Football after Bielsa
On how Bielsa leaving Leeds made me doubt the whole concept of sporting fandom (at least for a little while).
It’s not been the best few months in my supporting life. My cricket team had been embroiled in a racism scandal. My NFL team has been embroiled in a racism scandal, as well as allegedly offering to pay their coach to lose on purpose. And a couple of weeks ago, the team I care about most sacked the football manager I have loved more than any other. From the title of this article, you’ll know who that is.
The Bielsa sacking is, morally at least, clearly the least bad of the three. Sacking a manager, even a hugely popular one, doesn’t compare with institutional racism or actively trying to lose your team games, but it had the most effect on me. It almost felt like a bereavement (and I have suffered my fair share, so I don’t say that lightly). But why? Why did it matter so much?
Football has never been only about winning for me. For some fans, maybe most, all that matters is that their team wins games. It’s self-evident to them that victories and trophies are the most important thing. Look at the Chelsea fans, gleeful for the last twenty years at the wealth and success bought by a Russian oligarch, moral considerations never a factor. Going so far as singing his name over a tribute to those suffering in the Ukraine, ignoring anything he may ever have done outside football. Look at the Newcastle fans, not only not caring that their club had been taken over by a regime responsible for untold human rights abuses, but actively applauding it.
This is not a slight on the fans of teams in particular, although the toadying of the Newcastle fans has seemed particularly egregious. I have to admit that if my team were taken over by ethicallly dubious billionaires (is there any other kind?), many of the fans would feel exactly the same. But not all, and not me. How we do things matters, and has mattered more to me the older I get.
Since I started supporting Leeds I’ve never stopped, but there have been times when winning games didn’t matter to me all that much. Look at the Ken Bates era. Now Ken Bates is not, to my knowledge, a serial human rights abuser, but I strongly suspect he would be if he got the chance, given some of his public pronouncements. During much of his reign, It was more important to me to get him out of our club than to win matches.
Similar was true with managers. I couldn’t enjoy victories as much when the obnoxious likes of Dennis Wise, Neil Warnock or Steve Evans were in charge. I enjoyed them all the more when it was a manager I liked, or at least felt neutral about, which was usually the best it got. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t care about winning at all. I was still delighted when we got promoted from League One, even with Bates in charge, same with our famous FA cup victory at Old Trafford. I was never quite sure whether I preferred mediocre results with good people in charge, or good results with mediocre people. As it turned out, it was usually mediocre results with terrible people, the worst of all worlds.
Then, along came Bielsa, and everything changed. The football was more exciting than I had ever known, a different sport from that we had seen under the likes of Warnock. More important though, Bielsa was a good man, who seemed to genuinely love the people of Leeds and the club. There were a thousand tiny acts of kindness to fans, which he did his best to keep secret, often without success in this social media age. There was the way he tried to improve every aspect of the club, occasionally turning up to coach youth teams, transforming the training ground, even changing the positions of plug sockets.
Unlike most managers he didn’t demand the club spend a whole load of money on new players when he arrived, preferring to make the best of what he had rather than buying something new (a rare sentiment in life, let alone football), transforming players of barely Championship quality into Premier League players, internationals (most notably Kalvin Phillips). He railed against both the quantity of games in football, and often remarked that the solution was to play fewer games and the players and managers should earn less money. It’s hard to imagine say, Christiano Ronaldo or Frank Lampard saying that.
For three glorious years, we had both great football, and a great manager. We nearly got promoted, then finally did after 16 years, then finished in the top half of the Premier League in our first season back. More importantly, the people of Leeds fell in love with football again, and with Marcelo. But this season, football struck back. The injury list was severe, including many of our most important players, and Bielsa’s preference for a small squad was severely tested. The style of play wasn’t working as well or as often, culminating in a February where a record number of goals were conceded and a single point gained. The board, suddenly fearful of relegation, sacked him.
I though, from a football perspective, it was the wrong call. It is very hard for a new manager to institute a new style of play in a short space of time, more so when Bielsa’s tactics are so unusual. It was only a month earlier that Leeds had won 3–2 at Europe chasing West Ham, Bielsa’s football at its’ best. I thought it more likely that Bielsa could find that success again, than a new manager could succeed with Bielsa’s team. No manager is infallible though, and I could kind of the see the footballing case for the sacking, even if I didn’t agree.
