The Quality of Madness: A Life of Marcelo Bielsa

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The best chapter is on the ‘spy gate’ controversy. Here Rich carefully details what actually happened. In 2018, Bielsa sent a young intern to Derby County’s training grounds to spy on Derby’s pre-match training sessions. Once again Bielsa bore the brunt of the controversy, but Rich makes a convincing argument that sending one intern to an opposition training ground doesn’t mean Leeds are guaranteed a victory on match day. Pardo believes Bielsa's aloofness towards players may explain a modest trophy haul of three Argentine league championships, one Olympic gold medal and the Championship title with Leeds. Some players, says the Mexican, need their manager to show them some love. The 25-metre bath was exactly that. Some Premier League clubs have pools that feature adjustable currents and moveable floors that can help with injury rehabilitation but the one at Leeds was simply a pool – ideal for Olympic hopefuls; benefits less obvious for footballers. Still, it was considered a good thing to have. It is revealing that Lunari, who was Bielsa's assistant during a thrilling spell in charge of the Chile national team between 2007 and 2011, says he would be unwilling to work with the Argentine manager again.

Bielsa is a meticulous, obsessive and enigmatic manager who carries a mythology with him. He is one of football's most intriguing personalities - and he has just arrived in the English Premier League. But while his brother and sister followed family tradition by pursuing careers in law and politics - his brother Rafael is Argentina's ambassador to Chile - Bielsa became a student of football, dispatching his mother to the newsagents every day to gather up all the sports papers and magazines. That is why, for me, he is the best coach in the world. I am looking forward to seeing him in Lille next season. I am pretty sure his influence on their team, their club and their players will be huge - amazing."It wasn't long before Lunari was being subjected to the arduous training methods that have become another Bielsa trademark. Pushing young players to their physical and mental limits has been a theme throughout Bielsa's career. At Leeds, players compete in 'murderball', a high-intensity 11-a-side match where the ball never goes out of play.

Within seven weeks of pre-season training, Bielsa transformed the group into an entirely new team. They were comfortable on the ball, played one- and two-touch cushions all over the pitch, and never stopped running. It was as if someone had finally found the mains supply at Elland Road, plugging the old ground directly into the Northern Powergrid and sending a surge of voltage pulsing through brains and bones. Sometimes, a dozen or so will turn up at the team hotel, where they can be seen poring over laptops in reception, and some of Bielsa’s extensive support staff at Leeds have cut their teeth in this way. If they impress, they can be invited into the inner circle. It's Bielsa's rigidity that works against him and after the first season we all thought: 'There goes Bielsa again, almost but not quite,'" says Mora y Araujo. "But now he has done it, and I think that's incredibly redeeming for him personally and for the club." He really drew my attention. I was surprised by his intensity and way of talking passionately about football. He didn't just speak with his mouth: he spoke with his hands and his body. I thought: 'who is this man?'" So he and his fellow youth team coach Jorge Griffa divided the country into 70 territories, driving thousands of miles in Bielsa's little Fiat. If they liked a player, they would go and see them, no matter what time it was.

Marcelo Bielsa is a highly respected coach and is famous for his innovative playing style, tactics and formations. He has had a massive influence on football across the world and on other top coaches, such as Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino, Jorge Sampaoli and Gerardo Martino. The aim of the book is to use the innovative tactics of Marcelo Bielsa to provide a complete guide of how to build up play effectively against high pressing teams. It was a huge change for us 15- or 16-year-old boys who were used to playing mostly for fun," says Lunari. "We were used to training for an hour and a half, but with Marcelo we trained for three hours with a level of concentration and physical intensity that we were not used to. In our BBC World Service documentary - Bielsa: the manager behind the myths - we've spoken to some of the people who have got closest to the 65-year-old Argentine through his well-travelled career - from Buenos Aires to Bilbao and Mexico to Marseille - to try to find out what it is really like to work with this famously idiosyncratic and demanding coach. In Argentina, football teams are always looking in every slum, in every park, in every playground, hoping to find the next Messi, Maradona or Batistuta. But what Bielsa did, in typical Bielsa style, was to become incredibly meticulous and organised about it," says Argentine football writer Marcela Mora y Araujo.

After the game, Marcelo approached my dad and asked him to enlist me to play at Newell's," says Lunari.All of the sources contained within are just mates of the writer, and it goes into great and pointless detail about each of them and their tenuous qualifications. They share a raft of thoughts without any sort of narrative or flow, and are honestly no more incisive than random bloke in the pub level analysis. Discussing a football manager in such reverential terms might seem hyperbolic. However, what Bielsa has done for the club and the city in many ways transcends sport. He is a man who sees the corporate, avaricious, sportswashing modern game for what it is, yet managed to navigate his way through it all and still hold on to his principles: decency, humility and an unwavering work ethic.

We were exhausted," says defender Rod Fanni. "Mentally, it's very difficult to repeat the same things every day. You have to be strong because it's a bit like a factory. You go there, you repeat, you repeat, you repeat and you go home. He has a book of training drills and in the whole time we were with him we never once repeated a drill," says Pardo, who won 146 caps for his country. "After a drill, we would meet in the middle of the field and we could hardly breathe. He would be really happy to see us like that." In my opinion, Klopp, Guardiola and Zidane are probably friendlier with the players," he says. "Marcelo Bielsa convinces the player about the system and gives us the tools, but the relationship we have as people needs to be close. He thinks players are machines, but we are humans as well."The effect that he has had on Leeds United, and on the city’s environs has been extraordinary. He has transformed a team floundering in mid table mediocrity in the Championship to Premiership heavyweights and fired the imagination of a whole region. Much of the book is made up of self-congratulatory passages like "It was this quote from Roberto Martinez in a lecture I presented for the World Football Academy, at the Expert Meeting in South Africa 2014, that left Anson Dorrance with the urge to be the first to come up to me after the presentation, shake my hand and express an interest in further discussing some of the ideas in the presentation". The Philosophy of Football: In Shadows of Marcelo Bielsa by Jed C. Davies is a product of three and a half years of research, interviews over coffee tables, bus journeys through foreign countries and the development of an idea. The idea has been a simple one: to theorise and understand the philosophy of one of the most influential football coaches in the history of the game: Marcelo Bielsa