When Marcelo Bielsa left Leeds United in February 2022, even those who had grown close — or as close as one can ever be to football’s most mercurial manager — were unsure where he may next wind up.
His style of play and results attracted widespread acclaim in securing promotion for Leeds in 2020 as he returned the Yorkshire club to the Premier League for the first time in 16 years. But he also swept into Elland Road and the club’s Thorp Arch training ground like a human hurricane, disrupting an environment that had, for too long, tolerated mediocrity at one of English football’s most popular clubs.
His idiosyncrasies are now the stuff of legend. The Bielsa bucket (his preferred seat during matches, which has been swapped for a cool box with Uruguay) became a collector’s item in the club’s merchandise store, the “murderball” training sessions pushed Leeds player to the brink of their physical capacity and a spy was dispatched to secure snippets from an opponent’s training session. The detail was obsessive; installing a bed and kitchen at the training ground, building dormitories for players to sleep between double training sessions and suspending goalposts off the ground to try and ensure every piece of training field turf received the same amount of sunlight.
Brilliant, brutal and bewildering in equal measure, Bielsa commands extraordinary respect among his managerial rivals. When Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola began his coaching badges in 2006, he spent 11 hours in Bielsa’s company in Argentina, while Zinedine Zidane studied Bielsa’s sessions. He is, however, extraordinarily hard work and by the end of his time at Leeds in February 2022, with them leaking goals and sliding down the table, plenty of those who reported into the coach were exhausted by his intensity.
As with any idiosyncrasies, they are venerated in the good times and chastised in the bad, so it was little surprise to see many clubs and nations tempted by Bielsa after his Leeds exit. Time and again those moves did not quite materialise.
Bielsa in his final match at Elland Road (Zac Goodwin/PA Images via Getty Images)
Bournemouth and Crystal Palace of the Premier League gave consideration. La Liga club Athletic Bilbao, where Bielsa coached between 2011 and 2013, was a possibility. Most memorably, Bielsa came close to replacing Frank Lampard as Everton manager in January 2023 with the club battling relegation from the Premier League, only to leave Everton perplexed when he suggested he would prefer to take charge of the under-23 team until the end of the season and then start afresh in the summer, and his coaches would run the first team. Everton instead appointed Sean Dyche, despite Bielsa rocking up at London’s Heathrow airport unannounced to try and thrash out terms.
Another option came along when Leeds sacked his replacement, Jesse Marsch, and gave consideration to reappointing Bielsa. The parties held an exploratory Zoom call. By that point Bielsa had decided on a different route altogether: Uruguay, the South American nation of 3.4 million people, sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil, whose football team craved revival after exiting the World Cup in Qatar at the group stage.
As always, Bielsa did not come cheap. He was Leeds’ best-paid coach of all-time and is the highest-paid coach at Copa America after negotiating with Uruguay for three months before signing a contract that ties him through to the end of the World Cup in 2026. As part of the agreement, he will coach Uruguay’s under-23 team during the Olympic Games in Paris this summer, 100 years on from Uruguay’s success in the tournament. Bielsa, 68, won Olympic gold with Argentina in 2004.
The more pressing task is Copa America, and in just over a year, Bielsa has transformed Uruguay so dramatically that they entered this tournament as even more likely challengers to Lionel Messi’s Argentina than an out-of-sorts Brazil. First, though, the United States will face Bielsaball in Group C along with Panama and Bolivia.
His pre-match press conference before Uruguay’s opening 3-1 victory against Panama was prototypical Bielsa fare. He barely made eye contact with journalists, started flicking his way through a match programme halfway through and doused the flames of Uruguayan confidence by saying he could not predict the future when repeatedly asked whether Uruguay could win a 16th Copa America (albeit only two have been won since 1990).
Since arriving, there has been no shortage of classic Bielsa. The team has swiftly adapted to his demands on the field, even without the daily exposure to his intensity that Leeds players enjoyed and endured.
Bielsa’s Uruguay beat world champions Argentina 2-0 in November (Rodrigo Valle/Getty Images)
Uruguay’s progress was most devastatingly exemplified when they followed up a creditable 2-2 draw against Colombia in qualifying for the 2026 World Cup by beating Brazil at home and then Argentina away at La Bombonera. Uruguay are the only team — besides Saudi Arabia at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar — to beat Argentina in the 2020s and their World Cup-winning coach Lionel Scaloni praised Uruguay’s performance, saying his team “never felt comfortable”. Messi, who played in the game, said Bielsa’s impact was palpable and that Argentina struggled to handle the “fast pace” of Uruguay’s approach.
