Jesse’s version

At times, during Jesse Marsch’s recent podcast appearances, he has sounded like he’s speaking from an alternate reality.

Leeds United were not 17th in the Premier League when they sacked him, games in hand meant they were 13th. They didn’t have eighteen points, like the league table showed. Using expected goals, they had 28 points. (Also, they weren’t 16th when Marcelo Bielsa was sacked, like the table showed — on points per game, Marsch says, they were lower.)

When Marsch was sacked, the team had gone seven games without a win since the World Cup break, and before the two wins that had preceded that, had lost five in a row as part of eight winless games. But Marsch says:

“When you look at both the eye test, and by the metrics, by everything that we were doing to try to put the team back on track to what we wanted to become, we were moving in the right direction.”

Some of this is just what it initially sounds like, a sacked coach trying to grasp control of a narrative that paints him as a failure and a loser. Because that’s exactly what he was, his arguments inevitably sound unhinged, because he’s trying to make us think that a 30 per cent win record and an ‘eye test’ that had me wishing I’d left my contact lenses at home was part of a winning strategy.

But as well as being hingeless, these arguments of Marsch are irrefutable. The eye test? Well, narrow kick ‘n’ rush football is in the eye of the beholder. To Marsch, perhaps Leeds looked beautiful. And whenever he refers to ‘metrics’ he knows he’s in the clear. We can’t argue about whether the metrics looked good, because we don’t know what metrics Jesse has. Jesse’s metrics go to a different school.

Marsch keeps taking arguments about his time at Leeds into these impenetrable, imaginary realms, because in his imagination, he’s unbeatable.

There feels like more to this than just a public relations repair job, though. (Incidentally, he tells Simon Jordan that he joined LinkedIn because he had hired a PR team and they “felt strongly that I needed to do this”; he doesn’t get into his reasons for hiring a PR team.) Marsch’s imagination is an important factor in his sense of self, because that’s where he can go to fight and be a hero. Listening to his recent interviews, Marsch has seemed desperate for a fight, any sort of argument, so he can be the underdog and the winner he believes himself to be. The problem is that, in the real world, Jesse Marsch isn’t interesting enough to argue with.

There’s a moment towards the end of his interview on Michael Anthony’s podcast, when the host asks Marsch who has been the best US president in his lifetime, and while Marsch thinks, he suggests Bill Clinton. “Maybe,” says Marsch, “but I thought Obama, probably Obama. But there were things that I thought Ronald Reagan was really good at.” He votes Democrat, he says, but, “I probably am more independent. I would say I’ve maybe become over time a little bit more fiscally conservative, but socially liberal.”

I don’t know if the term ‘centrist dad’ has made it to America, but Marsch is an exemplar of the meme not so much for his perfectly ordinary beliefs, but for how he clinches the stereotype with defensiveness. Part of what defines a ‘centrist dad’ is mixing middle of the road beliefs with insistence that you are not boring. Marsch even goes there in so many words: “Not that I’m always looking to be the middle of the road, but I’m just trying to…”

Marsch is never trying to be middle of the road, but that’s where he always ends up because he is, essentially, quite boring. He is cookie cut, but believes he broke the mould. Throughout these interviews, Marsch will flip scenarios to ensure he looks like an underdog. A scholarship to Princeton? Absolutely not — Princeton doesn’t offer scholarships. But, well, yeah, the soccer coach Bob Bradley did ensure Marsch got a place there. That time in MLS when he kicked David Beckham? “I am built with a little bit of fearlessness. Like, I’m not afraid of being vulnerable. I’m not afraid of being in difficult situations. I actually thrive in that.” When he arrived at Leeds Bradford Airport in 2022, Marsch says his passport got extra attention. “They see my name and they see who I am. And the superior says to me, ‘So you’re here to save us’ … And I almost felt like it was a test.” Criticising Marcelo Bielsa’s training methods on Talksport? No, the criticism of Marsch is unfair — “I complimented Marcelo a thousand times. A thousand times.” Following Bielsa at Leeds? “The fans were waiting, they were almost waiting … a lot of fans were waiting for me to slip up this way.”

And yet he slipped up anyway, and this is what makes Marsch so irritating. He picks the fights. He knew that Bielsa loyalist fans were ‘waiting’ for him to slip up — so he gave them exactly what they wanted, to give himself someone to fight. At his unveiling, nobody mentioned Ted Lasso, so he brought it up, to give himself something to fight. Now, he’ll tell you Leeds were 13th when he was sacked, with 28 points on xG, to give himself something — reality — to fight against.

