Phil Hay on Marcelo Bielsa | Special Interview with The Square Ball

The square ball podcast [Music] hello there and welcome to this very special edition of the square ball podcast i'm dan moylan and with me it's phil hey hello hello phil hey uh you've written a book and that's very exciting have you heard about it i haven't tweeted at all well if you are watching on youtube here is the book it's called and it was beautiful marcelo bielsa and The rebirth of leeds united and it's out now as you either watch or listen to this and by the way if you're listening to this you can have

a watch of it on youtube if you're on youtube you can listen to it take it anywhere you want to just um search out our channel the square ball it's a book and it's got a lot of words in it i feel like you should read the chapter of it you know it should be a bit like jack and ori i'll sit here and Um and we can do some some pictures in in the background yes it indeed is the problem with that phil is that ralph einerson has done the the audio book version he

has he's got the best yorkshire voice in the world and i could never compete with that so i wouldn't even bother trying so you yours is not as sexy i'm afraid no i need to add a lot more gravel than baby to my voice um anyway let's get into the chat about the book we're here to talk about the book And how it all came together and marcelo bielsa the subject of the book how would you even start with something like this because i was just obviously being glib when i said there's a lot of

words in it there are a lot of words in it how many words are in it um it's just over 80 000 um somewhere between 80 and 90 which was genuinely what we were targeting um but that's always one of the considerations at the outset um 90 000 words is quite a daunting number when you've written zero And when the publishers got in touch with me about doing it they were they were very keen they had a good idea of how to structure it and and how it it might flow but you always have that

thought in your head of should i do this am i too busy i've got we've got the kids i've got work you know i've got the stuff going on with the the athletic um and once you get into it you're delighted that you said Yes but there's always that that little period beforehand where you think i could just make my life easy and say say no to no to this but i did realize with bielsa that there hadn't really been anything prior to him in the time i covered leeds that was a story really really

worthy of a book i'd done one 12 13 years ago in the the 15 point deduction and that was there was a lot to that and it was very interesting the ins and outs of it were What education for me learning experience about cvas and um insolvency processes but they lost in the playoff final and you know it there were another two seasons in league one it wasn't it wasn't kind of that complete package that has been under blc i've had the the pleasure of writing about bill support the three years he's been at leeds

and there's been so much to so many facets and so many different angles that the If anything you had more information than you needed you had more than you needed to fall back on so there was never going to be a shortage of content in it and it was all just about how best to tell the story of a really really unique coach it's interesting that there's too much content to go in it because he doesn't really speak because he doesn't talk to anybody although i mean spoiler alert you do manage to get a little

bit out of Him in this book yeah i i didn't want to i didn't want this to be published or to arrive without at least making the effort to try and get something something out of him what i mean is that i i knew that he wouldn't do a one-on-one and i didn't want to ask him for a one-on-one because it would have i've been around long enough to know that that's not how it works with him You know it's been perfectly obvious from the start perfectly obvious at previous clubs i think it would have

been a bit insulting for me to have said would you do a sit down for this because you know you know that he wouldn't but also the more i thought about this the more i kind of wondered if he said to you one day right you've got an hour with me you can sit down you can ask me anything for an hour Given that you've got news old boys and and his life before then you've got his time in mexico you've got bilbo you've got argentina you've got chile you've got marseille you've got leo you've

got lazio all two days of it i know you've got legionated what an earth would you ask in an hour that would scratch the surface are you going to try and skip thinly over the top of it or and i it occurred to me that better Idea would be focus on one specific thing that you want to to know about him so there were things that i wanted to know about him particularly about his early years you know his years in in argentina and at news so i wrote a letter to him and i said

to him like i know you don't do one-on-one so i don't want you to to feel like i'm asking for that one and i don't really want you to do that because you you know it's kind of break from from principle but there Are things that are although there's a specific thing that i want to know so i asked the question the letter and i said look if if you want to reply to this that'd be great if you don't then no problem and i totally understand because i know the drill and he basically said

look if you ask this at the end of a press conference then i will answer if you ask these questions then i'll tell you um so at the end of the press conference Before leeds vs sheffield united i did and he did that's great i mean yeah you're right i i'd probably just end up hugging him for half an hour if he gave me an hour of his time get this man off me please but but if you think about it and also the fact that i don't speak spanish much regret that um was the

letter in english the letter was in english yes could because i didn't feel That me writing it in spanish via either google translate or getting somebody else to to help would necessarily have conveyed exactly what it was that i wanted wanted to ask um but because he speaks in spanish and i would speak in english and you would have translation you know even if you sat down with him for an hour you could trim time out of that because a lot of it would be lost to the translation um so how much in that hour

If you wanted to know about his entire career how much would you actually find out i mean next to nothing i always think if you did an autobiography with blc if he agreed to do his autobiography you would need months i mean months weeks months hours loads and loads of time to go through everything from start to finish because the story is so intricate and it's so long i mean you're talking about 30 years in management and more to the point a Lot of it that that has never really been properly understood and to be

quite honest probably never will be properly understood because it's all upstairs with them so that was that was really where that came from the idea that if you were going to get the chance to get anything out of them you had to decide what it was that you really wanted to know and what did you want to know i mean for me it distills It down into one question see if you agree with this it's it's the question you pose i mean again spoiler alert but right at the end what does football do for marcelo

bielsa and where does it all come from those are the two kind of pillars i guess i am people remember a piece of the athletic before christmas and it was with a guy called fabian costello and fabian was one of the players in bayelsa's first youth team at News and the stories he told about the way they trained the way they prepared what they did physically the massive difference between them as escorted news and basically every other squad youth team scored at the club and made me wonder where that came from it wasn't normal in

