Marcelo Bielsa

[Irish Ian]

Loved that

Marcelo is a true legend

[whiteswan]

Berts first game in the Prem to Liverpool 4-3 is worth a few re runs as well, quite good to compare both those games, and the 'football' played

I remember Klipperty saying that they were going to give us a 'Premier League Baptism of fire'....and at the end of the game he had a shocked look on his face and said "Wow!"

[SaraM]

Loved that

Marcelo is a true legend

Very funny and endearing.

[Cjay]

[1964white]

Would be an interesting appointment for a country who won the first World Cup Finals in 1930.

[Mountain]

That would be interesting, Uruguay not traditionally known for the football and values that Bielsa brings. Then again, as someone said to me when he got the Leeds job, it might be beautiful but it will probably be a train wreck, and we got the former.

[SaraM]

Anything other than another club job in England, please.

[Barlow Boy]

That’s me Uruguayan then

[Jaydog]

Think he’s a great fit for them.

[1964white]

I assume Uruguay & Argentina are great or fierce rivals.

[1964white]

Is spitter still playing international football?

[BlackHillsPaul]

Think he’s a great fit for them.

I agree with you 100%. They are a team in generational transition. He's the perfect Manager at the right time.

I was hoping that he would Manage the USA. But that never really picked up any steam.

[Jaydog]

I agree with you 100%. They are a team in generational transition. He's the perfect Manager at the right time.

I was hoping that he would Manage the USA. But that never really picked up any steam.

They looked pretty decent in patches at the WC.
Think MB can work his magic with them. Would be great to see him back on the big stage

[weasel]

I was hoping that he would Manage the USA. But that never really picked up any steam.

Why would you want him when you could have Marsch? Nobody in their right mind surely would have him when they could have Marsch just ask Mr Orta, and he's no idiot.

[Jaydog]

Why would you want him when you could have Marsch? Nobody in their right mind surely would have him when they could have Marsch just ask Mr Orta, and he's no idiot.

That’s a cheap shot. I think Marsch is easily the best manager in his house.

[Mountain]

I agree with you 100%. They are a team in generational transition. He's the perfect Manager at the right time.

I was hoping that he would Manage the USA. But that never really picked up any steam.

On the Guardian podcast last week, or maybe James Richardson, they were saying Patrick Viera is the obvious choice for the USA.

[Kennyb41]

I wonder if Radz will come to his senses on April fools day and fck Orta off and go cap in hand to Argentina.

It could be the only thing that saves our club.

[SaraM]

Interview with Berardi on Bielsa's coaching - some great insights:

The right place at the right time in the career of Gaetano Berardi, a Swiss defender with more than 300 professional matches between Italy, England and Switzerland, can be identified with a precise date and place: Leeds, 15 June 2018. The day Marcelo Bielsa was made official as the new coach of the local team.

Among the players who were already part of the historic and decayed English club is also him, who since 2014 was already contributing to the cause of the Whites, for too long relegated to the Championship, far from the spotlight of the Premier League chased since the 2004/05 season.

The advent of the Loco in the West Yorkshire city represents for Berardi, at the age of 30, the hope of seeing his dream of promotion to the English top flight crowned, as well as the incredible opportunity to be coached by one of the most iconic world football coaches of all time.

In the end Gaetano will remain under the court of Marcelo, as he often calls him, for three years, two in the Championship and one in the Premier League, at the end of which he will return to his native Switzerland to continue his career with Sion and Bellinzona.
I chatted with him for a good hour, talking - obviously - about his experience with Bielsa and how his ideas have influenced what will be his - near - future as coach.

Gaetano, a question at such high risk of banality as to be almost rhetorical. Of all the coaches you've had, who is the one who has left you the most?

Without taking anything away from all the others, but Bielsa was definitely the most important coach of my career, especially considering the moment in my career when I had him: at the age of 30, at the height of maturity and awareness as a footballer and as a man.

What kind of coach is Bielsa?

If I had to define him with one word I would say, without a doubt, 'demanding'. He is maniacal in his attention to detail, in all aspects, both on and off the pitch. Trainings, meetings, diet... everything with him is studied down to the smallest detail.
I have never worked the way I have with him. His training sessions were mostly by means of drills that recreated micro-game situations involving 2 to 4 players and he had maximum attention to the individual aspect: from the care of basic technique to the aspects of individual tactics.

I find it curious that Bielsa does not stop at the concept of an 'evolved player' with established merits and flaws, but feels the need to seek continuous improvement in all aspects, including individual technique. What were his corrections mostly focused on in this respect?