There’s a parallel to Brian Clough here, in the blundering way they both followed legendary Leeds managers. Despite the acrimonious history — Clough had called Peter Lorimer a cheat two years before taking over — the Leeds players were more willing than Clough realised to give him a chance. As Don Revie tried to explain to him when they were on television together after Clough was sacked, if he’d just talked to the players about what he wanted to do, there was no reason why he shouldn’t have succeeded. Only, Clough’s paranoia, and dislike of Revie, ran too deep. He went to Elland Road wanting to fight.

The difference with Marsch is that there is no rivalry, no loathing, no paranoia. He actually reminds me more of Andrea Radrizzani, when he arrived at Leeds having made hundreds of millions by selling out as a junior partner in a sports media firm. They’re part of a new class who have been made idle by success while they’re too young to retire, whose brains are overloaded with grindset self-idealism that makes them feel like they’ve something to prove. They don’t want to see a rich, successful man when they look in the mirror, they want to see a hard working warrior. So they go out into the world looking to start a fight, so they can declare themselves the victor.

“I don’t need to work. I love to work, but I don’t need it,” Marsch tells Anthony. “Because of achieving in different things, I’m financially, I’m intellectually, I’m happy with my life, and it’s nice to dedicate time to my family when I have this downtime.” But:

“When you go and you step on that touchline and you feel the energy of the crowd, this is why you do it, right? This is the addiction. This is the problem. Without that, the job is totally different, right?

“So I love being there, with a group of young men, and a staff, and a club, and where it means so much to everyone — because that’s how I feel. It means so much to me.”

He’s looking for something, though, that isn’t about success as such. “It’s not about the ego, and it’s not about the ambition to be the greatest coach in American history, or the best American Premier League coach,” he tells Jordan. “My ambition is to create a path for myself that honours who I am and what I want to become, and staying true and authentic to that at the highest level.” He tells Anthony that “everybody in football” wants to be famous, “They love it” — except him. “I don’t want to be famous. I want to be a normal guy. I want to live a quiet life with my family, with my friends, and I just want to live.”

…but to live, authentically, ‘at the highest level’, which is what all this is about. It’s about Jesse Marsch, rich, successful and happy, needing a reason to get out of bed in the morning and — as a “competitor” — having to imagine some dragons he can slay, some windmills to tilt at, in order to become the hero that the American dream and its “propaganda we believe”, as Marsch himself puts it, says he should be striving to become. “One thing is for sure,” he tells Anthony, “I will never regret being more aggressive than being more passive.”

But, when your favourite president is a little bit Obama and a little bit Reagan, you have to work harder to dream up situations where you need to be aggressive, because nobody is going to want to fight you over such reasonable points of view. And Marsch, a rebel who can’t understand why everyone keeps nodding blithely along with the bland corporate speak he deludes himself is speech of fire, does work harder. One interesting point he keeps mentioning in recent interviews is that he has “an AI team”. “These people are used to dealing with heavy, heavy data,” he told The Telegraph in December. “It is complex and not the easiest for everyone (to understand) but I believe it could be a real advantage. Even in terms of verifying match plans and looking at scouting networks.”

This feels like another example of Marsch itching for another of his mystifying fights. Like many AI true-believers, he would be impossible to argue with on this ground, because he might be right — AI might be a real advantage in the future. Marsch doesn’t need any evidence to prove it, because for a few years there won’t be any that can prove him wrong, either. In an imagined future, metrics always look how you want them to look.

But there is more detail about what Marsch and his AI team, and his data team, are doing.

“I’m always doing research on different clubs to see what their transfer politics have been, what kind of impact that’s had on the team,” he told Anthony. “How do they play? Can we translate the team that they have into something that resembles what I think is important?”

Using artificial intelligence to simulate real football clubs, their match plans, scouting networks and transfer politics, so that you can input your own ideas of how that club should behave and use a computer program to see how they might play out, is a very literal description of someone playing Football Manager on their PC. And this, I guess, is what modern success looks like, when spending £44.99 doesn’t give you the buzz of imagining yourself to be an aggressive, successful football coach battling against the odds, and you can hire a whole team of people to help you pretend. ★彡

(Originally published at The Square Ball)