The Quality of Madness: A Life of Marcelo Bielsa

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All of the sources contained within are just mates of the writer, and it goes into great and pointless detail about each of them and their tenuous qualifications. They share a raft of thoughts without any sort of narrative or flow, and are honestly no more incisive than random bloke in the pub level analysis. Bielsa inherited a club damaged by years of failure, where symbols of the past had a haunting quality. Take the swimming pool at Thorp Arch, which summed up the excesses of the Peter Ridsdale era around the turn of the millennium. The book is a great read about a true sporting impresario and football fans and general readers alike will love it. Within seven weeks of pre-season training, Bielsa transformed the group into an entirely new team. They were comfortable on the ball, played one- and two-touch cushions all over the pitch, and never stopped running. It was as if someone had finally found the mains supply at Elland Road, plugging the old ground directly into the Northern Powergrid and sending a surge of voltage pulsing through brains and bones. Sometimes, a dozen or so will turn up at the team hotel, where they can be seen poring over laptops in reception, and some of Bielsa’s extensive support staff at Leeds have cut their teeth in this way. If they impress, they can be invited into the inner circle.

That is why, for me, he is the best coach in the world. I am looking forward to seeing him in Lille next season. I am pretty sure his influence on their team, their club and their players will be huge - amazing." When Pochettino was 12 years old, Bielsa turned up at his family home at 2am and told his mother he was very interested in signing him up. The mother walked him to the bedroom but Pochettino was asleep. Bielsa said: 'Don't worry, I don't need to talk to him, I just need to see his legs.'" We were exhausted," says defender Rod Fanni. "Mentally, it's very difficult to repeat the same things every day. You have to be strong because it's a bit like a factory. You go there, you repeat, you repeat, you repeat and you go home.

Marcelo Bielsa is a highly respected coach and is famous for his innovative playing style, tactics and formations. He has had a massive influence on football across the world and on other top coaches, such as Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino, Jorge Sampaoli and Gerardo Martino. The aim of the book is to use the innovative tactics of Marcelo Bielsa to provide a complete guide of how to build up play effectively against high pressing teams. Under Bielsa, match preparation does not finish at the training ground. Lunari and Pardo were sent home with videos of rival teams and asked to present their observations on line-ups, tactics and set-piece routines. During the wedding of Newell's defender Dario Franco, Bielsa took the squad to a room in the hotel to watch their next opponent's previous game. Marcelo Bielsa, ‘El Loco’, the Godfather of modern football, arrived as the new manager of Leeds United on 25 June 2018, the same day England thrashed Panama 6-0 at the World Cup in Russia. When Bielsa was announced as the new manager of Leeds, his appointment was met with fascination. How could a manager known as much for his eccentricity as his fast-paced, frenetic style of football, possibly succeed as this then unfashionable club, not least a club which is proud of its ‘northern’ English identity.

New players have joined, but the team that currently hovers over the Premier League relegation zone still holds core members of the first game against Stoke City in August 2018. If loyalty has proved to be the undoing of Bielsa, it is surely a flaw worth celebrating. Without any doubt that's the year I improved the most as a football player, because his huge level of demand makes you perform at the highest level," says Aduriz.As his exciting Leeds United team prepare to take on the Premier League, it makes for a revealing portrait of a fascinating but flawed character who is embarking on a tantalising new chapter in his career. When Leeds bet on Bielsa two summers ago, they knew all about the work ethic, the intensity, the eccentricities but nothing truly prepares you for the reality of the Argentinian known as El Loco. Has he been demanding to a point that has sometimes led to exasperation? Yes. Has he been precisely what Leeds have needed? Absolutely. It is revealing that Lunari, who was Bielsa's assistant during a thrilling spell in charge of the Chile national team between 2007 and 2011, says he would be unwilling to work with the Argentine manager again. Much of the book is made up of self-congratulatory passages like "It was this quote from Roberto Martinez in a lecture I presented for the World Football Academy, at the Expert Meeting in South Africa 2014, that left Anson Dorrance with the urge to be the first to come up to me after the presentation, shake my hand and express an interest in further discussing some of the ideas in the presentation".

The best chapter is on the ‘spy gate’ controversy. Here Rich carefully details what actually happened. In 2018, Bielsa sent a young intern to Derby County’s training grounds to spy on Derby’s pre-match training sessions. Once again Bielsa bore the brunt of the controversy, but Rich makes a convincing argument that sending one intern to an opposition training ground doesn’t mean Leeds are guaranteed a victory on match day. Throughout his 30 years as a manager, Bielsa's methods have helped players scale new heights. Leeds fans have delighted in the dramatic improvements of players such as Mateusz Klich, captain Liam Cooper and Kalvin Phillips, who made his England debut in Denmark on Tuesday. In our BBC World Service documentary - Bielsa: the manager behind the myths - we've spoken to some of the people who have got closest to the 65-year-old Argentine through his well-travelled career - from Buenos Aires to Bilbao and Mexico to Marseille - to try to find out what it is really like to work with this famously idiosyncratic and demanding coach. It wasn't long before Lunari was being subjected to the arduous training methods that have become another Bielsa trademark. He has a book of training drills and in the whole time we were with him we never once repeated a drill," says Pardo, who won 146 caps for his country. "After a drill, we would meet in the middle of the field and we could hardly breathe. He would be really happy to see us like that."

As a man, he demands very high performances of himself and his team, so you have to be alert every second. Every moment matters in every training session - every first touch, every strike, anything that happens is scrutinised and that makes you really aware in every training session. I think he feels empowered by the incredible love he has generated at Leeds," says Mora y Araujo. "But I think the pressure of the Premier League, with its circus of money and power, is quite unlike anything he has experienced. Anything could happen."