'A noble person with unbreakable values' - How Bielsa's Leeds became Argentina's favourite team

When Marcelo Bielsa first started out as a coach in charge of the Newell's Old Boys youth divisions, he had an unusual request for his young charges. Each one was ordered to go home and steal a broom handle, which would then be painted white and used on the training ground for slalom exercises.

It was on one of those afternoons in Rosario that he first got wind of his nickname, El Loco. Ex-midfielder Ricardo Lunari recalled to Infobae: “We used to call him Loco behind his back thinking that if he ever heard us, he'd kill us. It was affectionate, like you call some people 'Big Head'.”

On that day, however, the secret escaped. “Where is the mallet?” asked one of the youth players charged with setting up the broom handles. “El Loco has it,” another responded, not realising he was in earshot of his coach.

“He sat us all down and one by one started asking if we knew that he was known as El Loco. Three or four denied it out of terror,” Lunari added. “Finally, one guy admitted it and toned it down, saying it was because of his manner of working. But he was the first to know that it came from there.”

The legend had been born, and the aura that envelops this most unorthodox of football figures continues to work its magic more than 30 years later, as Bielsa now prepares to take the Premier League by storm with Leeds United, having just been rewarded with a new contract by the club.

Every step of the coach's English adventure has been followed with avid interest back in his native Argentina, resulting in unprecedented attention for the second-tier Championship.

Leeds' clashes with the likes of Derby County, Barnsley and Preston were screened live across the South American continent, while the ESPN documentary Take Us Home received rave reviews from fans who just two years previously knew the Whites solely, if at all, as a former Premier League giant that had dropped into lower-league obscurity.

Lucas Munilla Aguilar, who runs fan account Leeds_Argentina on Twitter, can attest to El Loco's magnetic popularity. Prior to Bielsa's arrival at Elland Road the Bella Vista native, who has followed Leeds since the days of Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell and Alan Smith in the early 2000s, had around 200 followers.

“By the end of the first pre-season alone that had jumped to about 1,500,” he explained to Goal, “and the next jump was when we went up this year, 1,500 followers more in a single weekend.”

Among Munilla's 4,000+ followers is none other than former Argentina captain Javier Mascherano, who congratulated Leeds via Twitter upon clinching promotion with the simple phrase: "Bielsa did it."

Invariably, the account's best-performing tweets are those that mention Leeds' trainer. "Obviously having Bielsa as coach gives us repercussion across the world, especially in Argentina, that if he were not here we would not get,” Aguilar says. 

"Argentine football is not prepared for Bielsa. Argentine football does not deserve Bielsa." That is the opinion of journalist Roman Iucht, author of one of the few biographies of the notoriously private, hermetic coach. As with thousands of his compatriots, Iucht has watched with interest as El Loco conquered the Championship with Leeds. 

"In some ways I was surprised [by Bielsa's impact], but in others I took it as logical," Iucht explained to Goal. "Leeds have always been, even in their darkest years, one of the teams in England with most tradition. They are a huge team that given their historical role did not deserve to be in the second division, much less in the third.

"Bielsa's arrival as a coach with such a long record and prestigious name even without winning many titles meant a lot of media interest. 

"But then, you have to start playing your way, and I think that heightened the sporting interest even more. There is something special about Bielsa that is uncommon in many coaches, he has his own fan-base, you become a fan of the club he is coaching."

To paint El Loco as a universally revered figure in his home nation, however, is to over-simplify matters. While he commands the unstinting loyalty of the Newell's faithful – Bielsa led them to two Primera Division titles and second place in the 1992 Copa Libertadores, and the Lepra's stadium is named after him – an “unfair and exaggerated measure”, in his typically blunt opinion - the coach's relationship with his native Argentina as a whole is somewhat more complex.

His methods command general admiration, but the lack of trophies and medals has been and continues to be a stick with which to beat him – particularly his failure as national team coach to progress past the first round of the 2002 World Cup.

That disaster and subsequent mixed record with the likes of Athletic Club, Marseille and Lille have seen him pegged by some as a coach whose methods are unsustainable in the long term; at worse a vendehumo (fraud) whose reputation is built on false pretences.

“Before Bielsa's arrival I had him down as a weird coach, who on top of everything ruined my teenage years when he left Riquelme out of the 2002 World Cup,” Lucas adds. “After that episode I stopped following his career because he meant nothing to me, just a bad memory.

