The Great Secret: Marcelo Bielsa and a Plan to Save Football That Nobody Dares Carry Out

There are Twitter accounts devoted to publicising the timings of Premier League press conferences to help Fantasy League managers decide their transfers, and each one I checked for details of when Marcelo Bielsa might speak before the Liverpool game was giving a different answer this morning. This was not helping anyone decide whether or not to captain Raphinha this weekend. Neither, when the press conference took place, was Bielsa’s mini-lecture on the world game’s economic suicide.

“To ignore the preparation and rest that is needed for the spectacle of the players is absurd,” said Bielsa, when asked a second time about the impact of the international ‘break’ over the last two weeks. “To ignore the effect that has on the players, the accumulation of the games and the long hours of flying — that will end up injuring any player, so clearly. There’s no way [i.e. plan] to resolve this by protecting football. They are protecting the commercial part of football, but the game goes unprotected, and football is going to waste in such a way [that] it’s going to become less attractive.”

Of course with a Bielsa press conference (video on LUTV here, Leeds Live transcript here) that was only one part of a much longer and more detailed soliloquy on The State of Football in September 2021. But by summarising, we get neat encapsulations of both the commercial bind football has got itself into, and the solution, that Bielsa recognises is almost unspeakable. “The great secret is that we [should] all earn less.” You’re not supposed to say that out loud, Marcelo!

We’ve heard from Bielsa before about the main problem football has, of which the international break is only an example: there are too many games. “When I worked in the national teams,” he said today, “we would play one game in every international break. Then we started playing two, and now three.” The reason is that more games means more money. Here’s where the catch-22 comes in. Why does football need more money? To pay the players. “Who are they supposed to give what [money] football brings [to], if not to the players?” But it’s the players, and the quality of their playing, being put at risk by playing more games in pursuit of more money to pay them.

If the solution is for everyone to earn less, then, is that same as asking players to be less greedy? Not exactly. Modern footballers and their wages are an interesting branch sticking in the cogs of football’s confused business. It wasn’t the players bringing about the Premier League breakaway in 1992, but satellite broadcasters and ‘big club’ executives, who saw an opportunity to market the sport to richer audiences, so profiting enormously from television advertising and subscriptions at the same time. And their plan worked, leading to huge revenues, but with one vital flaw: their model still depended on footballers, not executives. Footballers and their agents, seeing boardrooms newly awash with money, had a simple task pointing out to clubs that without the players’ services, all that money would disappear, so they’d better start paying the players more of it, or they’d all go play in Italy. And so a self-defeating inter-league arms race blew up, and now leagues frantically compete for the most lucrative broadcasting deals, so that they can give all that revenue and more to the best players, to keep them away from the other leagues and prevent them getting the bigger broadcasting deals.

The result of all this is that while the broadcasting deals go up, club coffers empty faster, while bemused footballers stack up millions they don’t particularly need. That’s becoming interesting in the last few years because these rich young people are showing characters unlike acquisitive middle-aged barons like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, who are so fearful of the world that enriched them that they’re hoarding it all for future spending on the moon. Meanwhile, at 23 years old, Marcus Rashford is still connected to the Withington estates where he grew up, and is personally motivated to use his platform and his money to bring about social change. I’m not sure that, when Rick Parry and David Dein were plotting to break away from the financial restrictions of the Football League at the start of the 1990s, they envisaged a future point when paper-rich clubs would be driving themselves into debt to pay the wages of players like Rashford, who if he maintains his current salary over the next ten years of his playing career will be one of the best resourced anti-racism and anti-poverty campaigners there has ever been.

More power to him for that, I say, but as a footballer, Marcelo Bielsa might point out, he’s currently recovering from shoulder surgery to cure a problem that affected his performances last season and at the Euros. The more elite players earn, the more their employers need them to work by playing, increasing the chances of injuries and lowering the quality of performance. Ultimately, says Bielsa, the quality of football will become so bad that it won’t be worth watching, and that will only increase the amount of football being played, to squeeze interest from the diehards. As well as saving society, then, footballers are needed to save football.

