The company parts company
Marcelo Bielsa should be a football club owner's dream. Can you help him? No. He is here to help you.
Leeds United have confirmed half of what the press told everybody at full-time on Saturday, hiding the loud bit by saying they've 'parted company': Marcelo Bielsa has been sacked from his job managing Leeds United.
They haven't announced a replacement, so Leeds United are spending Sunday rudderless, as well as bottleless.
It might work. Leeds United might get the wins and points between now and the end of the season to keep them in the Premier League. We'll never know if Marcelo Bielsa would have got the same wins, the same points and the same end result. Bielsa has been making this point about the demands for him to play a different striker, or a different system: the things you don't do are always the best ideas, because you never get the evidence to prove they weren't.
Leeds' owners have stopped being brave and decided to gamble. Their resolution has snapped into risk taking. Brave resolution helped them succeed when everything else they tried was failing, but now when it matters most they've abandoned the best idea they ever had.
Hiring Marcelo Bielsa in 2018 was brave. Plenty of people said bringing El Loco to the Championship was a mad idea. Bringing him back after the play-off defeat to Derby County, when he was ready to leave as a failure if Leeds wished, was brave. Getting through the winter of our promotion season, when Leeds won two in eleven and what had been the best defensive record in Europe collapsed in spectaculars against Cardiff City and Birmingham City, was brave. Giving him the first year in the Premier League was brave, when with promotion complete it would have been easy for everyone to shake hands and 'part company'.
The team's first season made keeping Bielsa in the summer easy. Now, stuck in another difficult winter, as Leeds have been every season with him, I thought they were going to be brave again. To get through January all in on Bielsa's insistence that what he had to work with was all he needed to keep Leeds in the Premier League was brave, when every instinct, every cliche about how football is done, was saying sack him and spend. Having roughed that out, Leeds have arrived at a point where they can only try half of the things that were available to them in January. That's not brave, it's foolish.
Bielsa should be a football club owner's dream. In some ways he is tiring, exacting, demanding. It's well known that he had all the plug sockets in Leeds' new Academy facilities moved by centimetres. Satisfying his requests for improvements must be exhausting but it is also very clear. The risks are low, and the benefits stay with the club. And after you've moved every tree and installed every piece of gym equipment he asks for, he will defend you like no other coach. Bielsa has never once said that he has not been given every tool the club can provide. This January, when asked why the club hadn't spent in the transfer window, he told everyone the club had already spent more than anybody could reasonably ask it to.