They Sacked Bielsa

One of Marcelo Bielsa's sayings is written on a wall in Leeds Six, next to a building high mural of the sacked Leeds United coach. 'A man with new ideas is a madman until his ideas triumph', it says.

Before the Tottenham Hotspur game, his last in charge at Elland Road, he said yet another thing that ought to be remembered, summing up the fate of a football coach as well as anything I've ever heard: "You have to undo what works before it stops working."

From madman to genius to madman again, but all of that is perception. What Bielsa did, who Bielsa was, didn't change, neither before, during or after his triumph. When he arrived in Leeds, people didn't believe in him, no more than they believed in Steve Evans or Paul Heckingbottom: proof was needed. One week of proof — Stoke 3-1, Derby 4-1 — then three years of proof. Marcelo Bielsa was a genius. Then, as the richest league in the world reasserted its might over his hobbled together Leeds, the team lost games, and he was a genius no more, they said. Once the games were lost there was no chance of recovering. As Bielsa says, the job of a coach is to keep fixing things forever, before they're broken, at which point it's obvious to everyone what the coach should have prevented. Football doesn't only demand genius, it demands your foresight defeats its hindsight every single week.

This is one of the tragic parts of Bielsa's sacking. The way he laid out, press conference by press conference, how all the worst elements of football conspire to make that outcome inevitable. In the end perhaps his greatest mistake was thinking for a moment that Leeds United could overcome the sport's worst excesses. He was different, Leeds was different, together they succeeded. Perhaps, in West Yorkshire, people were listening, and willing to keep being different.

An unspoken fear of failure rots football from within. Andrea Radrizzani tried to present the 'toughest decision' to sack Bielsa as brave, but the truth is, the board were frightened. Money, as always, is the bastard. The economic cost of relegation from the Premier League puts terror in the heart of every bottom half club. Pre-season confidence becomes panic by October as club after club realises their careful plans for success will only be good enough for mid-table at best, and starts frantically obsessing about the worst.

Leeds, for a time, resisted. Bielsa had reasons to think Leeds would be different. The story goes that he was packing his office up after the play-off defeat to Derby in 2019, and senior staff had to make an urgent trip to Thorp Arch to tell him that failure wasn't the end. This season, the board held on through the October stress test, the natural opportunities for change suggested by international breaks, the January transfer window. They were being as brave as Bielsa's football demands. Then a quirk of Covid postponements and the fixture list put Liverpool away between Manchester United and Spurs at home, and their bottle went.

In a way there's no embarrassment in doing what every other club does. But shame is the only word when you have to put down the plastic 'This is Leeds' flag and admit that being Leeds doesn't make us as different as we hoped. The story of Leeds after promotion, after sixteen years, has been about how long this weird anachronistic club, its mind never far from 1975, could resist adaptation to the modern top-flight. Last season's objections to the European Super League suggested an organisation as firmly Against Modern Football as the hoodie Victor Orta once wore in the away end at Hillsborough claimed. Glam-rocking through the Premier League with Gjanni Alioski like a platinum Bowie in white, maroon, green and lilac, Leeds were four to the floor throwbacks and even the modernised bits of Elland Road barely noticed the latest decade: remember the cashless bars this season, that lasted a game?

The story won't last much longer and it can only end one way. They'll get the touch screen order points working one day. The alternative is relegation. The Premier League is too strong to allow its clubs to retain too much brand-unfriendly identity. Its strength is its money, and the Football League's lack of it. Bielsa wasn't sacked for losing games, he was sacked because the eventual result of losing games is poverty. If the Championship was as rich as the Premier League, or close to it, relegation might be more like what it should be, a sporting failure that fans of other clubs can mock. Instead it's an existential threat at the bank, and that's what matters most.

Bielsa, knowing all this, explained several times how to fix it. Everyone at the top level of football should stop being greedy and agree to make less money from the game, he said. More money could then be invested in grassroots football, in developing excellent young players and coaches. Supply and demand means the more excellent players and coaches there are, the lower the transfer fees and wages needed to hire them. If Premier League clubs already have full squads of world class players, but there are many more available, those players can go to clubs in the Championship and lower down. The quality of games at all levels improves, increasing crowds and broadcasting revenue for good-to-watch lower division football. Players have less incentive to transfer away from their home towns, creating stronger links between teams and local fans and communities. The Football League becomes an attractive, healthy competition, and relegation no longer wipes 75% from a Premier League club's value overnight. And managers like Marcelo Bielsa, with a team near the bottom of a division, can be given security to play their way to safety. An idea could last longer than three months.

It's not utopian, it's simple, and I'm sure most Premier League chief executives, wincing at the contracts they're handing to players, would rather put that money into youth development, strengthen the leagues, reduce the risks attached to their own failures. But Angus Kinnear, presented with similar ideas in the fan-led review of football governance as those his own head coach regularly proposed, lambasted them using hysterical comparisons to Chinese famines under Mao. He wasn't the only dissenter. That's because Premier League chief executives are stuck between greed and fear, constantly under pressure to make as much money as possible, constantly terrified of losing their cash-cow whether it's to the Football League or a European Super League. Their fear reduces a fun sport that fans should enjoy watching to a static non-game riven by financial paranoia, while twenty clubs all kid themselves brave by boasting that they're in the league to win it.

What is fun about watching Premier League clubs playing their frightened, greedstruck matches? Again, if Bielsa's ideas were heard, the game could be reorganised closer to what it actually is: a game you're going to lose. Football presents itself as a game of winners. But only one team can win the Premier League each season. The nineteen other clubs are all losers, and to put such an unlikely outcome as 'winning' at the centre of the sport is a Quixotic flail against the odds. Winning should be the goal, but losing, rather than disaster, should be recognised as the norm. "I know that joy after winning only lasts five minutes," Bielsa once said, "then there is a huge void and a loneliness that is hard to describe." Yet we build the sport around chasing five impossible minutes of joy, while only Bielsa, the idealist, is realistic enough to think about how to survive all the time when winning doesn't come.