Leeds United, 2021/22: What went wrong?

We can argue that Leeds United’s 2021/22 season went according to plan if we focus on outcomes rather than processes, and if we consider these were the club’s objectives: start 2022/23 in the Premier League, with a coach who is not Marcelo Bielsa.

The first of those aims was always publicly stated and obvious for any team. The second came up in Angus Kinnear’s programme notes on 10th March, for the game with Aston Villa that was Elland Road’s first after Bielsa was sacked. About hiring Jesse Marsch, Kinnear wrote:

Knowing the requirement to evolve from Marcelo at the end of the season meant the process to identify and secure a successor was on-going and well advanced

He described the managerial change not as a reactive firing-and-hiring, but as ‘the acceleration of the coaching transition’. In other words, Leeds were always getting rid of Bielsa at the end of this season, whatever happened. Results and circumstances just meant they were doing it sooner. Kinnear was trying to present this as the action of a forward thinking board with a plan for the future. It feels more like the story of a board whose mind had wandered away from the huge problems it faced in the here and now.

It isn’t clear when it became the club’s ‘requirement to evolve from Marcelo at the end of the season’, but some clues help explain why the season became such a disaster. Bielsa was sacked on 27th February. By Kinnear’s timeline, the ‘process was well advanced’ for finding a replacement. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to presume that in January, when the club was bidding to buy Brenden Aaronson, formerly coached by Jesse Marsch at Red Bull Salzburg, and was reported to be interested in Takumi Minamino, also formerly coached by Jesse Marsch at Red Bull Salzburg, the board had already decided that at the end of the season the position of coach would ‘transition’ from Marcelo Bielsa to Jesse Marsch.

As a result, the Leeds board didn’t solve any of the problems the club actually had this season, when it had the chance to in January, because they were still assuming Bielsa would keep Leeds up despite his headaches being compounded by long term injuries to Liam Cooper, Kalvin Phillips and Pat Bamford, all incurred against Brentford on 5th December. Bielsa had worked wonders with what was still Heckingbottom’s core, so why couldn’t he just keep doing that? The board were trying to buy players for Marsch to use next season, with the fringe benefit that Leeds could use them now, when what Bielsa needed were reinforcements to use in his team this season.

The stories coming from inside the club put this differently. The board offered players to Bielsa. He didn’t want them. He was ‘stubborn’ about his requirements. But why shouldn’t he be particular about only signing players he could actually use? Was he being offered players that would fit his football, or Jesse Marsch’s? It was always difficult to understand exactly where Aaronson would fit in a Bielsa line-up — he usually plays as one of Red Bull’s ‘two tens’ in their narrow 4-2-2-2. Bielsa seemed willing to take him and try. He always said he was open to bringing in new players, but they had to be better than what he already had; but that meant they would have to play the same positions, for a start. Was a Kalvin Phillips back-up ever truly on the cards, knowing that a few months down the line, Jesse Marsch would be playing a double-pivot there instead? Were the other options just too much Marsch, too little Bielsa, so he was not frustrating the board’s plans for the second half of this season, but the first part of next?

The way club sources tell this story doesn’t sound great for the board anyway, even if Bielsa really was just being the obstinate old weirdo they’ve been trying to portray. If the club was adamant it wanted these players, and the head coach was refusing, they should have sacked the coach and bought the players. Their big idea instead was to wait until it was too late to sign anyone, sack him then, and piss and moan about him off the record. I’m not sure that counts as a sound season-saving strategy for taking strong ownership of the situation, even if it did work out on the final day.

It was club sources, too, who were whispering as far back as last summer that this season would be Bielsa’s last. Bielsa wasn’t saying this, but a lot of people were saying it. That, at least, seems now to have been accurate gossip. If the ‘requirement to evolve’ was club policy last summer, then, what does it say about that transfer window? The midfielder Leeds targeted was Conor Gallagher, but he was only ever available on a single season loan with no chance to buy. Lewis O’Brien was worth a bid, but as Huddersfield’s asking price went up, United’s interest went down. Perhaps, like Gallagher, they didn’t see a role for him beyond one season, because Bielsa wouldn’t be here to use him.

As for players who did arrive, fans aren’t convinced about Dan James, but for his high pressing and ability to play centrally as attack’s first line of defence, he looks an ideal Marsch player. He even kept his place in the new coach’s pecking order over the less energetic Joffy Gelhardt, until he got himself suspended. James was Victor Orta’s white whale ever since he smashed a phone up and burst into tears over the collapse of his transfer from Swansea. Junior Firpo? That narrow attack Marsch likes relies on attacking full-backs to supply what width there is, and storming forward for Marsch is when Firpo has looked at his best. Under Bielsa, he struggled.

It’s well documented that Marsch and Orta ‘got to know each other’ during the coronavirus lockdown. Last summer, Marsch was graduating from Red Bull Salzburg to RB Leipzig, but only on a two-year contract, with single seasons not unusual in the German Bundesliga. Were he and Leeds planning for a season with Leipzig in the Champions League as a warm up to jumping into a Premier League club already being prepared for him? Bizarrely, being relieved of his duties at the start of December after a poor stint didn’t make anyone think twice about Marsch’s suitability for Leeds.