argentina it wasn't actually that normal according to fabian that you had somebody in the 20s who would coach You everybody thought of coaches as you kind of grandfather's age you know more more kind of elder statesman um not you know somebody who just retired and looked very fresh-faced but he you know he he had all these thoughts in his head like using broomsticks as mannequins and getting the boys to play humble because it was much easier to pass the ball with your hands and if you if you forgot about passing the ball you could Concentrate

on getting your positioning right so you knew where you should be getting them to work on kicking with their instep and and the big thing as well is focus on lactic acid that the boys never heard about they had no idea what this was they didn't understand why he was making them run hard before a game they were thinking this is a complete waste of energy but then you would get onto the pitch the lactic Lactic acid would flush out of your system and you would feel the benefit of it and so i i wanted

to know where the passion for football came from but also where these ideas came from what what was it that made him think about this stuff because nobody else seemed to be thinking about it so the structure of the book you sat there laptop opens on on day one you've got 80 90 000 words to write whatever it May be where where do you even start to write a book about martin luther elsa it's a bit like alters forward where he says he pushed open the door to meet bielsa for the first time and the

room was like nasa and his only thought was help us what are we gonna do um i love that detail by the way like the the five computers were just sat there waiting for us in the hotel room when they flew over to buenos aires oh yeah absolutely Which now when you look back you totally expect you wouldn't even imagine it being any different but i think author talks about how um we also had gone a bit incognito for 12 hours 24 hours and hadn't replied to a message he sent an author was worried about

how upset him you know is this all going to fall apart he's flown out with rod rosani and um carlos coburn had gone with him too because the idea was that cobra would get involved in the first Team squad as he did and i think alter having kind of stuck his neck out with this one was suddenly in that horrible position of thinking we've come here is he suddenly going to say ashley do you know what i'm not interested i don't want to see you um have a nice flight home so he he there was

that tension but he had no idea what was waiting for him in the room when they walked into this meeting room and it was it was just Packed full of um almost like otter's going for the job interview well but that you see that is exactly how it basically was right radrazani wanted to feel beyonce out to work out whether the two of them could work together whether this was was going to happen but there is no doubt at all when you speak to alta and to angus canaan and other people who were involved that

they were selling this to be elsa Rather than be else is selling it to them but elsa did his best to sell himself you know he wasn't so he wasn't arrogant in the sense of saying if you want me i'm i'm coming he did tell them how it would be if you employ me this is what i'm going to do and we're going to walk like this but he did make the effort to say this is what i know about your players this is what i know about your squad this is what i know about

the championship but It was like he was doing the interviewing you know it what that's how they felt as if they were the ones who were having to pitch leads to him not the the other way around so yes when when i first sat down with a blank page it was a bit like help how am i gonna do this but basically i went to people chase and i bought a huge big paper um book notepad and i just scribbled endless notes in it and made notes on the laptop the things i Remembered the things

i wanted to include the stories that kind of hadn't been told the stories that needed to be expanded on the people i wanted to try and speak to which is another aspect that we can we can chat about because there aren't that many people who know him well who are happy to speak um he he isn't somebody who likes to be spoken about particularly from you when it's people close to him um he's a person who likes To keep a lot about him private even though he has this wildly public persona you know so many

people know who he is now um and basically it went from there you start writing and the story sort of builds itself because you do reveal in the book that the staff are all subject to ndas so the deal at leeds is structured in such a way that bielsa gets paid a salary and then it all gets divvied up among his staff as Well so he pays himself and then he pays all his staff which is quite unconventional actually for football you would expect to be employees of the club however they're actually employees of his

and part and parcel of that is the ndas they all have to sign and one of the wrinkles when it came to getting him to renew his contract was they actually wanted to tighten up some of the ndas too yeah so it kind of protects the the secrecy of what's going on around about Him um and i think prevents anybody speaking in two in too much detail about what what he does and how he works and what it's likely what it's actually like being being with him um i mean someone got the wrong into the

stick of this a few weeks ago and it seems to be under the impression that blc gets paid and then hands out bags full of cash to people it's all structured and it's all Taxed and it's all you know it's all above board but you're right they wouldn't arrange they wouldn't have this arrangement with another manager another manager wouldn't ask for this arrangement realistically because you have the i guess the potential problem or the potential stress further than the line of issues developing with assistants or analysts or coaches who expect to be paid and feel

like they haven't had what they do or feel like The goal posts have moved but it's how else has always done it and it's kind of non-negotiable thing with him and it and it works because the staff who are with him particularly pablo corraga and diego reyes intensely loyal guys who go with them everywhere i mean he basically picks up the phone and they're off you know like reyes is from chile quiroga's from um from argentina they in between jobs they'll i think go Back to their lives and kuroga especially you know there's a local

club close to him where he does a bit of work i presume for free that's what they said um any coach you'll help out you know it's an amateur club so he'll help out with facilities and that sort of thing but b also picks up the phone to say you know i'm potentially going to leads and and they're off key and it's not like they just get on the plane and fly over with them they were at the meeting the First meeting that um radhazani and author had you know where he had all this stuff

laid out it was them who had to um who had to get the flip charts sorted who had to get all the analysis put together and for for him to use so you know they're very very much under his control but seemingly very happy to be under his control it almost strikes me as being a little bit like mission impossible you know that you just hire in the Specialist crack hit squad to come and fix everything that's what it's like and he knows exactly who who he wants but at the same time and i talk

about this in one of the chapters he's very open to approaches from people that want to work with him particularly younger people who are kind of learning the way a lot of people write to be elsa and say you know if they're sensible they'll write to him And say here's an analysis project that i've done um this is i studied i don't know euro 2020 um and i looked at the defensive structures of each team or i looked at the attacking routines that were used or the difference between the attacking routines at the world cup

and the euros how have things changed and if b also sees stuff that he likes you'll engage with these people and he will quite often give them a chance to to get involved i mean this is how it went with Um quiroga quiroga was known by somebody else and was um recommended to be also somebody else to set him an analysis task i think right saying the 2006 world cup have a look at various things that went on in it and feedback to me and i'll draw a view i'll take a view on whether or

