If I was Jesse Marsch, I’d pack my bags at the end of the season and get myself back to the Bundesliga or a big job in the MLS.
Because the narrative I’m hearing from Leeds fans right now tells me so many of them have disappeared down the rabbit hole of the cult of personality that I find it, frankly, astonishing.
There seems to be absolutely no dissection of the job Marcelo Bielsa did and the state he left their club in. Instead, it’s all, ‘This is really bad from Marsch and we sacked a legend, an icon, for it. Why?’
Why? The answer is simple.
You did it because with Bielsa still at the helm you were definitely going down and at least Marsch has come in and given your club a fighting chance of staying up, even if ultimately he fails. The idea that, ‘This isn’t for us, this is rubbish’, is laughable because it was properly rubbish when Leeds were losing by threes and fours under Bielsa and had the worst goal difference in the league.
He did 95 per cent of the damage in that time by not going into games with a system of play which could give his side a chance to get enough points on the board and keep goal difference at a level that, in the squeaky bum time of the season, would mean they could still be competitive.
He just kept trying to thrill and saying ‘This is the way I play’.
But that makes Bielsa fundamentally a very poor manager in this day and age, and as a result the man brought in to sort out his mess has been left with a woefully green squad which only knows how to play one way.
Marsch is now having to put them through two sessions a day to try to sow some different thoughts into their minds and it cannot be done, because it was Bielsa’s way or the highway for too long and everyone who grew under the Argentinian is not going to be for learning quick enough in the last few games.
So it has zero to do with Marsch, who has only done what any other manager worth his salt would have done if they’d come into this situation.
Football values and norms don’t change — teams who win things keep clean sheets — and you’re not going to do that playing Bielsa Ball so why try?
The other thing I’m hearing from Leeds fans that makes me laugh is that Bielsa wasn’t supported by the board, that he gave them a list of targets and they didn’t bring them, in but that’s absurd.
He was on £8million a year, more than most managers in the Premier League, to compete and all he did was go all-out attack, in fifth gear, without thinking, ‘There are times I need to be in second or third’. It’s inconceivable to me that if you employ a manager on £8m a year and give him trust that his targets would not only have been listened to but slavishly followed by the board.
But Leeds won’t want to believe that, either.
