If your sole experience of Marcelo Bielsa was watching Lille’s 3-0 defeat to Strasbourg
in the second game of Ligue 1 this season, you’d
be forgiven for thinking he was something of a newcomer to football management.
There were three subsitutions before half-time, which
forced Bielsa to play an outfielder in goal once Mike Maignan was sent off.
The outfielder was then swapped for another outfielder and the match descended into something of a farce.
But, Marcelo Bielsa is, in fact, one of the most exciting, innovative coaches in world
football and his brand of attacking possession-based football, played with a high tempo and
often based on a 3-3-1-3 formation, has influenced managers like Pep Guardiola, Mauricio
Pochettino, and Diego Simeone . Bielsa, nicknamed ‘El Loco’, the mad one,
is obsessive in his preparation, using videos to
explain opposition systems to his teams.
He favours a 3-3-1-3 formation, which sees three
central defenders, a deep, screening midfielder, wide midfielders or wing-backs, a creative
midfielder in the hole, and a front three with two wide men who stretch play.
Bielsa alters his formations to suit his opposition, though, sometimes using a 4-2-3-1 with
high full-backs; his aim is to have one more centre-back than the opposition have strikers,
which facilitates his high line and pressing style of play, as only one spare defender
means there are more players to push forwards.
Bielsa gets his teams to play with ferocious pace, despite also favouring a possession-based game.
This requires huge technical skill from his squad and he frequently plays midfielders
such as Gary Medel or Lille’s Ibrahim Amadou in central defensive roles to ensure they
have the ball skills to pass out from the back;
Bielsa also uses full-backs as centre-backs because
he believes they are better able to carry the ball, and even deployed Arturo Vidal as
a wing-back when coaching Chile.
He defenders are expected to pass the ball among themselves,
and the goalkeeper, before recycling possession wide.
The essential shape of a Bielsa 3-3-1-3, which is his favoured system, creates a kind of
bowl shape in the defensive line, with the deep
midfielder dropping into that space to patrol the
middle of the pitch and assists the centre-backs.
At Lille Thiago Mendes or Thiago Maia perform this role, and they are the fulcrum
around which much of the play rotates.
The wing-backs or wide midfielders, and with Bielsa the distinction is blurred, push high
and often ahead of the holding midfielder.
Ahead of them are the 1-3 component, the element with which Bielsa rarely if ever tinkers.
His wide players, Anwar El Ghazi and Luiz Araujo at
Lille, play as wide as possible, stretching the opponent’s full-backs and creating overloads
in the wide spaces with the wing-backs.
Between them plays a striker, Nicolas de Preville, and what Argentinian football refers to
as an enganche , literally a hook, a playmaker
with very limited defensive responsibilities who
acts as the prompt for the attacking moves.
Yassine Benzia , the former Lyon player, fulfils this role at Lille, having been converted from a centre-forward.
Even when Bielsa abandoned a 3-3-1-3 at Athletic Bilbao in favour of a four-man defence, he
played two holding midfielders behind an advanced enganche and three forwards, two wide.
The intention is to play with pace and width, high up the pitch, passing in triangles and
moving off the ball to form a kind of attacking whirlwind that opposition players struggle
to mark.
There is an emphasis on verticality, transitioning the ball rapidly forwards to force the opposition back.
Players rotate, switching the focus of attack, and are expected to be able to fill in for
one another, to improvise within the system; there
is something of the positional fluidity of Total Football in Bielsa’s approach.
Bielsa also preaches pressing.
Bielsa doesn’t set up a team in a defensive block and an
attacking one, all his players are expected to run and hassle, while also playing a high
line that minimises the opposition’s room to develop play.
The demands on Bielsa’s players are as intense as his style of management and his style of
football.
The physical demands are obvious but the mental ones are there too: pre-planned
passing moves must be learned, the opposition studied to a meticulous degree, and
positional play mastered, especially tricky when playing such an idiosyncratic formation.
But Marcelo Bielsa is a without doubt something
of a footballing genius and his tactics, fluid, erudite, innovative, demand more analysis
than a short video like this can provide.
Watch Lille this season: whatever happens, however mad it gets, you’ll learn something.