On every aspect, even the most basic.

In training, for example, he insisted a lot on the fact that passes of a certain distance were executed not with the inside of the foot but with the inside of the neck, hitting the ball on the edge in such a way as to impart more force and, in this way, also facilitate the control of the receiver, who would thus be able to jump over any opponent who was approaching already with the first control.

Clearly it was not easy, the first few times the quality of the passes was not always high and most of the time previous habits led you to make this type of transmission in the classic way, with the inside foot, but every time he intervened to try to change this habit of ours.

Did it ever happen to you, listening to his technical corrections, to think 'I just never thought of that'?

Yes, it happened sometimes and that's because his attention often went to details, subtleties and nuances that are difficult for a footballer to think about. Remaining on the subject of 'transmissions', as I told you he always wanted passes to come out strong and sweeping and to assess their quality he would look at the turn the ball took during the slide: if the ball rotated going forward it meant they were executed correctly, and he emphasised this. Conversely, when it took a different spin, perhaps slightly diagonal, he would point out that the quality of the pass was not perfect.

How was this need, as you called it, to create new habits in you players, also from an individual technical point of view, received by you?

Without any particular kind of problem, also because he was very clear and always emphasised the fact that he didn't want us to be robots or behave like robots, but that repetition was the only way for us to incorporate technical gestures and perform them without thinking about it.

In practice, how was this repetition created within the weekly work cycle?

In so many ways. I was extremely fascinated by his work and that of his staff, so several times I went to his offices to closely observe how the proposals were created, which we then executed in the field. For every situation he has a huge plethora of possible exercises. Side ball defence, one-on-one frontal... for every possible micro situation in the game he created a personal playbook full of training proposals.

How were the individual training sessions structured?

In the activation he gave a lot of space to his fitness coaches - there were two, one of his own and one from Leeds - and at the end we would split into two groups, always divided by departments - forwards and defenders, with the midfielders 'dancing' from one group to the other depending on the type of work - to carry out small group exercises.

Each session included many exercises on the same theme, sometimes as many as twenty, some of which were also very short, 5-6 minutes, but still carried out with great intensity.

Afterwards, the work was combined, with the attackers and defenders together performing a series of duels, always related to the tactical theme on which we had worked previously.

When you talk about twenty or so role-specific drills to be carried out within one session, do you mean that they were variants of a single drill or were they twenty different proposals?

Some were also variants of a 'macro' situation, but many were different drills that Marcelo wanted to do in preparation for the weekend's competition. Each week, based on the opponent we were to face, Marcelo wanted to do a number of drills on a certain theme, and this meant that in a single session we could do so many proposals one after the other.

Sometimes, despite the very long training sessions, we couldn't complete the entire training programme, partly because Marcelo likes to talk and explain between exercises, but everything we couldn't do was made up the next day. I remember very well that when we players looked at the training programme on the ipad, there were so many exercises scheduled that it seemed as if they would never end.

What aspects of the drills did Bielsa focus on?

Usually after a first block of three to four drills, he would gather us together in the centre of the pitch and explain to us why he was doing what he was doing, often referring them to previous games or the one we were to play next.

Explaining to the players why you are doing what you are doing is a subtlety that is as important as it is sometimes underestimated. Have you ever in your career gone through drills or training without really understanding why certain demands were being made on you?

Maybe not to such an extreme extent, but it has certainly happened to me that I have performed work with a motivation that was not too clear or that perhaps we players did not consider necessary for the situation we were in at the time or for the preparation of the match.

How do you experience such a situation as a player?

As a young player you tend to just execute, without asking yourself any particular questions. As a more mature player it's different, which is why I consider myself very lucky, as I told you at the beginning of our conversation, to have had Bielsa in his early thirties.

What kind of relationship did Bielsa have with his players?

He didn't have a very intimate relationship, far from it, rather detached. During training sessions he had a very direct style, very few words, just enough to get his message across.

It was different in situations where he was one-on-one with a player. In those cases you noticed the difference, he let himself go more and showed his personality more.

How did you personally experience this relational detachment with your coach?

Without any particular problems, although clearly something was missing on a personal level. Although I'm not one of many words, I like to intervene with my opinions on locker room dynamics and with him there wasn't much way to do that, although his door always remained open, for anyone and anything.

As a future coach, how do you see yourself in relation to this issue? Do you think you will adopt this style or would you prefer a less detached relationship from a human relations point of view?

I'd definitely like to have a closer relationship, but I wouldn't like to go too far beyond a certain limit because I've also experienced the opposite extreme and, as far as I've seen, it's not the best to have too close a relationship.
The situation I imagine myself in is a fair middle ground.

