Goodbye Marcelo Bielsa, hello Premier League

Marcelo Bielsa's impact at Leeds United can be described and measured simply by writing down what he did, assembling the video clips being shared on social media, comparing the before and after pictures of the club, its players, its league position, its bank account, its future.

His departure was always going to be difficult but his mid-season sacking feels like an occasion for grief. Not so much because he's gone. We'll always have memories for that. But grief because Leeds United is no longer different, and it was all over before the traditional kick-off time of Saturday, 3pm. I was dragged out of bed by BT Sports and the worldwide broadcasting market for a lunchtime match against Spurs, and sacking Marcelo Bielsa at the end of the game was the moment Leeds United became just another Premier League football club on just another Premier League day.

It is being said that Bielsa transformed Leeds United and gave the club an identity the way he made Kalvin Phillips an international footballer, but neither is strictly true. As Phillips put it on Twitter, 'You saw in me what I didn’t even see in myself.' Bielsa's genius was seeing what Phillips had, and finding ways of putting it to work. That's why he once said that coaching Pablo Hernandez was making him a better coach: bringing Hernandez's incredible abilities to the surface required ideas and techniques Bielsa hadn't thought of before. He doesn't invent what is within his players. He invents ways of getting it out.

The same thing happened with Leeds United as a club, a fanbase and a city. Leeds came later than almost everywhere else in the world to association football, and never seemed to get used to the idea of it as a viable alternative to rugby. In the 1950s, United had the best player in the world, John Charles, but people wouldn't go to watch Leeds because they said he made the rest of the team look bad and they wouldn't pay to watch one player. In the 1960s Don Revie built the best team in the world, but it was his constant frustration that he couldn't fill the stadium, and if he did, that the crowd would jeer if the afternoon's 3-0 win wasn't exciting enough. Howard Wilkinson managed the feat of bringing 250,000 people out onto the the streets of Leeds to applaud his champions, but he was a bit boring and not someone the raving fanbase could feel close to, so Vinnie Jones and Eric Cantona became the symbols of his success. Then they were gone, and half the city's interest with them.

The city of Leeds was about as disinterested in soccer as it had ever been when Marcelo Bielsa turned up. But he didn't change what he found. Like he did with Kalvin Phillips, he recognised what was good in it, the hardcore loyalty, the quickly stirred passions that had flashed for Garry Monk and Thomas Christiansen. He had the secret to winning over this old rugby town. The problem for decades was that, for people to give up rugby, soccer in Leeds had to be exciting top quality, but it rarely was. But when Leeds people saw the football Bielsa was putting on in LS11, they went crazy for it.

During our sixteen years away the Premier League was always the great promise and the great danger. Being outside it was the great frustration but also the great anarchic thrill. Leeds, like few other clubs, retained its identity through the first two decades of the 21st century while the Premier League gave in to the transformative weight of its money. Getting promoted to the top flight would mean success. But it was also going to mean the end of a lot of things that were fun.

Bielsa managed to delay that inevitability and he did it by the force of his personality. Spygate was the moment Leeds completely united behind him because it pitted him and his ideas against every simplistic obnoxious trait in top level English football we had disdained from afar. The fairest goal, given to Aston Villa, was another moment when football showed its arse while Bielsa kept his and our dignity. Would we have respected Steve Evans letting the opposition score? I doubt it, but Bielsa hit upon a seam of innate integrity and justice among Leeds fans, a feeling generated by inverting how the 1975 European Cup final still burns us; the only thing Jack Charlton truly hated was unfairness.

Bielsa's public behaviour in the Premier League, towards his own club, towards officials and towards rules that have often punished him, has been an exemplary contrast to the erratic, disruptive behaviour of Antonio Conte in only the last week. We alone understood that his press conferences were given through a translator because that allowed Bielsa to give extended answers no other manager would dream of giving, clear and straight from the source, because by answering in Spanish he was guaranteeing a full unedited explanation of his thoughts as near to the way he thinks them as language can allow. Even if the translator next to him was struggling, we could work instead with the original Spanish text.

Then there was his football. We know what it was like to watch. And, in the first Premier League season at least, it inspired so much rage outside West Yorkshire that we could enjoy it even more. The rest of the football world was so much more angry about our 6-2 defeat at Old Trafford than any Leeds fan was, and we revelled in the confusion our devotion was causing.

All these things worked at Elland Road because they tapped into a feeling that was always there about what it means to be a Leeds United fan. Bielsa didn't invent how we felt, he found the feelings in us and brought them out. Many people will have wanted to put tributes up in Leeds to Don Revie or Howard Wilkinson while they were here, but if they'd done one, others would have said they were daft. Only Marcelo Bielsa made people happy when artists went up their ladders with paint. Only Marcelo Bielsa makes fans want to tell the club to shove its planned tribute up its arse.