not you you have what it takes ray has literally tipped up to the training ground in chile um i want to work for you and again it was a case of okay well i'll test this guy Somebody said to me he basically submerges them in oil for an hour and if they come up breathing he says fine you're good enough for me on on we go and so it you know he he it's not as if it's a totally close shot they call it the iron circle round about him but it's not as if other

people you know like cobra and so on don't ever get into it he just he's very very big on loyalty and he needs people around him that he feels he Can absolutely trust and it does change and evolve over time like benoit delaval who's his fitness coach at leeds came from france rather than being his original fitness coach that came with him prior to that yeah it was a guy called gabrielle makaya who had been with him um previously but he obviously saw something in delaval that he um that he really liked at leo and

that is often often how it goes and people speak very highly of development the fitness levels You know they speak for themselves you don't really need to talk them up too much because it's perfectly obvious to to everybody um but again you're talking about guys who take no time off i mean one of the reasons why diego flores went last summer and nothing was really made of this belt has never really spoken about it but flores went before the start of the premier league season um and essentially he from what i understand he felt like

He needed a break you know he'd been with bielsa right the way through it was incredibly intense there'd been the covet shut down where they hadn't really had any time off and the season had gone on in well into july and it was very short period before pre-season started and he just felt it i'm told he's back in cordoba now um and you know it just felt that enough was enough and it wasn't that he was unhappy i just think he felt that his body and his mind Needed a neither break needed a rest and

and to cut himself away from it but some of them just seem to have endless endless energy as much energy as bielsa and i think if you're lacking stamina in any respect if you're lacking stamina as a player or as a coach or as a chief exec or an owner or a director of football then you are absolutely toast with him and we're into uncharted waters where that's concerned aren't we because the Elsa project if that's what you're gonna call it the experiment has never lasted this long anywhere no um so volume two coming up

in in a year's time um i know i don't i don't think that will be happening but um it it is true and one of the themes that i really wanted to get into in the book was away from the football and the technical stuff the analysis and everything which does you know there is a lot about that Was the relationship that he developed with a city which to be quite honest by the time he arrived was borderline sick of the club you know it wasn't that they'd given up in the club and that the

loyalty was still there but even in radrazani's first year there were things that were you know it caused massive friction the badge the me and my Mimer two the form the sacking of christensen heckenborn coming in it not working out the players who'd all been signed the ones that didn't work out it it it was quite a sort of poisonous environment it was like a permanent cycle of mediocrity sometimes it was worse than mediocre and it was actually quite a big leap of faith for people to look at bielsa and say on mass and this

is how it felt Do you know what this guy might do it without much evidence of that or without much promise of that as soon as he came in there was this definite excitement and this feeling of this might this might be the one without a doubt it helped that they annihilated stoke on the first day because that was different to anything we'd seen for years he came out that thinking that was really really special so straight away people were able to Inject it and and to go with it but i do think the relationship

between him and the city is something quite extraordinary you've got murals here that we'll never hear before you've got kind of you've got a kind of fixation now with the club which is kind of always you know it's not like that's new but i think it's intensified to at an extreme level and something people won't have seen since you know the champions league Run or the wilkinson area it really is up there um with with those things and one of the reasons that i wanted otter to do the forward is because it was essentially his

decision you know radarzani signed it off but beyonce was his pick and i do think that it probably has been the most important single decision by anybody at the club since they since they went for wilkinson and it's mentioned in the book that otter said to radrizzani look This one's on me pin it on me this is my gamble if this doesn't work then you can fire me because he's my guy because rodriguez getting messages from people saying i'm not sure this is a good idea do you know what do you know about this guy

have you seen what went on at leo you know it can be volatile you might find that you employ him and he's gone in no space of time so rodrizzani had these messages on his phone and was getting These phone calls and and yeah alte said to him we need to be brave with this we've got we've got to be brave um if we do this it's my choice and it goes wrong you sack me as director of football i'll need to go you know you you have to stop me but i honestly think that

this this could work um and i mean although says quite openly you know what he didn't think beyonce would be interested and he thought we should have Better offers and would maybe see the championship and leaders below him but as soon as bielsa said to them tell you what come and see me in buenos aires and we'll chat this over they all felt that they were being tested it was a case of if you come and you make the effort and the right people turn up and you listen to what i have to say you

know 5 000 miles away from leeds then i'll know that you're serious and i might actually think about this if you Can't be bothered to come or if you just want to do a zoom call then there's no point in this going any further but if you are willing to make the trip and to fly out here then yeah let's talk one of the things that you mentioned there and it's touched on in the book is the relationship with the city and you mentioned in the book that the west ham gig came up in 2015

but he just didn't feel that the ownership there was something he wanted to necessarily work With but also living in london is a completely different proposition to living in yorkshire and you look at his time at bilbao and i wonder how much the geographical aspect of it and the city region played into his decision to come to leeds it's definitely the case that he wasn't particularly sold on the board at west ham i think the project there didn't feel right to him um i would suspect that deep down as well Leeds is a city in

a club and and what it's like up here is more in tune with somebody who is so obsessed and in love with news old boys and rosario then you know a club in in london would be west ham are a very very big club and that was a very very good job no doubt about it but i think it would have been difficult for west ham not just as a club but as a culture to you know embraced him in the way that That he has in leeds he's got this weird thing now where he

tries not to take credit for anything and he tries to avoid too much attention but he's always going to be synonymous with leads and leads are always going to be synonymous with him and i think even even when he goes and this might be an issue for the next coach who comes in it's going to take ages before the kind of feel of bielsa and the you Know the sort of positive smell of beelze is gone um because the the impact has been has been that big and i've i've never seen a manager anywhere really