And in relation to playing style, what principles and ideas would you like to work with?

To tell you the truth, I'm still not thinking about the principles I'd like to bring in, for now I'm just studying a lot about how to set up a session, or a cycle of sessions, in the most appropriate way possible. I'd like to have an approach to weekly work similar to Marcelo's, with the same attention to detail on an individual player level.

In which direction would you like to take your coaching career? Do you see yourself more in a youth football context or would you prefer to stay within the first teams and 'big boys' football?

To date, I would tell you that I would prefer to start with youth. It would give me the chance to find out what kind of person I would be in my new role and have a better chance to make mistakes without too much pressure.

In your career you played several years in the Championship, a league characterised by a lot of intensity in the face of less tactical balance. How will Berardi the coach modulate these two aspects?

I like dynamism and offensive football, but football that is orderly from a defensive point of view, that has great solidity, which does not necessarily mean defending low and with many men. I also experienced this with Bielsa: at Leeds we used to attack with a lot of players, but always with a lot of focus on defensive prevention.

We spoke earlier about training principles. Is there any principle of play, among those adopted by Bielsa, that you would like to make your own tomorrow?

Definitely the great mobility of all players, including the central defenders. Bielsa has always stressed a lot these constant movements in the open spaces forward to create superiority and give more passing lines to his teammates. There was a period in England when I was injured for a long time and I remember watching my teammates' games on TV and often hearing the commentators say that many of our developments were actions that were codified and prepared in training. In reality this was not the case at all, what was prepared was the movement, the principle, and not the development itself. The plays were just a natural consequence.

I find this very interesting because, in my view, there is a very thin line that divides teams that have a very 'mechanical' preparation from those that often find a certain solution through principles.

It is exactly like that. The difference between the two models you described can be seen when things don't go the way you want them to.

Working by principles, when you don't find a solution you can immediately find another one. By mechanising a process, the risk is that you do not find alternative solutions.

In a training context so focused on the individual and small groups, how did these principles emerge at a collective level?

Through the very high specificity of Bielsa's exercises. Each proposal simulated a specific game situation that was proposed in the specific area of the pitch where it took place in the match. Everything was repeated many times and at a very high intensity. I'll give you a practical example, to better understand: to train these forward movements of the side chain full-back-midfielder-outfielder, he would form a corridor in the area of the wing and here these continuous movements would take place after each pass. This is a trivial example of a very simple exercise that he had us do many times, with many variations. The same was also done in the central areas of the pitch, with other players involved.

Coming back to you, you have played in Italy, Switzerland and England. Is there a particular country among them where you would like to coach?

The way coaching is conceived, I would love to start in England, where the tasks are more all-round managerial aspects than in other countries. In the English lower leagues there are many young ex-footballers who have had the chance to emerge despite their lack of experience, elsewhere it is more difficult.

I currently follow a lot the current Huddersfield coach, who in my years at Leeds was one of Marcelo's assistants and was previously the coach of Leeds U23. I talk to him a lot, he asked me a lot about De Zerbi, even before he moved to Brighton, and from him I learnt a lot about the figure of the coach and the collaborator, specifically.

What, for example?

He, like everyone else, has his own idea of football and maybe not always in line with Marcelo's thinking. I know this because the confrontation between me and him has always been very open. In spite of this, when he had to run drills for us, his communication focused exactly on what Marcelo would have wanted, he even went as far as leading the drills as he led them. This seems an obvious professional aspect, but it is not always so.

You spoke of young coaches who are not always given a chance because of their young age and lack of experience, which is often too often assumed. As a still active player, how would you welcome a rookie coach younger than you?

It's something that has never happened to me, but I don't think it would have a particular effect on me. I would simply assess the person for who he is, without looking at his age. If a boy younger than me spoke to me as a coach, correcting me on some aspect, I would welcome him on the basis of the quality of the correction itself.

One last question Gaetano. In your future plans, when will you start your coaching career?

I will evaluate at the end of this championship. I'm on deadline, and I'm considering taking part in the combined Uefa C and D course at the end of this season. My path as a coach, in terms of courses to attend, will be in Italy, for the rest we'll see where the future takes me.

https://www.areacoach.it/2023/04/03/vi- ... o-berardi/

[Prisoner37]

Thanks for sharing that Sara. Really enlightening on Marcelo's coaching strategies.

[SaraM]

Thanks for sharing that Sara. Really enlightening on Marcelo's coaching strategies.