Bielsa’s football revolution
When representatives of Leeds United flew to Argentina in 2017 to secure Marcelo Bielsa as their new coach, they may have wondered how much he knew about the second tier of the English Football League.
After all, this was a man who has spent large portions of his career in South America, with only continental experience in Europe - and none in England. They need not have worried.
Not only had the analytical guru watched every Leeds game from the previous season – 70 hours in total – he started the meeting by listing every formation used by Leeds’ opponents throughout the entire 46-game campaign.
To regular Bielsa-watchers, this was not a surprise. Twenty years earlier, he had arrived at an interview with Velez Sarsfield in Buenos Aires armed with 50 video tapes to illustrate his findings. The interview took many hours, but he got the job.
His dedication to analysing games, goals, statistics, formations, results, performance levels and everything else that happens in the beautiful game has not only set new standards, but also inspired a new generation of data-driven coaches from Pep Guardiola to Mauricio Pochettino.
With Leeds making waves on their return the English Premier League, it seems the club’s bold appointment is paying off and a new era of football analysis has taken hold.
Almost every professional club now employs monitoring software and spends time analysing everything from distance covered, to sprints to tackles made. At elite clubs, teams of sports scientists pore over every detail before and after games to give their side the biggest advantage. Even in smaller outfits, a coach will pay attention to information that wasn’t available just a few short years ago.
No in-depth match report is complete without a detailed breakdown of passes, possession, shots on and off target and all other aspects of the game. It has become part of the post-match ritual and begins preparation for the next opponent straight away. So how has Bielsa’s own brand of in-depth analysis worked so spectacularly for Leeds?
Last season, a controversial episode gave an insight into the level of detail the former Argentinian national coach goes into. In an incident that caused national headlines, Leeds were fined GBP 200,000 for “spying” on their EFL Championship play-off opponents Derby County. A man was seen in bushes watching Derby training and police were called.
Such practice is common practice in South America, but virtually unheard of in England. While not illegal, Leeds were fined by the EFL for ‘breaking the spirit’ of the law. Instead of attempting to cover up the “Spygate” incident, Bielsa called a press conference and spent 66 minutes outlining the workings of his standard tactical analysis.
Using a projector, he gave the assembled media an insight into how he breaks down information on opponents in the build-up to games. Quite openly, he admitted: “I can tell you we observed all the rivals we played against and we watched all the training sessions of the opponents before we played against them. When you watch an opponent you’re looking for specific information. You want to know the starting XI, the tactical system they will use and the strategic decisions on set pieces. These are the three main tactics that the head coach usually analyses.”
“When you watch the activity of the opponent, you get this kind of information the day before the game or you confirm the information you already have.” Bielsa showed how Leeds staff had watched all 51 games Derby played last season, with each game taking around four hours to analyse. He said the preparation for one play-off game alone took his 20-strong analysis staff 360 hours.
But, of course, having the information alone does not guarantee success and in fact, Derby pulled off a shock victory at Leeds’ Elland Road stadium that ended the Yorkshire club’s promotion hopes in 2019/20.
So Bielsa accepts that analysis alone is not enough. “It doesn’t define the path of the competition,” he says. “So why do we do it? Because we feel guilty if we don’t work enough. Because it allows us not to have too much anxiety. And we think that by gathering information we feel we get closer to a win.”
To illustrate his methods, Bielsa asked journalists to select any Derby game from the regular season, then ran through an in-depth tactical breakdown of the selected match including team selection, formation, chances, set pieces, transitions and more.
“Before the game we knew perfectly that they would use these kind of systems.” And the players know too. When the squad arrives at hotels before a match, a room is always set aside for what club staff affectionately call “Mission Control”. There, four analysts make the final cut to personalised video clips which are then sent to the relevant player to study the night before the game. But the players’ responsibility does not begin and end with watching footage and following instructions on the pitch.
In that very first meeting in Buenos Aires - which lasted 12 hours - the Leeds negotiating team were taken aback when Bielsa demanded an upgrade of their Thorp Arch training base. Not only had he acquired photographs of the facility, he had even got the blueprints and had prepared a list of changes to be made. Among these were improved rest facilities and a communal wood burning stove that the players would take turns looking after. Rumour has it, the coach even counted how many logs each player used.
When the work began, progress was slowed for a week after Bielsa noticed that the light switches were slightly off centre. They had to be changed. It is not the first time the coach has remodelled player facilities. When he took over as national coach of Chile in 2007, he set about renovating the players’ quarters - bringing in experts to analyse sleep patterns to make sure the squad was well-rested between sessions. Once new beds and better facilities were in place, Bielsa made sure the team could find their way around with clear new signs at the training complex. He even chose the font to be used, after noticing how clear the lettering was on a visit to Santiago Zoo.
It is this attention to detail that sets the former Newell's Old Boys, Velez Sarsfield, Athletic Bilbao, Marseille and Lille coach apart.
Now 64, the man nicknamed ‘El Loco’ in Argentina still speaks little English and lives a humble life in an apartment above a shop. Each day, he walks 45 minutes to the training ground, listening to tactical reports on his headphones and shunning offers of car rides, even in the rainy Northern England climate, far from his South American homeland. He wears the same over-sized club tracksuit most days - even turning up to a black-tie awards dinner in the same outfit.
During games, he sits away from the backroom staff on an upturned bucket, schoolteacher glasses perched on his nose, poised to leap forward at any moment to issue new instructions to his team. At busy periods, he will sleep in the bare sleeping quarters the club has arranged for him at Thorp Arch, re-watching games and compiling reports with his analysts until the early hours.
His Leeds team have adapted a 3-3-1-2 formation pioneered by Dutch legend Louis Van Gaal, with a high press and a pivotal number 10, in this case Spain’s former Valencia and Al-Arabi playmaker Pablo Hernandez. Only once last season did a team have more possession over the course of a game than Leeds - another statistic that is mirrored by the likes of Guardiola at Barcelona and Manchester City.
With Leeds back in the top flight of English football for the first time in 16 years, it is just reward for a coach who has spent a lifetime analysing everything down to the smallest detail. As for Bielsa, he is aware that there is still much to play for and that his methods will be analysed for a while longer yet. “A man with new ideas is always a madman,” he says, “until his ideas triumph.”