i mean perhaps are exceptions you know maybe you could say alex ferguson over at manchester united but even he had those years where he had banners traffic and all that sort of stuff i i can't think of many managers who have just been unanimously popular from The get-go and i know that's down to football i know that's down to him and basically it's down to the fact that it's been a success but it's been a success because of him it's not none of this has been by chance at all he's written a massive significant chapter

in the history of leeds there's no two ways about it and it's one of the things i've become aware of and maybe this was part of the inspiration for writing the book you tell me Just the idea of living through history and it needs to be documented i agree with that i i did say in the letter to him given what i've covered at this club and given how it's gone i find it hard to imagine another period that will inspire me to write in the way that this has and i struggle to think of

another period that leads that will necessarily justify a 300 page book Don't get me wrong if they get into europe or if they they win the title or whatever else at some stage then then perhaps it changes but i can't even then i can't see anything that would be more unconventional than him and more interesting and more detailed he's totally a total one-off which is why which why i began the book with the story of him declining a lift in the pouring rain as I was driving out from thor parts because i've said before on

that on the philly show if that'd be my dad at 66 i would have said to him you know get in the car and don't be stupid it's pouring rain you're 45 minutes from home i'll just run you around the corner but for some reason with him when he says no i really like this and if he turtles into this torrential downpour you find Yourself laughing even though really you shouldn't be letting that 66 year old wander off into the rain like that you know but but that's kind of him and there are so many

quirks and and so many differences to him and and the main thing with him is there's all about the football all about the football is all about coaching it's not he doesn't fixate on transfers He he doesn't he does get into the political side of football but when he involves himself in the political side it's normally to kind of concur with the supporters about how much they hate politics you know the and i'm not talking about you know general politics hasn't taken the knee or black lives matter or any of that stuff but you know

the politics of football boardrooms and governing bodies and all that sort of stuff Drives him mad because when you get to that point you totally detach from what football is which is a game with a crowd and that's that's what he lives for i agree that we kind of needed to rip up the manual and start again and i feel like i see so many echoes in what bielsa has done with wilkinson when he joined leeds it's Very similar to the 1990 promotion and what wilkinson set out to do which was to just change the

dna change the identity of lead united and he's done exactly exactly the same thing but you could argue that leads were in a fairly desperate situation and needed somebody just to come in and just grab the bootstraps and start again there is a long chapter in it which is basically the decline from Well i mean it really started before the champions league run because of the way they were setting up deals financially it was like it was putting trouble in the pipeline that as it happened came after the run to the semi-finals but was kind

of always going to materialize because of the way because of the risks that had been taken and it runs on and i mean ralph anderson's done the audio book um As we said at the start it's brilliant actually his voice for this just absolutely perfect and he said i had to stop about four times to cry during that because it is the story is so miserable you know through that period but i don't know how much beyonce really knows about that i don't know how much anybody's ever taken him through you know the potted history

of why leeds were shambles But you have to kind of see that to understand what he was fighting against and what it was that he was trying to turn around you know bring under control this beast of a club that was just prone to eating itself constantly and didn't seem to be get able to break out of the era of crises and and everything else um but i mean there are other characters in it too who who i think you have to you have to recognize otter who More and more i think has been vastly

underestimated including by me early on as a director of football but not least because of the way he's had to manage bail so that is a tough gig um kaneer i think i see criticism of canada from time to time but i actually think incredibly capable chief executive a lot of other clubs would be quite quite happy to to employ and there are things about rodriguez that frustrate me you know things like The the badge and everything else and the the the stuff that kind of from time to time almost drags leads into a little

bit of disrepute although nothing in comparison to what came before but you cannot deny that it's been on his watch that this has happened and that he's finally done with this club as owner he's done what nobody else looked like doing in the interim i don't think prior to be elsa coming in there's ever been a season where i Genuinely felt like leads were headed for the premier league possibly christmas under grayson although it was a little bit too early with even with monk there was a point where i thought they'd get to the playoffs

but even though i was putting money on them getting to the playoffs i wouldn't have put money on them getting promoted through the playoffs this is this period has has done it and i think it's it's it Is predominantly down to be else i feel but there is also a structure about around him which has allowed it to happen just a little left turn quickly i said einerson you said innocent which one is it because one of us owes him an apology oh it might be me i've always called him tomato and tomato i've always

called him ralph innocent is it einstein oh ralph sorry one of us is sorry anyway get in Touch get in touch yeah blow your paint uh yes returning to be elsa fixating on transfer as you mentioned there i feel like i've become a more knowledgeable fan by learning from bielsa watching how he operates and realizing that as much as you know we're talking now in the closing stages of the 2021 summer window and there's been a little bit of uh angst around leeds united's lack of Movement but i feel deep down quite okay about it

i think because i trust bielsa to rinse every last drop out of the existing squad and it's what he likes to do because he is he is so obsessed with coaching and that goes some way to answering that question of uh what does he get out of all this you should never be obsessed with coaching to the extent that it damages the team because you will never be open to recruitment there are some players who Can only improve to a certain level but i think what the else has proved is that virtually everybody is capable

of improving or a lot of people are capable if you pick sensibly so when he took the squad on he clearly did cut it up into those that i am absolutely not having a little group of maybes but probably going and then a group of players that i'm very very happy with of which there was a really big core and because he knew what he was doing he Knew that they could could improve one of the things that always always sticks with me is when he was in his first press conference at ellen road we

we said to him or somebody asked him you know realistically what can you do this season because you only have five or six um weeks to work with the players and you've never dealt with them before you probably didn't have you probably never studied them until you know a Couple of months ago even though you'll have studied them intensely since then and they also just said five or six weeks is more than enough time to get them ready absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be ready okay and then they went and played like that against

