Marcelo Was Right (Again)

At Wembley on Sunday, with Leeds building pressure in the second half of the FA Cup semi-final, Robert Sánchez went down. Nothing had happened. He went down because Chelsea’s interim head coach Calum McFarlane wanted a moment to deliver tactical instructions. A goalkeeper lying on the turf is, for now, the most convenient way to get one.

Over eighty-two thousand people inside Wembley knew it. Millions watching at home knew it. Even Jarred Gillett, the dickhead referee who continually pandered to Chelsea’s theatrics throughout the game, probably knew it.

Nobody was pretending otherwise.

Some hours later we were sat silently in a traffic jam on the M1 northbound, somewhere near Luton or Milton Keynes or Northampton or wherever. I returned to the question that often takes root in my brain: what would Marcelo think?

Calum McFarlane, speaking after the game, brushed off the criticism, saying matter-of-factly, “I used it as an opportunity to talk to the players and get the information out there that we needed.” It’s not just the act itself, but the naked indifference to doing it. The win-at-all-costs mentality is not new – football has always had a dark arts tradition – but there used to be some residual shame attached. At the Etihad earlier this season, against Brentford at Elland Road, and now at Wembley Stadium, the script stays the same: a goalkeeper goes down holding his thigh in a gloved hand, his teammates gather for instructions, and everyone agrees to carry on as if nothing extraordinary is happening. Except Ethan Ampadu. Bravo to the skipper for placing himself in the Chelsea huddle to shine a light on this cynical farce.

The rules, as they are currently applied, give match officials no meaningful power to intervene. It’s the same with players who go down clutching their heads. As studies emerge linking head impact injuries in football with dementia and with concussion protocols being tightened up, the football authorities are staring cautiously at the thin end of a thick, problematic wedge. Referees are now programmed to put player welfare first, while the players have simply found a new loophole to exploit. Ampadu, composed as ever despite the disappointment of the day, offered the obvious: “Everyone knows the referee can’t do anything.”

It’s important to say: this shouldn’t be mistaken for a moral panic. Moral panics are nothing new in football. Dribbling was going to destroy football. Diving was going to destroy football. The backpass rule, VAR, Premier League money, agents, the Bosman ruling, international breaks. They may have all contributed to a changing direction of travel, but football continues to be watched by more people than almost anything else on earth.

Marcelo Bielsa is not prone to moral panics. He is, by temperament, a man who thinks in systems. But his systems are overlaid on an art form. At its core, art is about provoking a response in its viewer. For Bielsa, football is about the pursuit of beauty. Football is a spectacle for the crowd. This underpins what he says – what he has always said.

“I am certain that football is in a process of decline,” he said at a Copa America press conference in July 2024. “More and more people are watching this sport, but it is becoming less and less attractive.” Bielsa’s honest diagnosis points to a truth: the more the thirst for commercial growth goes unquenched, the less the game itself is protected. Business demands more consumption and growing audiences. Bigger audiences do not demand greater quality.

“We do not favour what made it the best sport in the world,” Bielsa continued. “We promote business, because business means that a lot of people watch the matches. But over time, there are fewer and fewer footballers worth watching, the game is less and less enjoyable, and this artificial increase in spectator numbers will be reduced.”

Around the same time Robert Sánchez was being helped to his feet at Wembley, FIFA was in the throes of defending a ticketing structure for the 2026 World Cup that priced the tournament final at nearly $11,000 a seat. This is football’s latest commercial “enhancement”: dynamic pricing, with resale values in the millions. Gianni Infantino explained that FIFA only generates revenue for one month every four years and needs to make it count. Even Pep Guardiola, currently at the wheel of football’s state-owned Death Star, criticised the prices. Some concessions were made under pressure, with some reduced price tickets added, but this was nothing more than a few scraps being thrown for the poor. The architecture remains the same: the World Cup is a product, and football is merely the scaffolding holding it all up.

These two things – a goalkeeper feigning injury at Wembley and a governing body pricing ordinary fans out of their own tournament – are not the same thing. But they point in the same direction. They show a sport that has decided, at multiple levels, that the spectacle matters far less than the outcome.

What does football actually want? I suppose it wants what it has always wanted: to win, and to get paid. What it seems less interested in is whether the winning and the paying is actually worth watching. Bielsa laid it bare: he has seen the cost of this from the inside. In a sport that bullshits and pretends, Marcelo is thoughtful and he is honest. As much as the breathtaking football, his authenticity is why we’ll always be Las Viudas de Bielsa – the widows of Bielsa.

I imagine Marcelo Bielsa had some thoughts about that second half, as did Daniel Farke. Farke, however, wisely opted to brush away questions about cheating with grace. His true thoughts wouldn’t affect the outcome.

So, Leeds lost at Wembley. Again. Enzo Fernández’s first-half header was enough to make me abandon plans to stay at the Premier Inn next to that stadium and head home. I had no desire to wake up and see that place – a true paean to football’s rapacious commercialist ambitions – so we boarded the tube, got back to the car, and drove north in the darkness. Back to the sanctuary of Yorkshire, far away from all that fakery.

As the M1 traffic jam cleared, the image stayed with me: Robert Sánchez sat on the turf while the touchline buzzed with instructions (in spite of Ethan Ampadu’s best efforts). Eighty-two thousand people watching someone pretend. The referee unable to do a thing. The beautiful game.

Football has been here before, and it has found ways through. The rules will no doubt change, eventually. They always seem to change once complaints reach a critical mass and these things happen often enough on a big enough stage.

In the meantime, Bielsa’s question remains. It’s not: is football dying? It’s: what, exactly, is it living for?