Jesse’s version
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.
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.
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