stoke and evidently if you play well getting results then you have more and more time to work with them because things go on and you stay in the job for a while but there has never been any of this I could do with a couple more transfer windows this is a new squad we haven't had a lot of a lot of time he hates setting bench low benchmarks as in or sitting benchmarks where he says you shouldn't expect any more of this because i think he sees it sees it as a bit of a dereliction

of duty if you're them if the head coach you're part of whatever you can get you know and you push yourself as far as you can i mean to ask You a question midway through the probation promotion season if you'd been offered glenn murray in that january when things were a bit iffy and eddie and kitty had left would you have taken him probably yeah and and the same with billy sharp i think 90 of us would have said in no way are we saying that they are stellar stellar footballers who you want For the

next five years but when it comes to promotion they'll probably do you know and and the fact that he didn't want either of them i think tells you that he he's not only committed to his plan but he has total total trust and faith in it and sometimes it's going to go wrong and it will eventually go wrong it leads you would think because these things always do i'm chuffed to bits for him though That he's through the window now where anybody can talk about burnout um because if it ends after four years if it

ends after five it would be totally ridiculous to say oh they burnt out as we always said they would because they've had promotion they've had a very strong year in the premier league you'll be able to look at it and say it's the natural conclusion that comes to most managers which is that eventually They lose the grip it goes wrong the results turn the players sometimes fall out in love with the with the plan and they get sacked or they they quit and the club move on nobody will be able to say you push the

players too hard and ultimately you can't survive in a blc regime because they have is that you can one of the revelations for me about the toughness that you spoke about there and the the clear Delineation between players that he wants there were some maybes and then there was the not want you mentioned in the book the not wants were made to train at different times to the rest of the squad and even at a different site at ask and brian college just outside york um so that that was actually later on that was a

subsequent summer um in in the first one when he split them into groups they they they were training at thorp arch But they would they would come in at different times and the reason was because beyonce did not want people like washing boy anywhere near the squad he looked boy was one of the players he looked at and said absolutely not he he goes he's he's no use to me um i can't i can't walk with him um so boy was on the list of people to go so if bielsa's players were turning up at

10 o'clock to do analysis sessions and then training and then more Analysis sessions and during the summer as well you know they were sometimes there so later they were going to stay at hotels nearby rather than driving home because there was kind of no point the the other players were made to come at times when the training ground was empty and interestingly we wrote last weekend at the athletic about how you sell a footballer how do you get rid of a footballer that you want to go and one of the tricks that is used by

clubs Is that they train with the 23s and they're no longer allowed to use like the first team car park or canteen and they get been from the the first team whatsapp group um at certain places i don't know if that actually happens it leads it wasn't that beyonce was trying to do that as much as he wanted them to go it was he just said if any of these people are around given that they're not going to be involved then this potentially Compromises us so yeah absolutely there's there's no place for them here while

first team training is going on and where the facilities are concerned there's uh a separation of facilities that's gradually being enacted at thor parche where the first team squad are very much separate to like the academy lot and part and parcel of uh what can he has described as best in class practice for the training ground is to have a very separate set of uh Facilities for the first team versus you know like you said the kids who are coming in with their parents for the the calorie lot you don't really want them all mixing

together in the same car park at t-time do you know very much so even though there is quite a blend in training um and i think it makes it it makes it quite aspirational that you've got to you've got to work hard to make sure that you're in with the main group and if you're not in the main group you Know that you've got you've got things to do and it's i mean that was going to be the plan at the matthew murray site which obviously not going to go ahead now it was there were

actually going to be separate entrances for the first team and the 20th or the academy levels which obviously can't be done at thorpe arch but the the infrastructure changes there i think have have helped to get leads into the mindset of what needs to be done to Transform yourself from if we're being brutally honest a 20th century club into 21st century club i mean i remember somebody at the academy telling me how celino knocked back a request to put up new signs at the um the training ground which would have cost not not substantial amounts

of money hundreds are small you know in the very Low thousands but basically to make it look professional because the signs were old and so on and there's there's no denying that leads did not have a lot of cash at that time so i understand that chileno would have been tightening his belt and whatever else but it was just a case of we're not doing that you know that's that's not something we'll spend the money on the end you now have bielsa saying i want the same training pitch at thorpe arch that We've got at

ellen road because that is a marginal gain and that gives us an advantage and i think significantly the club have gone with them on so many things like that and and it's dragged them forward as well and thinking you know should we have a new training ground should we get on with the development of the stadium should we try and make the infrastructure something that you would recognize if you were actually going to an ultra-modern Premier league club and i will be very sorry when ellen road is no longer ellen road as we saw on

saturday because i do love it like that but it's that is not built for the modern day premier league i think we're starting to realize that what's dawning on is that we do need to upgrade things things have stood still at ellen road for such a long time and you see i mean i don't want the same stadium as spurs or the emirates or any of that i don't want it to look like Man cities either the etihad i still want it to have a uniqueness but i also completely appreciate that we need to move

forward now in order to compete with the rest of them and it's grumpy to talk about revenue streams and things like that but it's just become a necessary evil in football hasn't it hopefully we can retain the ellen roadness of ellen road well that's the balance isn't it and that's why clubs are taking the the the money from Sociologists and getting into fans tokens because it's easy cash and it's easy you know easy revenue and quite substantial amounts um and it means that you have the conflict of people like me who look at the fans

tokens and have concerns about them and other people who think that you need to maximize your revenue streams and actually you know both arguments are kind of valid on the one Hand you want clubs to invest in this player that player wages new contracts everything else on the other hand you want to kind of limit the um you know where the money comes from i think when you get into cryptocurrency that becomes a really delicate area that you have to be very very careful about um and i'm kind of digressing here but you can you

can almost relate this back to the point where they employed bielsa on a huge salary compared to what Anybody at least had done before certainly recently i mean david hawkiday we were told was getting about 150 000 pounds a year and clearly that was a really weird setup and an odd appointment and he had no huge bargaining power didn't even expect to get the job um but be also you were talking millions suddenly and it's the vast difference between and it loads of investment can go wrong if you don't do it properly but That was

