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The recently released documentary about P Diddy brought back to the surface the history of America’s east vs west coast rapper beef, a silly cold war between men who perform poetry before a crowd.
War raged in the Balkans, but Tupac and Biggie Smalls had a public feud that could have been resolved over a landline. More than thirty years have passed but little has changed other than the fame levels of our latest celebrity clash: Jesse Marsch and Sam Allardyce.
Marsch recently responded to comments made by Allardyce about the state of Leeds’ fitness when he arrived in May 2023. The thin-skinned former Leeds manager — Marsch, to be clear — posted a graph detailing Leeds’ physical stats in the twenty games he managed in 2022/23 before being sacked after two wins in seventeen games:
Really?? https://t.co/mAQ5Rvj34Y pic.twitter.com/Zz65DZm3YE
— Jesse Marsch (@jessemarsch) February 23, 2026
Like all good modern feuds, it began on a podcast, Allardyce’s aptly named No Tippy Tappy Football show, to be exact. He was speaking to our beloved Eddie Gray about facing Marcelo Bielsa and later taking over at Leeds. “Bielsa had the top physical stats in the Premier League, so Leeds United were number one,” Allardyce said. “When I got to Leeds, I think, ‘At least they’re fit.’ The two managers after Bielsa (Marsch and Javi Gracia) allowed the physical stats to drop into the Premier League as the bottom three.”
One might suggest there were bigger issues than fitness to resolve in a team that had spent a year undoing the hard work Bielsa put in to make them much greater than the sum of their parts. And there’s also the issue of confidence that had evaporated by the time Allardyce arrived with four games remaining. Leeds capitulated after half-time against Crystal Palace at Elland Road, losing 5-1 despite taking the lead, and were torn apart by Liverpool a week later. They blew a massive opportunity to beat Leicester and then went to Bournemouth and lost so badly that stories emerged suggesting Gracia was crying after the game, clearly at the end of his tether after only two months in the job.
But Allardyce had a point. Leeds looked busted after seventy minutes each week in 2022/23, Marsch’s first and only campaign with a pre-season under his belt. The decline in fitness continued under Gracia, culminating in United looking like a spent force by the time Allardyce rolled into town with a distinct lack of vision and a plan that hadn’t worked in five years.
The stats Marsch presented paint a pretty picture, much like the ‘underlying numbers’ he loved to quote when trying to explain why Leeds losing matches was actually fine. These stats stated Leeds had covered the most distance, had the most sprints and high speed runs, and ranked second for distance sprinted in the Premier League before Marsch was sacked.
Some of these stats aren’t publicly available but the Premier League published a piece about distance covered during the 2022 World Cup winter break. That had Leeds 13th in the total distance covered metric, so unless Jesse was measuring the players from the moment they stepped on the team bus, then I’ve some doubts about where his numbers came from.
Ranking high on the stats mentioned doesn’t necessarily equate to being a fit and proper football team. It can often mean you’re running a lot more than you need to because your team can’t keep possession, or won’t. It may also mean your side is tactically inept and you cover more distance to fill gaps in your defence. Say for example your team has a fatal flaw of leaving acres of space at the back post, then your players may rank higher in running metrics having to plug those holes.
These numbers also only bear positive meaning if you’re able to keep performing well late in games and not concede goals. For example, it’s no use being Linford Christie if you blow a 2-0 lead at Southampton in the final twenty minutes, or throw away points at Brighton and Crystal Palace. Perhaps your team might throw the lead away three times away to Spurs and actually end up losing 4-3 late on.
Marsch had a full pre-season and then another seven-week break with most of his first team squad as the World Cup played out in Qatar, yet Leeds only got worse and looked even more blunt. Victor Orta gave him all the Red Bull toys he could possibly need.
His Twitter riposte to Allardyce reeks of Giuseppe Bellusci ‘proving’ to Leeds fans that he was a warrior by posting his own spreadsheet of stats:
— Giuseppe Bellusci (@peppe_ele) May 4, 2016
You’re never winning the battle with Microsoft Excel and, even worse, it’ll prompt some eejit to write a blog about you.
The only way to settle this now is to have Allardyce and Marsch sit down on Yorkshire Television like a really shit Don Revie versus Brian Clough. Perhaps Calendar’s Chris Dawkes can sit between them as though they’re two boxers who could explode at any minute. Marsch’s preppy presentation rubbing up against Allardyce’s old school English distrust of anything that doesn’t predate 1992, it would be a battle for the ages.
I might take a less partisan view of Marsch’s claims about his team’s fitness more seriously if he hadn’t taken to the airwaves shortly after replacing Bielsa at Leeds, just so he could trash his predecessor’s methods. “The injury issue, for me, had a lot to do with the training methodology,” he said. “These players were over-trained and it led to them being physically, mentally, emotionally and psychologically in a difficult place to recover from week to week, game to game.” A reminder that Marsch then used his first game in charge away at Leicester to leave a visibly injured Tyler Roberts on the pitch even though he couldn’t move.
There’s no doubt that the squad didn’t have it in them to go again under Bielsa in 2021/22, not least because he repeatedly said they couldn’t towards the end of the previous season and asked the board to replace the squad or find a new manager, of which they did neither. But it’s disingenuous and disrespectful for Marsch to claim that he was some sort of saviour when, in fact, Leeds stayed up that season purely because they had a future Ballon d’Or nominee playing on the wing. And at right wing-back, while taking long throws. But Jesse disagrees:
Except we kept the team up. 🤔 https://t.co/GPNp2RnZnC
— Jesse Marsch (@jessemarsch) February 23, 2026
Come on, man. Have some dignity. It was all going to pot at Molineux in Marsch’s fourth game until Raul Jimenez stupidly got himself sent off and Leeds got back into the game. That should have been Marsch’s third defeat, but his players dug out a massive late win through Luke Ayling. Then they beat a relegated Watford side either side of throwing away winnable games against Southampton and Palace.
It took a moment of magic from Joe Gelhardt, Tyrone Mings blocking a certain Burnley goal for Aston Villa and Sergi Canos inexplicably getting himself sent off on the final day of the season for Leeds to stay up against nine man Brentford. This was no masterplan.
Jesse Marsch and Sam Allardyce are a part of Leeds United’s past, a memory we’d like to forget. So if they could both move on with their lives and stop pretending they weren’t both ineffective for different reasons, that’d be great. And please, no more spreadsheets.
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