“So the great secret,” says Bielsa, “is that we all [should] earn less, and [then] there [would be] less games, and that [leaves more money to] increase the investment in the grassroots, so that the players are not so expensive [because there are more good ones], and for football to be better … my position is to pause the inflation of football, the cost of the [transfer] fees and how much the players cost [in wages], to play less so that the game can be better, reducing the [ticket] cost to go to the stadiums so there are more spectators, and to invest a lot in the foundations so there can be a lot of good players.”

Key to why all this isn’t happening is Bielsa’s description of such a plan as ‘the great secret’. Everyone working in football knows that everyone working in football — at and near the top, at least — is paid too much money, and that the game would be better in almost every way if they were paid less money. The inflation of football, in Bielsa’s phrase, needs to pause. The problem, though, and what keeps this a secret, is a lack of trust that causes a standoff. Think of the situation at Arsenal when wage deferrals were proposed at the start of the pandemic. The players refused, not because they didn’t want to help, but because they didn’t trust the club’s billionaire owners to use the money saved to help lower paid staff. And true enough, it was Mesut Ozil stepping in with his wallet when, after a deferral was agreed, Arsenal sacked Gunnersaurus anyway. How many elite players, told by club owners like the Glazers, Florentino Pérez or Andrea Agnelli, that if they take pay cuts the money will be invested in grassroots football, cheaper tickets for fans and strengthening the game’s lower levels, will reply by looking those owners in the eyes and telling them, ‘Oh aye, Jimmy Hill chinny reckon.’

So on we go, with everything making football worse and nobody trusting anybody enough to make it better, and Marcelo Bielsa saying the secret things out loud and staying as personally enigmatic as ever. He’s handsomely paid by football himself, but he did walk the talk by paying more than his first season’s wages at Leeds to build a youth football facility at Newell’s Old Boys. At Leeds, his form of redistribution has been to enforce training ground improvements as part of his annual contract negotiations that we can hope will pay for themselves in the far-away future after he’s gone. Leeds’ bankers might shudder at the cost of these requests from their already enormously expensive head coach, but perhaps he has an argument about how much more they’d have to pay him if they didn’t invest in Thorp Arch.

Bielsa gave the impression today that, with more time, he could explain every deterioration of modern football in detail — it isn’t only too many games. He gave passing mention to VAR’s negation of creativity, by creating an atmosphere of ‘intolerance to errors’ that has players second guessing themselves. He touched on the Super League promoters like Perez and their insistence that “the young generations, they only want to see the highlights, so that’s to say they only want three-minute, five-minute, ten-minute games,” which Bielsa says is not caused by demands from global supporters, but is, “exactly the consequence of the way football is being handled” by such as Perez. That point should be food for thought for the global football content creators at Socios, who seem to think their crypto-tokens are doing the world’s fans a favour by letting them share the passion, or whatever, of putting pictures on the side of a team bus. It’s an insult to future football fans to think Socios’ shitty polls are somehow what ‘foreign’ fans want, because they’re so different to ‘native’ fans? Or that kids want ten minute matches and can’t handle the whole game. The whole game is the important thing that has made generation after generation in country after country fall in love with it. But, well, the whole game is getting worse.

“There are other paths,” says Bielsa. “To play less, to invest in the grassroots, to facilitate the entry of spectators with cheaper tickets. If you pay attention, a lot of these things German football is putting into practice. Apart from the tradition like Saturdays at 3pm [being a TV blackout in England] — [tradition] sometimes has a component of wisdom that is very big, and the traditions are protected by those who put them there. That’s why it’s so important to keep the essence of football from every country and every club.”

And why it doesn’t really matter that thousands of Fantasy League managers are no surer now about whether Raphinha will play on Sunday. ◉