the huge difference between a considered expensive investment and a total stab in the dark um and it has i i do think that has been the starting point for so many changes that leave leads in in so much of a better position could you pay for the book with chili's i'm just checking a year's time i can sell them for about two million pounds fill my boots oh dear me and just return to the structure of it and um The start to the end it's it's almost like a diary of the first premier league season

yeah so we chart the well and it was beautiful the rebirth of leeds united that's what the book is all about interspersed with loads of other little stories and thematics yeah subjects yeah that's that's a nice word hopping back that was the publisher's word actually i can't take credit for that it was them he said what about thematic chapters i thought that sounds good So what thematic chapters do we have in there then tell me about what that book looks like when you open it you have obviously the decline you have the story of bielsa's

appointment you know how how it was done there's the there's a thematic chapter on the city and the changes here um motherboard and training analysis uh the the assistants round about him who are they what do they do how did this all come to pass the hierarchy as well i wanted to Write about autumn and kaneer and rodrizani there's some great stuff from there and author you start to learn actually um anybody who hasn't seen your um your pre-season release the special one yeah there's a great interview in there that moscow's done with autumn and

he touched on similar some similar themes but he goes on about how he had this sticker book when he was young football card book which he you put the Cards in stickers in and um he would get and then you had to try and get players to sign underneath you know stick their autograph underneath so he would go to hotels in madrid when um social dad turned up or whoever else and he'd you know he tried to get him to sign it and some of the players would say to him victor you're always right why

are you always here you know nobody else seems to care about this but you're always here and you would say well because i Need to finish my sticker book and he tells this great story about how um he came home one day and his um his mom said to him how was school today so that was fine yeah she said oh right what were you doing said oh just the usual things okay okay well tell me a bit more said why about it so interested in this she said because i put on the telly um

and the news had uh footage of juventus flying into madrid Airport and there you were standing there trying to get um autographs from the players when you should have been at school um and he is a total total football obsessive um for his for his faults and i do talk a lot in it about how he has kind of ruffled feathers and directors boxes over the past um past couple of years when you go into his office it leads it's packed with football magazines he's obsessed with it It's not a big office is it no

no so i was looking at the table there were some in japanese and i presume he doesn't speak japanese but you know he's got like 78 of shoot magazines he's got um a couple from south america he's got every single edition of um because he's he's just so into to this sort of stuff so there's a piece on the the hierarchy and then the final chapter was kind of inspired By fabien costello who we spoke spoke about right back at the start of this and the kind of genesis of how did bielsa become the elsa

because the a lot of connections between what he was doing even before being manager of news what he was doing as a youth team coach and what he does now and it there's long enough in between to know that none of this is contrived none of us none of This is for the cameras and none of this is for sure it's all because as a coach this is how he sees it how important do you think the hierarchy at leeds have been we just sort of uh got into it a bit there is it a

perfect storm almost with the you know you look at kaneer otter radrazani and then bielsa somehow it works i think they've landed on the feet with a very good Director of football who he can seem quite egotistical can alter but i actually think not a lot of what he does is particularly for his own benefit i don't think he's i think i think he finds criticism very hard to take as most people do but i don't think he's obsessed with the idea of people saying alter his alter is a genius or whatever the the view

of him is and as i say i think canada is a really really capable um chief exec and those Appointments by rad rosani i think even though the first season was it was a bit of a mess i think created a bit of a proper structure and and framework uh ian mcintosh who works for the athletic with me he said earlier he said i wonder if anybody remembers my tweet you know the maddest club and the maddest coach um can this possibly work and you do feel like there's an element of chaos theory to it

until you think properly about The way b also works and how detailed he is and everything else if you were calling this chaos theory it would be because it was happening through luck or by chance but there isn't any of that it's just the fact that other clubs it sometimes hasn't worked for him they either haven't liked him or his methods haven't clicked with the players or it's just been all all wrong but here it has been a perfect match Who's the glue that holds it all together i think alter is the glue that holds

it all together i really do you've he it's alter who manages um it's that thing of managing up and managing down i mean you couldn't talk really about managing down with bielsa because it feels like b also sets up you know sits above everybody even though rodriguez um your majority shareholder but it's All to who manages him it's also who then has to manage upwards um there are people who have to manage alter from time to time caneer in particular i think um and you do get you do get differences of of opinion but i

almost feel like autist story is the kind of hidden hidden part of this not the not the recruitment because you see a lot of that although you don't see half of what goes on with him and the team around him it's not purely him when it comes to Recruitment you know there is a is a big scouting team but it's the management of personalities and the management of emotions not just would be also but with the general staff as well that he's he's very very good at i i don't envy his job put it that

way and he's really well thought of by the staff isn't he uh bielsa even though he is incredibly demanding on a just on a day-to-day basis One of the things that became apparent the more i wrote was and people i spoke to um in the club out of the club so people who have skin in the game within people who don't when it comes to people who don't he's incredibly generous with them and and even though i think he finds personal interaction quite a challenge you know it doesn't come that naturally to him he's he

