Marcelo Bielsa, constrained football, and creativity in the gaps

Marcelo Bielsa is not beyond criticism but he acts with such unusual intention that holding him to normal standards seems a futile form of critique. When Bielsa succeeds, it’s by doing things other people would not. So when he does things that don’t seem obvious, it’s a trap to assume he must be wrong, and more interesting to wonder why he’s doing those things differently.

Maybe I just don’t have the ego for modern transfer discourse. In January 2022 it has felt alienating to be calm among so much tantrum. From my place on the sidelines, with no power to influence Leeds United’s transfers no matter how many times a day I might press send on a tweet, I feel like I have too great an opportunity to enjoy watching and learning from Bielsa’s attempts to get out of this season’s problems to prefer burying that vista beneath my own opinions. I didn’t have this opportunity when Steve Evans was here, for example, so I don’t want to squander a moment. I know what I think already but I don’t really care about my own opinions. I am very, very into having my ideas challenged, and discovering what Bielsa might do, and thinking about why it isn’t what I might.

Bielsa is leading Leeds United through this winter like he’s James Bond trapped in a villain’s lair. The pleasure of a good movie escape plot comes from tension, even if you know that for the good of the franchise your hero will get out of danger and into the sequels. What you can’t work out, an hour into the film, is how, and having Bond’s ingenuity revealed over the next hour is pure pleasure. If someone gives you the answers before you sit down with your popcorn we say the movie is spoiled, and yet that’s exactly what a lot of fans have wanted from the January window, new players who would somehow guarantee Premier League safety and make the second half of the season a meaningless parade. If the counter argument is that too much money is at stake to risk enjoying discovering the outcomes of the next seventeen games, then let’s slash the prize money and get back to enjoying football. Something is wrong if we fear the results too much to enjoy watching the games.

Films are an example of how to enjoy Bielsa, the hero spy dropping his gun out of reach, trying to whittle a replacement pea-shooter on the fly. Bond would do that by accident, but it’s a deliberate ploy by the scriptwriters, and it’s more accurate to put Bielsa in the writers’ room than on the big screen. The movie is no fun if the solutions look too easy, and football is the same, as Manchester City fans have found out to the cost of their joy. They should have been refunded for the letdown of their 6-0 win over Watford in the 2019 FA Cup final.

Constraints are a vital factor of plot. What does the hero want, and what don’t they have that would help them get it? They must either go questing for what they lack, or discover the resources within themselves. ‘The nobility of the resources used’ has been a stock phrase of Bielsa’s, and his detractors’, for twenty years, and we’ve heard variations of it throughout this season’s injury crises. Will Bielsa turn to the transfer market for help? Maybe, if it’ll improve the squad, but probably not. He’s always been confident that he can find what he needs in the resources he has.

I wonder if constraints help him. Bielsa once infamously said that if he had a team of robots he would win every game. I think if you offered him a team of robots he would refuse them. To wake up every day and have every problem solved is to have retired. Bielsa always believes he’ll win. He said in the Championship that he would go to bed and, before sleeping, start dreaming that his Leeds team was beating Liverpool. The wonder of that dream is important. Life begins at 3pm when we start discovering if Leeds can beat the other team. Win lose or draw, that life ends at 5pm, and why rush to oblivion?

Constraints can be creative. Making things difficult can generate solutions. Samuel Beckett, the Irish author, spent years writing in French because English was too familiar to him, too easy to use; French, with its smaller dictionary, forced his attention onto words rather than style, because he had to work much harder with the limited words available to make them communicate what he meant. Bielsa’s choice not to add to his squad — and it is a choice, not a failure — causes a similar squeeze for every ounce of nobility in his resources. Leeds United’s players, like a small dictionary trying to express big ideas, have to work hard, be creative, keep their intensity. It feels counter intuitive to the point of absurdity to suggest adding players could have weakened Leeds in January, but imagine the difference between this tightknit squad feeling the invigorating faith of its coach being renewed, and the already flabby groups at other clubs expanding to fit new guys, the old guys knowing they’re scrapheaped for the rest of the season. Everyone involved can go slack, right when they need to tighten.

There is another example in French, from author Georges Perec, who went further than Beckett by disregarding a great swathe of the already small French lexicon, writing his 1969 novel La Disparition (A Void) without using any words containing the letter ‘e’. Imagine taking a small squad of players then injuring half of them. Perec was associated with a group of writers, known as Oulipo, who believed this sort of ‘constrained writing’ could inspire new ideas. It’s a common concept in some circles, when you can’t think of an idea, to take away some easy options and force yourself to work harder, and the best example in football is the last three years of Stuart Dallas’ career. Leeds have got much more out of Dallas by asking more of him. Likewise, Dan James playing at no.9. It would be easier to have another striker available to solve the problem of lacking Pat Bamford, and James’ name didn’t look right on the teamsheet at first. Then we saw him playing the role — pressing hard, tackling defenders and goalkeepers, terrier energy in the attacking third — and understood Bielsa had found an unexpected solution from within his constrained resources. It’s not particularly elegant or even effective, but neither is reading a novel without an ‘e’ in it. There’s a reason why most books still use the letter. But a shelf of Dan Brown’s novels suggests a lot of those books with ‘e’s in them weren’t worth writing, let alone reading.

Perec might not be the best analogue for Bielsa. He wasn’t the first to write a novel without an ‘e’ in it. One before him, in 1939, was an American, Ernest Vincent Wright, whose novel Gadsby has been reprinted with the subtitle, ‘50,000 Word Novel Without the Letter “E”‘. Perec’s book contains sideways nods at this precursor, but he was wary of Wright’s work. He was taking a risk, Perec said, of ending up “with nothing [but] a Gadsby.” Wright’s book had circulated as an unpublished manuscript during the 1930s, attracting nothing more than jokes in newspaper columns. Eventually he self-published it, but a warehouse stocking the finished book burned down and destroyed them. Wright died that year, unrecognised, but his work was handed around among enthusiastic linguists until a copy was given to Perec. Perec emulated Wright’s ideas, while avoiding his pitfalls and his fate; his Wikipedia page has a section devoted to honours, just about where Wright’s page describes Gadsby’s ‘scarcity and oddness’. It’s like Ernest Vincent Wright is Bielsa, Georges Perec is Pep Guardiola. This was always part of the risk when Leeds decided to hire the teacher and not a disciple. We have the pure original, others got his pupils’ refinements.

One way of assessing Leeds United’s transfer window of January 2022, then, is to see the deliberate lack of players as a means of generating creative solutions that could — if we let them — intrigue and entertain us this season more than any other attempt at the art of football in the 2021/22 Premier League season. It might seem a stretch but I’m glad when the huge gap between my understanding of football and Marcelo Bielsa’s forces me to think so hard to bridge it that I end up, well, in experimental French literature. The gaps are where interesting things can happen. Perec’s novel is an example of a lipogram — ‘lipo’ meaning to leave something out. The lack of something — an ‘e’ — creates something else, more interesting than a complete picture, because it makes us wonder why something is missing. In French, ‘e’ sounds like ‘eux’, meaning ‘them’, so as well as missing ‘e’, the book is missing ‘they’ — Perec’s parents, killed in the Second World War, his mother at Auschwitz. Perhaps this is why Perec succeeded where Wright failed, as his efforts were more sincere than the zany solo effort of Gadsby, and the macho posturing affecting others in the Oulipo group (women weren’t allowed to join for the first fifteen years). Maybe Perec proves that principles and constraints are not incompatible with prizes, in literature at least. That you can make something beautiful by leaving something out. ⬢