We might need to go even further back to find the actual decision over Bielsa’s long term future. I discounted the rumours last summer because it seemed insane to me that the club would look at all Bielsa achieved in the first season back in the Premier League and decide it wanted rid of him. But it had been an open question, in summer 2020, whether Bielsa would be given the chance to coach Leeds in the Premier League at all, or thanked for promotion and let go. The club embarked on its two-season project for staying in the Premier League, doing two seasons’ spending in one summer, and Bielsa was kept. But now, thinking again about the two year plan for survival and Kinnear’s comments about summer 2022 coming with a ‘requirement to evolve’, I wonder if August 2020, the pinnacle of the last twenty years of Leeds United’s history, with the club on a high from promotion and murals being painted in Bielsa’s honour across the city, was the moment the board decided two more years of Bielsa were going to be enough, no matter what.

That would mean Bielsa never stood a chance of capitalising on what he’d built at Leeds. Before promotion, Andrea Radrizzani said that once in the Premier League he would ‘start to play’; the pandemic seemed to hold him back, and perhaps that’s why Bielsa was kept for the low-budget survival job. Bielsa, while always stressing the club had done all it could in the transfer market, said that to improve on the players he had would need signings for fees of £30-40m. Leeds’ two-year plan meant that wouldn’t be an option before summer 2022. It also meant Bielsa wouldn’t be coaching them. Leeds have not been shy about their ambitions beyond 2022, for loosening the purse strings to challenge for Europe, for expanding the stadium. What they never said out loud, though, was that Bielsa, who gave them the chance to do those things at all, was never going to benefit from them.

Had Leeds actually progressed and qualified for Europe in 2021/22, the reins were still going to Jesse Marsch or someone like him next year. Perhaps we haven’t seen the best of Jesse Marsch’s football in his time in charge so far, but whatever it becomes, remember that the board decided this was the better long-term plan than sticking long-term with Bielsa and giving him a rebuilt, more expensive squad to work with. An economic rule of football is that more expensive players build a better team; at Leeds, Bielsa was never allowed further into the project than tinkering around a Heckingbottom core. His results with those players were wonderful. We have Pep Guardiola’s testimony for what Bielsa could create with a bigger budget.

The relationship between Bielsa and the board has never seemed warm. In the first season of Take Us Home, Radrizzani fumes about Bielsa’s autonomous reaction to Spygate. Looking at the way the goodwill surrounding the club was so thoroughly destroyed by Bielsa’s sacking, something the club seemed ill-prepared for, I wonder if they actually learned anything from him. Kinnear’s diatribes in the programme about the dangers of funding grass roots football, for example, were totally at odds with things his head coach had said about money destroying the sport. Did they not learn from Bielsa, because they never really understood him? And if they didn’t understand him, did they know how to support him properly?

Perhaps I’m reading too much into an idle anecdote, but here goes. After ‘parting company’, Kinnear shared what he thought was a quirky tale about Bielsa in the same programme notes. Whenever they’d met that season, Kinnear said, Bielsa was ‘never failing to remind me — irrespective of the topic we were discussing — that I had, in his opinion, reneged on a promise to build him a putting green’. It was an intriguing detail, part of a theme where Kinnear plays the sensible brake on the crazy guy’s mad ideas, usually in the form of pyrrhic victories like paying the coach millions but drawing the line at a few grand for golf. After all the alterations at the training ground, and the gym Bielsa paid to build for the staff in return, why quibble over a putting green?

Bielsa’s first acts, in summer 2018, included building a games room and relaxation area at the training ground to improve the team culture. Leeds made a lot of the wood-burning stove he put in, for the players to keep lit. But Bielsa’s word held more weight back then, somehow, before he had proved himself. In 2018 a new wood fire was an unquestioned part of the magic Bielsa was creating to get Leeds out of the Championship. And now? Again, in Kinnear’s first post-Bielsa programme notes, he talks about how ‘There were frequent reminders of the idiosyncrasies that may have made his tenure at other clubs so short’, as if the crazy old fool was lucky they hadn’t sacked him earlier. By summer 2021 he was going in a year anyway, so why bother indulging him with putting greens anymore?

Perhaps because there is a difference between effective forward planning, and losing interest in the plan you’re working on because next season looks sexier. Jesse Marsch talks a lot about alignment — how everyone at a football club has to believe in the same things, be working towards the same goals. He’s right. I bet the moment Leeds United’s fortunes starting turning for the worse was the moment when the board stopped thinking about how good they had it with Bielsa, and started thinking about how good they could have it without him, by getting on with their next big brilliant idea. As Lucy Ward put it on the Guardian Football Weekly podcast, “I think the powers that be just got pissed on how well they did last year.”

Of course, the quality of football and quantity of defeats Bielsa oversaw this season falls on him, as he constantly reminded the press. I’ve never seen a coach stop more of the buck, or take more on his shoulders to protect a board. Perhaps he didn’t realise, to his cost, that the one-year contract they’d signed with him was going to be his last. He didn’t look, leaving Thorp Arch in tears, ready to leave, in February, this summer, or ever.

But what 2021/22 proved about Bielsa was that he’s human. With the tools he had, he couldn’t keep making summer 2018 happen forever, and the tools he was being offered, by the end, were better suited to someone else’s work. While some of us hoped and prayed Bielsa would do the trick one more time, like hoping a trapeze artist will recover their balancing knack, we were only fans with our wishes and faith. To the people who could have helped him, I fear, he’d become a weird grumpy messiah, cantankerous and demanding but somehow always making more wine for them, no matter how much water they gave him. Rather than offer him a bottle in return, they just got pissed. ⬢