Devotes i know people who get whatsapp messages from him um because he you know they do kind things for him and in return it's like you know i don't think i'm giving away any secrets here by saying you guys have been up to thought patch because he loves your end of season reviews that you do he sees them this sadly sadly he wasn't there i should add he was he was away in a meeting at that point he must have held You were coming but but he sees this stuff he knows that it's no skin

off his nose that you're doing it and he knows that you're devoting time to this stuff to write about him and his players and everything else so you really really really appreciates it in the same way as when clovid started the lockdown first lockdown after covert started to ease he was insistent that one of the first People he had to come back from follow was a woman called izzy who walks in the canteen and has worked there for years and not because there was anything in it for him but because he saw what she did

he really really appreciates the rank and file staff and he wanted to make sure that she was looked after once you get to the level of firsting players chief execs directors of football he expects an extraordinary amount of Them and it beca it becomes intensely professional it is like an ultra-professional relationship in which he can be difficult to please and difficult to satisfy and sometimes it can be wildly infuriating i don't think anybody would would deny that but it works and in the same way that the players go with it with really really intense training

because they see the results it's the same with the it's the same with the Management they see what he does and they see the impact he he has and in the balance of he's hard work versus he's an absolute magician um the magician wins every time do you think you've uncovered any weaknesses within marcelo bielsa i mean we're all human we've all got faults what did you find when you explored his character in this he doesn't i i often wonder what his circle of friends is like you know how many people is he really really

close to Um and i think that's a personality thing more than ever he seems quite happy with his lot um you always have that question in your head of when he gets to the age where he is retired afterwards really wish ever that he'd maybe devoted a bit more time to other things in his life or or other people he is he's a definite loner without a doubt and but it seems quite happy in that in that bubble you know that seems to be What he needs and and how he how he lives um you

can call the obsession with training and analysis a weakness when it doesn't work because i think when it become for example i i spoke to um andoni ariola who played with him at bilbo and got used to the motherboard sessions over there they called it champions but it was the same thing and i asked him do you think Other coaches would try to employ this you know because he's managing now he's at rio vallecano now would you use this you know because it worked for bielsa and he said no absolutely no chance because the players

wouldn't have it from me realistically a lot of coaches would find it hard to say to players we're going to do this every week because you run the risk of them saying what have you ever done in the game you're killing Us here but you have no you know you have no right to kill us in this way but it's different with blc you cannot argue with his reputation or his track record and it helps that you constantly have guardiola over the penins saying this guy is the best coach in the game bar none and

you know how do you how do you contest that but when it does when it grates on people when people get tired with it if players don't go with It it is going to go wrong but to be quite honest isn't that true of every manager it does end badly for everybody one way or another doesn't usually yeah the one exception being ferguson at manchester united he is one of the few managers who has managed to have huge peaks and then go you know it would go without there being this huge demise before it happened

even wenger at arsenal i mean it's sadly to see How little wenger seems to want to go back to arsenal because it got so sour um in the end and you would hate to think that it would ever be like that would be elsa but i can't however it goes with him i don't think it'll ever go beyond the point where people don't feel intense gratitude for what he's done i definitely think whenever the time comes he will it will leave a hero he'll be carried out he'll be chatted out of uh Of yorkshire and

hopefully will be welcomed back pretty soon afterwards one thing i would wonder is is he too concerned with what's written about him and opinion of him do you think that sways his his state of mind more than your average manager well i do touch on this the fact that in the mornings that he has staff who read the press and translate the press and let him know What's being said about him um i can understand why he would fixate on it even though he gives you the impression that he you know keeps his distance from

the the media and everything else and you almost gives the impression it doesn't really matter what they say because he'll do his own thing anyway when he comes under attack you have to say that it seems to be more vicious and Some in some cases more personal than it is with your average manager i think because so much is said about how clever beyonce is and how unique he is and and how talented he is that when it doesn't look like that in the flesh the tendency does seem to go in with with two feet

there was a weird piece in the mirror a couple of weeks back which was going on about how if he wasn't in a a one-bedroom flat above a chiropractor But it was in a gated community i think he was just calling i think it was yeah the gated community as in as if to say if he was in an environment where the general public couldn't get anywhere near him then this would all be more serious or he would be a better coach or he would think more totally totally misunderstanding and misrepresenting what it is that

makes bielsa tick which is pleasing i've used the phrase Reservedly but the ordinary fan if you like yeah um and i i don't see why it would be a good thing for bielsa to shut himself off from the world at all in fact i think it would have a massively detrimental um impact on him and and it wouldn't change the way he played and it wouldn't change what he does his team just is what it is his tactics are what they are when it goes Wrong he merits criticism like everybody else because i don't think

you can get back to the old trafford two to two visits running and expect people to say that doesn't matter you know yeah people should dig into what you're doing you're a very technical guy you're big on tactics you're big on things working if they don't you know ask ask why they didn't but the the evidence is massively in his favor you know the track record is is in His favor and i can imagine that he reads some of what's written and feels that it's a bit too personal or that there's this constant attempt to

start the argument about is he actually special this guy or is he just bang average with a very good pr machine around him um i i often say to myself just remember that you might be might be biased about this because you're on the scene and You're very close up to it but i do genuinely think this has been special i do think this has been absolutely remarkable period and a real enlightenment about what you can do with a club and players if you if you have this sort of plan in your head um and

i do think he's exceptional i think guardiola's right and it's made more special by the fact that you can bump into him in morrison's in his track series to me it adds to the Myth it doesn't detract from it he says he doesn't get that but he must get that because when when did you last bump into guardiola in the news agents or you know going around the the morrisons with this trolley and i'm not saying that guardiola's it wouldn't be fair to say that he's out of touch in that sense he'll just he'll get

an ocado delivery will uh guardiola he'll be falling in mason though Probably yeah no i don't not a chance um but guardiola is not wrong if he says to himself if i go out and shop in tesco's i'll have people all over me i'll probably never get out of there and and you know it'll go everywhere but also just doesn't understand it like that he just thinks i'm just going out to get some food you know and so he does in the same way that he sits and costs the she has to he'll make space

for you know You'll have people come in sunday coffee tables will all be full so make space and you know they share this table and i don't think he talks to them and they don't talk to him they all just have their own space and it's fine but you've got him sitting watching video clips them sitting around chatting having a having a coffee but i think over time people learn not to leave him alone because obviously you see a lot of photographs of people with Him and and and people like to do that but i

