American coach Jesse Marsch is the odds-on favourite to replace Marcelo Bielsa, and though he may be an unfamiliar name to a lot of Leeds United fans, some clues as to his philosophy can be found.
The 48-year-old played in the MLS before coaching Montreal Impact and New York Red Bulls. He then moved to German side Red Bull Leipzig where he was an assistant coach for Ralf Rangnick.
Next he became manager of Red Bull Salzburg - he has had a long association with the energy drinks company - where he won two doubles in a row and earned his spurs as a European first team coach.
With his recent success on his CV, he took over at Leipzig, but in December last year he was sacked after just a few months in charge due to poor results, and he has not been with a team since.
With him having never managed in the Premier League, knowledge of his managerial style is limited, but there are a few clues in some of the things he has said over the years.
On his coaching approach, speaking to the Montreal Gazette in 2012, he said: “As a coach you're the leader, but you're on trial with every decision you make.
"Every line-up you put out there, every substitute you make, every training session you run, every meeting you have, the players are looking for ways to buy in but also are wondering what kind of guy is this? What kind of staff is this? What are we trying to accomplish?
"The clearer things are, and the more they make sense, then the guys will buy in."
Opining on Jurgen Klopp to the Times in 2019, Marsch said: “I have never met Jurgen but the relationship he has with his players and his teams, the way his teams play, the passion that he has for the game, the passion that his team has for the game, tactically what he tries to achieve . . . There are a lot of things that I really respect about how he runs his team."
In the same interview, he also spoke about his former boss Rangnick: "Ralf Rangnick is a genius in terms of the way he thinks about the game. The first time I met him, he really opened my eyes as to how detailed you can be about this game. I have used that to empower my teams to be a version of what I think our philosophy should be.”
He also spoke about Rangnick's impact in an interview with Newsweek in 2020: “I like my teams to play with speed and aggression, and a great deal of credit for that is down to Ralph Rangnick, who I learned an awful lot from."
And in 2019, he talked to the Mirror about speaking German: "There's two things that come along with it. There's an adaptation to the culture which includes understanding how the people work and how they think and how they talk, and there's also showing the vulnerability, the imperfection of who I am, and that's a big part of how I coach.”