From a moral perspective though, it seemed unforgivable. The man who had done more for Leeds than anyone in the last 30 years deserved the chance to put it right, and to leave on his own terms. I think most fans thought his time might be coming to end when his contract ended in the summer, but even those who wanted to that happen (or most of them at least), didn’t actually want him sacked.
It may be that Bielsa, as a man, and as a manager, isn’t ultimately suited to modern football. But if that is the case, it’s modern football that is wrong, not him. I have been losing interest in football in a wider sense for a long time, as it has become increasingly dominated by a small number of super-wealthy clubs with dubious owners. I stopped paying much attention to Premier League and Champions League results when Leeds were not in those competitions, not helped by the fact that virtually no games were now on terrestrial TV (in the past I might at least watch the odd Champions League game on a weekday evening). When Leeds did come up, even amid the joy of our first season, it became apparent that the best we could hope for was to finish in the top half, maybe qualify for the Europa League, a competition no ‘big’ team cared about.
There was always the dream of doing a Leicester, somehow winning the league, but in my heart I knew that was a freak occurence, a once in lifetime season where somehow none of the mega-rich teams got more than 70 points, where 90 is more the norm. I haVe always had a love for the underdog in sports (one my first football memories was of Wimbledon beating the mighty Liverpool in the 1988 FA Cup final), but those underdog stories became increasingly hard to find. The whole Super League farrago rammed home the divide between the haves and the have nots.
What if Leeds had spent 16 years trying to get back to the Premier League and it turned out to be rubbish? At least with Bielsa in charge it was (usually) entertaining, and we felt good about our team, our club, and our city. With him gone, our best case scenario may be scrabbling around in mid-table, a fully owned subsiduary of the San Francisco 49ers with a succesion of mediocre managers. I have often said in recent times that I didn’t love football, I loved Leeds United, and I worried it was mainly Bielsa keeping alive my love for even them.
It is often said that no one man is bigger than the club, and while that is true, it’s hard to overstate what Bielsa meant to Leeds. You have to be a Leeds fan (or perhaps a fan of Newell’s Old Boys, Chile or Athletic Bilbao) to truly understand. If you listen to the messages to Bielsa from Leeds fans on this podcast though, you’ll get a sense of how we feel.
Now he’s gone, and a new manager is in charge. We’ve played four games, lost two and won two. The immediate threat of relegation has lessened. I’ve found it hard to care though. On Friday night I even completely forgot that Leeds were playing until the game was over. Sport feels less important than it has done at almost any time in my life.So what next for my sporting fandom? If I can’t follow Yorkshire cricket, no big deal, I didn’t follow them that closely anyway. If I decide to stop following the Miami Dolphins, who cares, I have no real connection to them anyway. Could I stop following Leeds United though? Stop being a fan altogether?
There is another way to enjoy sports, one I was reminded of during one of Bielsa’s last games, a 3 – 3 draw at Aston Villa. Philippe Coutinho played a pass so good, that I could help but internally gasp with delight at witnessing such a moment of skill, even though it led to a goal against my team. Is it possible to get back to enjoying football the way I did as a child, for those moments of unbelievable skill, the excitement of the game, not caring too much who wins? Ignoring the owners, the money, the politics, taking sports as an escape from life? Surely that is one of the things that sports should be all about.
Ultimately though, I doubt I can quit Leeds United. Too much of my history, my city, my family is tied up with them. I will move on from Bielsa, even if a bit more slowly than others. I’ll drift back to being a Leeds fan, no matter who manages or owns us. Back in our near bankruptcy days I sometimes wished we had gone bust and started again as a fan-owned phoenix team, controlling our own destinies, no terrible owners in sight. We would never have had the Bielsa years though, and I’m not sure I would swap them for anything. I have thought about taking an interest in my local non-league team, or even another fan-owned team, but my heart wouldn’t really be in it.
Bielsa himself has said that football is all about is the sense of belonging, the community that comes with being a fan, and that fans are the only part of a club that can never be replaced. And despite everything, a fan is what I am, what I remain, even if with Bielsa gone I’m not sure being a fan will ever be quite the same again.
