Nein zu Red Bull

Three league matches into Red Bull Salzburg’s 2019/20 season, Jesse Marsch was spooked. Fizzy Salzburg had won all three of their fixtures, but now Wolfsberger had taken the lead after seven minutes, the first time the Salzburg franchise trailed all season. Spotting a rare chance for some sporting tension and drama, the makers of the documentary series about Salzburg’s campaign use this moment to add the sound of some stirring strings to slo-mo action shots. Could Salzburg possibly come back?

Well, yes — of course they can. They’ve got Erling Haaland! Salzburg are behind for all of fifteen minutes. Alfie’s lad scores a hat-trick and, despite a late scare when Wolfsberger pull a goal back and briefly threaten to equalise, Salzburg win 5-2. Marsch is troubled, though. He thinks the game was too competitive. Back in the changing room, Jesse is raging to his assistant manager Frankie Schiemer, who is covering his face with his hands, shaking his head:

“Three points are important now, very important, but so many times we had no idea. It’s unbelievable. We have everything: football tactics. But if we have nothing on the field…”

Jesse was laughing with incredulity when he started, but now he trails off. He starts waving his arms in the air like he was just doing on the touchline. “…And I’m like an idiot on the bench.” He walks out the door, repeating for the sake of clarity: “Like a fucking idiot!”

By ignoring the generational talent who has just scored a hat-trick to win the match and saying he had “nothing on the field”, while defining “everything” as “football tactics”, Jesse Marsch inadvertently described the Red Bull approach to football. The tactics are sacrosanct. The handbook is never wrong. Whatever happens, do not question the handbook. Wolfsberger’s striker might have been left unmarked in the penalty area, but Marsch’s coaching wasn’t the problem. And if the tactics aren’t the problem, they can’t be the solution either. Jesse can’t fix the defending on the training pitch — he’s already told them what to do, if not how to do it — so he spends a league record fee on a centre-back called Maximilian Wober to fix it for him.

Leeds United presented Jesse with the opportunity to prove he could think beyond the Red Bull handbook, but he chose not to. He constantly talked about ‘transitions’, yet while Leeds were exposed whenever teams counter attacked, Jesse’s answer was always to tell the players they were not committing to the tactics enough, that if only they were less stressed, they’d achieve the nirvana of tactical clarity.

I felt a pang of sympathy for Marsch when Leeds confirmed he’d been sacked on Monday. For all I’ve rolled my eyes at his press conferences and winced at his football, I think he’s been sincere in working hard to make Leeds a good team. But my sympathy ends when remembering Marsch is the self-described “Red Bull guy — I’m a company man”, a willing participant in what he calls their “grooming process”.

After his first management job at Montreal Impact lasted only one season, he aligned himself with the energy drink conglomerate that has taken over clubs around the world and stripped them of their histories and identities, changing names, badges, and kit colours to advertise their bull’s piss. At Jesse’s former Salzburg franchise, supporters who turned up to games wearing the violet and white colours of the original Austria Salzburg club were told they weren’t allowed in the stadium. “The people are amazing, the football is amazing, the whole idea of what we are — I’m totally bought into it,” Marsch once said of his former employers.

During Leeds’ wilderness years, the spectre of Red Bull was always looming in the background, known to be interested in a takeover if only any of Ken Bates, GFH Capital, or Massimo Cellino were capable of having a sensible conversation. Perhaps we should be thankful they weren’t. But that’s what makes it all the more galling that Leeds’ board acquiesced to a soft rebrand under Marsch. Victor Orta spent two years talking to Marsch before appointing him, only to discover the promise that drinking Red Bull gives you wings is a lie. The cold, corporate language Marsch spoke riddles through accentuated the sense he was trying to sell us something. We were forced to stomach the Kool Aid for almost a year, but it still tastes like battery acid and leaves me with the jitters.

Supporters tried to see the best in Jesse, even if his eternal optimism was never reflected in consistent performances and results. When the league table kept pointing towards a relegation battle, we couldn’t keep buying what he was selling. Something changed in the defeat at Leicester, when the away end asked, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ It was a fair question.

A lot has happened since the board promised Marsch was here to continue the work of Marcelo Bielsa. We’ve had a manager who asked Raphinha to play wing-back and take long throws, and once didn’t realise he’d subbed off Luke Ayling. We’ve had a director of football who once wore an ‘Against Modern Football’ hoodie to a game before spending two years chatting to Mr Red Bull swearing at fans after scraping a comeback against a relegation rival. That was one week after the owner, in a rare moment of pointed humility, vowed that winning at Anfield meant ‘we are not champions tonight’. While fans worried about a lack of depth in attack, we’ve had a chief executive patronising us for feeling ‘perplexed’ and promising not to sign any ‘warm bodies’. A plan that lasted half an hour into the next game, when Rodrigo got injured against Everton, meaning Leeds spent deadline day trying to sign five other strikers — including Kelechi Iheanacho, who couldn’t answer the phone because he was too busy ACTUALLY PLAYING — before deciding to bring forward a move for Wilf Gnonto, a teenager they didn’t think was ready for the Premier League. He turned out to be better than all our other players. Even Gnonto hasn’t prevented the need for spending a club-record fee on another forward in January. And at the top of it all is an owner who has agreed to sell the club but still seems desperate to be in charge, so he can do fun stuff like letting his son design the third kit and earning a final few quid back on Jack Harrison, whether Jackie wants to live in Leicester or not. Seriously, what the fuck is going on?

Jesse Marsch’s failure has only underlined the failure of the board. They had three-and-a-half years to come up with a plan for the future while Marcelo Bielsa sorted the club out for them. Lack of imagination meant the best they could think up was going all in with Red Bull. They use a German word, in Red Bull circles, to describe going all in: reingehen. In the rest of Germany, and now hopefully Leeds, they prefer to say ‘nein zu Red Bull’. Tyler Adams is still cool though, and thankfully Marsch remembered Maximilian before it was too late. For us, if not for him. ⬢