Even an iconic, iconoclastic coach and thinker like Marcelo Bielsa has been influenced by
a number of other coaches and schools of thought.
Bielsa’s style is extremely intense, physically and tactically. Complicated and
systematic approaches are worked out based on
the opposition’s structure, learned, and practiced in minute detail.
Defence is based on a swarming, but managed, press; attack is based on verticality, with
a possession-based, positional system.
One feeds the other, with counter-pressing also a feature of Bielsa’s approach. Bielsa
has explained his philosophy using four terms:
“concentración permanente, movilidad, rotación y repenitización”.
In English, these are ‘permanent concentration or focus’, ‘movement’, and ‘rotation’;
the fourth term means something like improvisation,
but actually comes, according to Jonathan Wilson, from sight-reading music without practising
it first. This philosophy has its roots in Argentina’s
footballing history, and two of its towering, and
opposing figures. Carlos Bilardo, who won the 1986 World Cup
as coach of Argentina, was born from the pragmatic school of Argentinian football.
Influenced by Victorio Spinetto and subsequently Osvaldo Zubeldiá, who managed him to three
consecutive Copa Libertadores wins as a player with Estudiantes, Bilardo was a tactically
astute, but physically fearsome player. Zubeldiá wanted to win, at any cost, preaching
a doctrine of relentless effort, meticulous preparation, and, if needed, cynicism or even
violence. Bilardo was his most successful and
determined pupil and learned, and coached, that along with hard work and self-sacrifice
to the team, the keys to success were preparation
and analysis of the opposition. This resulted in training based on repetitive drilling of
match specific situational responses. His tactical
approach, seen for example in Argentina’s successful World Cup side of 1986, was about
balance, pragmatism. There, the attacking talents of Maradona, Jorge Valdano, and
Jorge Burruchaga were unleashed, but only because the remaining seven outfield players
were destroyers – a team of two units, made in the first instance of a 3-5-2 seen at the
highest level. This coaching approach - demanding effort,
drilling specific scenarios over and over, the
predication on meticulous opposition research - had a huge influence on Bielsa.
Bilardo’s mentality also influenced Bielsa. The uncompromising approach, the
idiosyncrasies that, while not celebrated, demand acceptance. And, perhaps more than
anything, the need to win. As Bilardo once said, “You have to think about being first.
Because second is no good, being second is a failure. For me it’s good that if you
lose you hould feel bad; if you want you can express
it by crying, shutting yourself away, feeling bad.
The antithesis to Bilardo was César Luis Menotti, a raffish, chain-smoking manager
nicknamed El Flaco, the skinny one. Menotti, who also won the World Cup with Argentina
in 1978, could not abide the cynicism and brutality, not to say the defensiveness and
overly tactical approach, of Bilardo.
Menotti loved attacking football, his title-winning Huracán side of 1973 was full of
invention, trickery, and attacking intent. He wanted his teams to dazzle and inspire:
“I maintain that a team is above all an idea, and more than an idea it is a commitment,
and more than a commitment it is the clear convictions
that a coach must transmit to his players to defend that idea.”
Bielsa certainly inherited this love of attacking football and, more subtly, the sense that
Menotti had that playing football was a privilege and that footballers had a duty to inspire
as well as entertain – there are echoes of
this sense of responsibility in Bielsa making his Leeds
players pick-up litter. Menotti, who was ironically replaced by Bilardo
as the coach of Argentina, played with a 4-3-3 that drew inspiration from the Dutch
national side of 1974, a whirl of fluid, off-theball movement and intricate passing that required
huge technical ability and an intuitive understanding of space and the position of
teammates. This 4-3-3 was the first system used
by Bielsa at Newel’s, but the importance of attacking and movement, and of football
itself to fans and players alike, was Menotti’s more concrete influence on Bielsa.
The synthesis of the two influences, of Bilardo and Menotti, is described by Wilson in his
superb book Angels with Dirty Faces as ‘The Third Way.’
Bielsa himself said, “I spent 16 years of my life listening to them: eight to Menotti,
a coach who prioritises inspiration, and eight to
Bilardo, a coach who prioritises functionality. I tried
to take the best from each.” In Argentinian football, influence always
looms large and is there to be acknowledged and
built upon. There are two further, clear influences on
Bielsa that are worth noting. Total Football, the
philosophy developed by Rinus Michels and his greatest pupil Johan Cruyff, beat Argentina
at the World Cup in 1974 and was, as Wilson notes, a clear influence on Argentinian football
thereafter, especially Menotti. Bielsa’s insistence on an, at times, almost manic press,
is born of Ajax and the Dutch sides of the early 1970s,
who pursued the ball with intensity, seeking to make the pitch as small as possible when
out of possession, and as large as possible when
attacking. Versatility and rotation – for example Bielsa’s
deployment of midfielders as defenders – also stems from Total Football’s emphasis on
players being able to interchange. This allows Bielsa’s teams to create more passing options
and overloads from the back more easily and naturally, and also facilitates counter-pressing.
It requires Bielsa’s players to be technically excellent, as well as extremely fit, and when
at its best, creates a whirl of movement and interchange that resembles Total Football
at its finest Bielsa was also influenced by the Urugyuan
coach Oscar Tabárez, who revolutionised the youth system in the Uruguayan national set-up
and took the senior side a Copa América win in 2011; he also won the Copa Libertadores
with Peñarol in 1987 and a title with Boca Juniors in 1992.
According to Bielsa, “Football rests on four fundamentals, as outlined by Tabárez:
1) defense, 2) attack, 3) how you move from defense
to attack, and (4), how you move from attack to defense. The issue is trying to
make those passages as smooth as possible.” Jonathan Wilson notes in his 8by8 piece on
Bielsa that the Uruguyan’s pragmatism is at
odds with Bielsa’s idealism. But Tabárez’s way of breaking down the game into a series
of states and transitions between those states
was clearly hugely influential on Bielsa as a way
of thinking about the game. His theories of movement and rotation, the interchangeable
function of players within a system, are a response to Tabárez’s view of the four
fundamentals, Bielsa’s answer to the questions posed by the transitions between states.
Marcelo Bielsa has been characterised as the product of the two dominant, but opposing
schools of Argentinian football: that of Menotti, and Bilardo. From Menotti, he took
attacking intent, the importance of possession and passing, and, with a sense of football’s
importance to fans, almost a moral standpoint. From Bilardo, he took the mechanics of how
to achieve this: hard work, dedication, meticulous preparation, and training based on
rehearsing responses to in-game situations. From Michels and Cruyff, via Menotti, came
movement, fluidity, rotation, and positional flexibility, as well as pressing. And from
Tabárez, a way of thinking about a game that broke
it down into four constituent parts, each to be worked out and solved in terms of how
they relate to one another.