Another season of the Argentine risks United’s hard-won Premier League status and an indelible stain on his legacy.
Marcelo Bielsa breathed new life into a club that had long since become stale and had endured a purgatorial exile from the Premier League. The title-winning season, the return to the opulence and splendour of the promised land, the intoxicatingly breathless football and the emergence of Kalvin Phillips as a first-rate midfielder and a star of the English national team; the list of achievements is impressive and extensive. He has, without question, carved out a legacy for himself at Leeds United and succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of a fan base that had endured so much heartache in the years that preceded his arrival.
Such has been Bielsa’s success that large swathes of Leeds fans have apotheosised him. Some have gone as far as describing him as the best coach in the club’s history. That this has happened is understandable to some extent. He did, after all, lead the club out of a Stygian, sanity-sapping world in which all too often thick fogs of uncertainty enveloped Elland Road and sparse crowds groaned as Leeds crashed to ignominious defeats to minnows like Barnsley, Blackpool and Rotherham. We have a great deal to thank him for.
The issue is that for those people, who make up a significant portion of the club’s fan base, any criticism of Bielsa is strictly verboten. If you wish to call out a baffling substitution you had better be prepared to become persona non grata. Complain of a relative lack of transfer activity and you’re clearly somebody who yearns for a return to the destructive profligacy of the Ridsdale era. Outsiders who express such views receive even greater scorn, as Gabby Agbonlahor would surely agree after receiving some of the most vile abuse from Leeds fans on social media. In the eyes of his acolytes, Bielsa can do no wrong and there is only room for true believers.
The club’s hierarchy cannot afford to take such an evangelical view. United’s performance this season has been lamentable. Bielsa, the highest-paid manager in the club’s history, is as human as you and I and bears great responsibility for this whatever the blinkered seals may say. They may be at pains to make reference to injuries or to cite the riches available to some of United’s divisional rivals or to blame slipshod and iniquitous officiating. For them it has nothing to do with Bielsa and everything to do with a lack of fortune and fairness. These arguments do not stand up to serious scrutiny.
The truth is that the mother of this season’s woes has been a combination of Bielsa’s refusal to adapt to evolving circumstances and the club’s misguided approach to squad building. Leeds possess a relatively small squad and injuries have made it smaller still. Yet he has persisted with his gruelling methods and style of play. Since promotion, the club have signed a number of injury-prone players. Rodrigo, Junior Firpo and Diego Llorente all spring to mind. He has pushed them to the limit as he has the likes of Luke Ayling, Stuart Dallas and Mateusz Klich, all of whom are now in their fourth season of high-octane football and have reached or passed the age of 30.
What is more is that despite the injury woes and all the boastful talk of there being a pathway for talented youngsters, Bielsa has been extremely reluctant to place his trust in the likes of Joe Gelhardt, Lewis Bate, Cryscencio Summerville and Cody Drameh. He has instead preferred more senior favourites, such as Ayling, Klich and Tyler Roberts, who have consistently underperformed all season. Such has been the lack of regular first-team opportunities for young players, Summerville and Drameh felt the need to request transfers last month. Summerville remained at the club but Drameh joined Cardiff City on loan. He clearly felt that the prospect of regular football was worth running the risk of Steve Morison inculcating in him the sort of scarcely believable ineptitude we saw him produce in the white shirt some years ago.
Leeds and Bielsa have brought this mess of a season on themselves. The mistakes have been multifarious and the momentum of the project has faded. United should avoid relegation but would be mightily fortunate to do so and it would be a grave error to consider that a triumph. Surely a team that was the ninth-best in the country only last season should aspire to more than simply being better than the lowly likes of Burnley, Norwich and Watford?
Like it or not, United have regressed. There are several issues they must resolve in the summer if they are to continue to compete in the Premier League. There are several players who are 30 or older (Klich, Ayling, Rodrigo, Dallas, Liam Cooper and Adam Forshaw) and others who are simply not good enough for the Premier League and probably never will be (Roberts and Jamie Shackleton). There is an exigent need to replace them and to increase the size of the squad. Fixture congestion is going to present an even more significant challenge next season owing to the World Cup in Qatar. There should also be a greater willingness to promote the club’s young talent, as handing out debuts is all well and good but it is regular football that counts, and a more flexible tactical approach that takes into consideration the profile and condition of the players available as well as the strengths and weaknesses of opposing teams.
There is no prospect whatsoever of Leeds resolving these issues if Bielsa remains at the club beyond the end of the season. For all his virtues, he has shown himself to be an utterly intransigent figure who will not change his ways. I struggle to envisage a scenario in which he abandons his policy of maintaining a small squad and deviates from his most intense training methods and his overall tactical approach. It seems to me that another season with him at the helm would prove to be even more of a mess than this. It would be madness to sack him now but in my view it would be in the best interests of all concerned if he were to leave at the end of the season.