think people understand that that's his environment and he does need his own space and there's a way to manage that and there's a way to act when you're around him so that you're not all over him but he has huge amounts of patience i mean i always felt with eddie gray that i don't know how he ever learned to a be able to speak to the hundreds of people that tried to speak to him every game and b to sign all the Autographs that he constantly have has to say without as far as i can

see evil complaining about it and i know what you can say well it's nice when people think of you like that and it is there are also times when you want to be left alone eddie is a genuine rock star in league isn't it that's not right he is i mean if it's a question of whose statue should be at um should be ellen road you know further Down the line it would be eddie's and i don't think they also would argue with that people would hate the idea of having a statue you know if

someone said yeah we're going to put statue of you he would feel kind of honored and touched by it but he would also say why on earth why are you doing this um because he he you know the times what you tried to say to him we used to label this point after promotion In no way can you say this has nothing to do with you just incredible to say that and i always loved the fact that when promotion came he did get in the mix and he did enjoy it even just for a couple

of days you know he he let his hair down and he let himself go and it was nice to see that actually you know it did really really matter to him that much it is funny how he's he has transcended superstardom because as i said i think He was on the philhay show i made a pilgrimage to weatherby morrisons i needed to stop somewhere on my way up to newcastle i thought hmm i'll i'll just pop in there to get my my drinks for the cart rather than anywhere else that i could have gone that

was either closer or more convenient just on the off chance he wasn't there i would like to add but there are very few players that could uh our managers sorry that could inspire a grown man to go to Those ridiculous lengths yeah i can imagine the security guard looking at the camera going here's this guy again and he never buys anything but he comes in and stands around for 45 minutes and then and then goes back out there is a definite bit of that people love seeing him seeing him in the street um and i

i don't know i i kind of feel like there's a lot of negativity generally in football and i've kind of i've been guilty of getting sucked in by that i've Probably fueled some of it was some of what i've written over the years equally there have been times it leads where it has been intensely negative and there's been very little to feel positive about and it is really really nice in the same way as on saturday i massively enjoyed the reaction to the taking of the knee just that you know that total injection of support

against everton yeah and it's been the same with blc just this total desire to See see it work for him and to to do well there was nobody turning on him after the derby defeat to them in the in the playoffs you know people wanted him to have another bash they wanted it to to work out for him nobody wanted them to to go after promotion even those other messages about this contract they wanted him to stay they wanted to see what was going to happen in in the premier league maybe there will come a

time when people tire of this because That's that is often the way you know the way things work out um but still feels like we're quite away from that yeah he's still very much a sacred cow so i mean in terms of what you've written here then never mind the negative awful stuff you've written in the past you've got your book here uh what have you written here then what will leeds fans get out of this do you think i'd like to think that it will give them A really clear insight into how it's worked

and why this has worked you know not not just what's going on but why it is that the things that have gone on have made a difference and how it's all knitted together um and i hope that they'll enjoy the followed by author which i just think is is altered to t but also really good insight into why they took this plunge and the last chapter which you know does have some insight from bielsa it's it's Not a one-on-one and i did point that out in the book because i don't i wouldn't want him to

think that he was being portrayed like that and we did i did speak to the publishers specifically and we agreed you know we said we cannot say that these are exclusive quotes because he has been known on interviews where people have said we've got a marcello balsa exclusive to just say there and then i don't do exclusives this isn't exclusive there's loads of Media around and about you know so it's it's one of the things that that does frustrate him but the last chapter was i think as close as i'll ever get to you know

to getting to knowing what is in his head and where where this all came from and is that what you've got out of this never mind what's in it for like the for the reader but what's in it for you as well what have you taken out the experience of writing about it The feeling that i probably never covered anything like this again you know people might not remember but in 2012 hearts and hibbs got to the scottish cup final and there we go hearts battled hibs it was it was glorious and i was 31

and i was bored i didn't have a ticket for it so i watched in the pub down in york and i was walking home thinking at 31 i'm never going to see a better Game than that it doesn't matter what happens no there will never be a game that will be like that no matter if hearts win the title or when the european cup which never happened but it will never be that in the derby annihilating them just the the absolute peak and you know i'm not that old now but i'm starting to get on

but i i can't imagine i'm ever gonna have Anything quite like this to write about again which is why when the publishers tried to talk me into it they did because i did think to myself why wouldn't you want to write about this you know this is kind of opportunity to to properly get into a story that has a beginning and kind of has an end already even though there's still time of being elsa to go um and really had to be done to return to the question that we uh we Kind of kicked all

this off with do you think you've learned what football does for marcelo bielsa and obviously we want people to buy the book and read it so don't give the game away completely but do you think you've figured that one out i think it gives it from a very early age it gave him a passion that he found nowhere else his family are politicians and architects he says he didn't have the intelligence um to be a university Student i suspect it was nothing to do with intelligence but possibly more to do with interest or actually the

the willingness to apply himself to that because there probably was no underlying passion for it um and he found in football he as a as a personality he is withdrawn he's not particularly outgoing he strikes me as a sort of guy who doesn't necessarily find fun all over the place in his life or perhaps Direction but this was i was well i think it was a calling for him you know it was like something going into the priesthood really this was what his life was going to be about and this is why 66 he's not

on the beach and he's not retired to his ranch in rosario he is right in the thick of it demanding that leads get the training ground pitch lead asap well nice work on it it's a really good read i've not read it all yet because I've only had it for a couple of days but i've read all the important bits and i enjoyed it a great deal and i do think as time wears on it's really important to have this this documented so nice work well thank you uh and it's available now and it was

beautiful marcelo bielsa and the rebirth of leeds united by uh by phil haye available i think you've got to say in all good bookshops and the bad ones too that's the standard Yes hardback ebook and audiobook and we look forward to the sequel phil all right crack on with it now please the square ball podcast [Music]