“But when he signed for Leeds I discovered a true hard worker, obsessed with details and above all a noble person with unbreakable values. That was what most surprised me, his values and unshakeable ethics. I began to understand the army of fans that follow him, even if I don't agree with everything they say.

“In Argentina we are so result-driven. When we see that someone finishes second twice in a row we immediately write them off as a loser and discard them. We do not look at the process, or the details of play. Sometimes the ball hits the post and bounces out, sometimes it goes in, it's as simple as that.”

"In every part of the world rivalries exist, but Argentina is a specialist in creating rivalries," Iucht points out. "This is a country in which even the fanatics have their own fanatics, a country of 'or', not 'and'. The Beatles or the Rolling Stones, Messi or Maradona, black or white, with everything. 

"Something similar happens with Bielsa, and you get something which does not occur with many people, the 'ism', Bielsism. We have Bielsistas and anti-Bielsistas.

"Bielsism has to do with the way you understand football and apply that. In everyone of his clubs Bielsa had control and a broad mission. He is a builder, not just a football coach. That means bringing players up from the youth sides, working long hours at the club, working hard and improving players through training, so players don't feel they are players for just two or three hours a day. 

"On the pitch it means Bielsa wants his teams to be on top in every game, to respect fair play, be very dynamic sides that look to dominate opponents, all of that is related to the notion of Bielsismo."

Central to the Bielsa legend are the dozens of stories that bear witness both to his incredible attention to detail and boundless eccentricity. The tour he embarked upon on the suggestion of mentor and long-time collaborator Jorge Griffo in a cramped Fiat 147 prior to taking the reins as Newell's youth coach, driving over 25,000km the length and width of Argentina in order to discover new talent.

Sneaking into Mauricio Pochettino's bedroom while the future Albiceleste defender, 13, was sleeping, and deciding to sign him based on the girth of his legs. Chasing Newell's ultras off his doorstep brandishing a hand grenade, or calling his brother Rafael at midnight to apologise for having months earlier dedicated Velez Sarsfied's 1998 title triumph to him - “One should not assume for oneself the entirety of something that is only partially theirs”, was one of three reasons given for the retraction – the list is endless.

Lucas highlights a memorable episode from Bielsa's time at Athletic: annoyed at the disruption caused to training by building works, El Loco threw out the site supervisor and then presented assault charges against himself at a local police station.

“[Bielsa] is not motivated by money nor comforts, he is motivated by great challenges,” Lunari, who went on to represent the likes of Chile's Universidad Catolica, Atlas and Puebla in Mexico and Salamanca of Spain in a long, well-travelled career,” explained to ESPN.

“Easy things perhaps bore him, he likes difficult challenges, into which he and the people he works with can put their hearts.”

That enthusiasm, while it may not convince everyone, has proved impossibly infectious throughout Bielsa's long career; as well as Newell's, he retains huge admiration in Chile (no mean feat for an Argentine) thanks to his exploits at the Roja helm, while his spells at Athletic, Marseille and now Leeds quickly saw him become a cult figure with fans due to the dynamic football glimpsed on the pitch and his endearing accessibility and, let's admit it, oddness away from it.

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From Gabriel Batistuta - “He was crazier back then than now, he dreamed this was Sacchi's Milan,” the ex-Argentina idol told Telefe of his first meeting with the coach back in the Newell's U19s – and Pochettino through Chile duo Alexis Sanchez and Arturo Vidal to Leeds' new England international Kalvin Phillips, scores of elite players credit Bielsa with inspiring them to reach new heights.

"It is a good indicator, right?" says Iucht. "Look at what everyone who has had contact with him, players or coaches, say about Bielsa. "It is a very telling fact, apart from extremely rare exceptions there are no players who do speak about Bielsa with glowing praise."

His methods may not be to everyone's taste, but while they have delivered relatively little silverware on a human level it is difficult to fault the 65-year-old whose appetite for the game in all its forms remains as enormous today as it was all those years ago when he was setting out those broom handles in Rosario.

“How can you not like someone like Bielsa,” Lucas states. “The fans immediately felt identified with his working methods, his attacking play and, most important for me, he changed our mentality.

“Even though in the first year we didn't get promotion that change of mentality alone meant the eternal gratitude of the Leeds fans. He gave us back our pride in feeling like the protagonists, that was priceless.”

No matter what happens in this debut Premier League season, that feeling around Elland Road will not change; and, thousands of Argentines will continue to tune in to El Loco's adventures every week to see how his unique style fares against England's finest.