The Bolivia coach Antonio Carlos Zago, speaking after Uruguay dismantled his team in November, said Bielsa’s side were the standout team during qualifying. They are second in the CONMEBOL (South American) World Cup qualifying group, two points behind Argentina but six points clear of Brazil. The top six sides are guaranteed a place in 2026.
Bielsa’s players have begun to speak in reverential tones about their new leader. Federico Valverde, the relentless Real Madrid midfielder, said: “He deserves so much respect for what he believes; it is a different style, a different game and a different intent. I have greatly improved my psychological equilibrium playing under him. Although football with him seems crazy, we are working a lot on defensive and attacking balance and it has helped us know how to think in difficult moments on the field.”
There are no shortage of hard-working and technically-gifted players in this Uruguay set-up; the perfect blend for Bielsa’s unique brand of football. There is the direct chaos of Darwin Nunez up front, the honesty and guile of Facundo Pellestri and Maximiliano Araujo stretching play on the wings, and the tireless quality of Valverde and Manuel Ugarte in central midfield.
All of a sudden, a nation that appeared to be at the end of a cycle in 2022, the curtain closing on the gilded careers of Diego Godin, Edinson Cavani and Luis Suarez, now appears to be on the crest of a wave. Suarez was excluded from Bielsa’s first squad as Uruguay coach but has now returned to the set-up, albeit in a support role for the leading act, who is very much Nunez. Of the 12 teams who have competed so far in Copa America, Bielsa’s squad is the fourth-youngest at an average age of 25.91, behind only Ecuador, Canada and the United States.
Uruguay were deserved winners against Panama, and really ought to have been out of sight during a dynamite opening 35 minutes in which they had 12 shots but somehow only a one-goal margin. When a Bielsa team is on it, as Uruguay were in Miami, there are few more exhilarating sights in football. Yet, as ever, there were vulnerabilities too: Bielsa’s team struggled to maintain such intensity in the second half but saw out the game late on, as Nunez and Matias Vina added to Araujo’s first-half strike.
Bielsa’s attention to detail has been as intense as ever; in just over a year he has called up more than 50 players, including a series of youngsters. He has shaken up what he perceived to be a comfortable culture within the Uruguayan Football Association (AUF). The Argentinian newspaper La Nacion reported that Bielsa made clear that federation directors were not to be popping along to observe training.
Sebastian Abreu, who won 70 caps for Uruguay between 1996 and 2012, has criticised Bielsa’s approach. He told TyC Sports that everyday employees were experiencing demands that they had not been exposed to in the previous 15 years under former coach Oscar Tabarez, claiming that up to eight workers had simply walked away. The goalkeeping coach Carlos Nicola departed after disagreements with Bielsa, while ESPN reported that Alberto Pan, chief of health at the AUF, left because he would not comply with Bielsa’s wish for him to be present in the office every day.
Bielsa celebrates during Uruguay’s opening Copa America victory against Panama (Rich Storry/Getty Images)
Other departures have included Richard Lopez, the team’s kinesiologist, and video analysts Andres Paysee and Marcelo Mayor. On one occasion, Carlos Manta, an executive board member of Uruguay’s federation, drove 125 miles to the training complex unannounced but Bielsa decided not to greet him, instead focusing on other tasks he had organised that day. “I’m going to see if he will return the gas (money),” Manta later joked.
As ever with Bielsa, his high maintenance and sometimes impolite approach to officialdom is the opposite to how he interacts with supporters of his team. He regularly sat himself in and among ordinary football fans at Uruguayan league matches during the past campaign, shunning the smart seats. After taking the job, he said he had been taken aback during a visit to Uruguay with his wife by the politeness he had seen from citizens on public transport. He praised their “civility” and the respect shown towards women, saying this weighed heavily when he decided to accept the job.
A 36-year-old Uruguayan — Federico Vera, who works for a hotel in West Palm beach — went to try and watch Uruguay training in Miami this month. The training was temporarily suspended due to rain but the supporter came across Bielsa and asked if he could stay. Bielsa calmly explained that the security team had decided it should be behind closed doors but requested Vera’s phone number. Later on, Bielsa telephoned the fan, apologised, talked through what the team was up to in training and explained the reasons why supporters were not permitted entry.
Vera said: “Even now I am still wondering ‘Who would take that time out of their day to do what he did? A famous person, of such magnitude, taking time out for little old me. I am nobody, just a Uruguayan far from his country.”
To Bielsa, however, everybody is a somebody.
(Top photo: Chris Arjoon/AFP via Getty Images)
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