ANALYSING their wretched run of recent results – winless in six Premier League games, with 21 goals conceded in that period – it’s difficult to disagree with Leeds United’s decision to reluctantly part ways with Marcelo Bielsa.
They are 16th in the table and trending steeply downward. Only two points separate them from Burnley at the top of the relegation zone, and the Clarets have a game in hand. Leeds desperately need a quick uptick if they are to rescue their top-flight status, and they have turned to former Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig coach Jesse Marsch to replace the idiosyncratic Argentine who was so beloved at Elland Road.
“We were planning a successor for the summer and we had to anticipate this decision now,” Andrea Radrizzani said in a video message to fans, “as I could see something was broken in the club and I have the interest of the club and maintaining the Premier League as my first goal and first interest.”
But, while it has become increasingly clear that something had to change at Leeds, the “new-manager bounce” they are counting on to help lift them clear of trouble might be hard to come by. Replacing Bielsa brings unique challenges for the next man in charge.
The stretch of the 66-year-old’s influence greatly outstrips his tangible success. Before guiding Leeds out of the Championship, ending a 16-year Premier League absence, Bielsa’s managerial trophy haul amounted to two Argentine league titles with Newell’s Old Boys in the early 1990s, another with Velez Sarsfield in 1998 and an Olympic Gold medal while in charge of Argentina in 2004.
More impressive is his ‘coaching tree’, players who played under him before borrowing his principles to achieve success in their own managerial careers – Mauricio Pochettino, Diego Simeone, Marcello Gallardo. And the list of the game’s most revered tacticians who cite Bielsa as an influence and inspiration – Pep Guardiola flew to Argentina to meet and talk football philosophies with Bielsa before he assumed his first managerial post, in charge of Barcelona’s B team.
But Bielsa’s influence is seldom absolute. The managers who’ve studied his methods have also understood their limitations, and in turn have borrowed from him piecemeal. His theories around compressing the pitch, playing with “verticality” in possession and his energetic high press have all been taken up by other, ultimately more successful, coaches. None have adhered undyingly to his way. None, most notably, have adopted the hyper-specific man-marking approach that was such a key facet of his Leeds team.
https://twitter.com/LUFCDATA/status/1497694167723655172
There are many similarities in Marsch’s style that, on the surface, set him up to succeed as Bielsa’s Leeds successor. He too likes his teams to press high and relentlessly out of possession and to attack with speed and directness once the ball is recovered.
But, raised in the Red Bull system, he is stylistically more aligned to the likes of Ralf Rangnick and Jurgen Klopp in his approach to pressing, small but key differences to the way Bielsa works that could complicate his job at hand in West Yorkshire.
“If you watched Marcelo Bielsa with Leeds, he is a big believer of ‘against the ball’ but he does a lot of man-marking across the field,” Marsch told the Coaches’ Voice in 2021. “We call our pressing ‘ball-oriented’. We believe that when we attack and we commit to winning balls, we’re going to outnumber opponents in spaces on the field that is going to increase our chances of winning the ball.”
The players Marsch now finds at his command have had three and a half years of indoctrination in the Bielsa way, of a unique man-marking style and of intense mid-week ‘murder ball’ training sessions, 11-v-11 games in which the pace is lung-busting and no fouls are called. And these players have seen how well that approach works. Many have had their careers transformed by Bielsa, with the likes of Patrick Bamford and Kalvin Phillips reaching a level of play of which few would have believed them capable just a few years ago. There will be some tricky unpicking and resetting required of the new boss.
To achieve promotion and then a ninth-place Premier League finish while being outspent by those around them represented an impressive overachievement for Bielsa. As such, the level of talent in the squad Marsch inherits – especially mired in an injury spate – might be considered inferior to most in the top flight.
In the past, the 48-year-old American has employed a collegiate approach when taking over at a new club. When he was appointed Red Bull Salzburg manager, for example, he asked his new players what that wanted to change about the way they had been training. And he was tremendously successful in Austria, winning back-to-back league-and-cup doubles.
He was less successful, however, with RB Leipzig, where, as is now the case at Leeds, he took over from a charismatic and idiosyncratic coach, this time in the shape of Julian Nagelsmann. Marsch attempted to put his stamp on Leipzig, switching to his preferred 4-2-2-2 shape. Results didn’t follow and, in an effort to right the ship, he soon switched back to the back-three-based system Nagelsmann had utilised, but it had little effect and he was sacked after overseeing six losses and four draws from his 17 games in charge.
So now Marsch is tasked with taking the reins from one of football’s great dogmatists – someone who believed, all or nothing, in his philosophy and methodology – and instilling his own system in a very short space of time.
Encouragement can be found in the fact Marsch presents publicly as intelligent and adaptable, and several players – not least in Phillips’ star showing for England at Euro 2020 – have shown an ability to thrive quickly in non-Bielsa systems on the international stage.
Still, such a transition would have been more easily accomplished over the summer, with a full pre-season for the new manager, as had been planned. Instead, Leeds have just 12 games to save their season and stave off a dreaded return to the second tier.
Premier League relegation markets
