From the New York Times
The Artist Who Painted a City
As Jesse Marsch takes over Leeds United, he faces the difficult task of replacing Marcelo Bielsa, who was equal parts coach and icon.
Out on the Burley Road, where the last vestiges of the city of Leeds slowly dissolve into the Yorkshire countryside, there is a barn in the middle of a field. It stands there, alone, the size of a garden shed, in a patch of land demarcating the boundary between a pet grooming salon and a dog park.
For a long time, it was about as unremarkable as any structure can be. A barn, in a field, in a part of the world where there are a lot of barns and a lot of fields. And then one day, a year ago or so, it changed. One side, the side that faces you as you head down the hill, was suddenly covered with a striking, monochrome mural of Marcelo Bielsa.
What caught the eye most, perhaps, was the incongruity between the work and its location. Bielsa’s face, solemn and bespectacled, emerging out of nowhere, watching over all he surveyed — which, in this case, amounted to a succession of dogs at varying stages of cleanliness — gave it the air of a border post, a territorial marker. This field was Bielsa country, it proclaimed.
In the days after the curtain was drawn on Bielsa’s three-and-a-half year tenure as manager of Leeds United, the discussion focused — understandably — on the state in which he had left the team. Had the Argentine coach’s famously exacting methods, his ideological intransigence, left the club at genuine risk of relegation? Or was his dismissal a premature reaction to a tough run of games and an ongoing injury crisis that had deprived a small squad of key players?
Much more significant, though, was how he had left Leeds the place. It can be easy, at times, to overstate the impact that soccer has on a city, a country, a population as a whole. A team’s success or failure is assumed to have some seismic effect on its home; the sport has sufficient hubris to believe that the mood of millions hinges on its every turn.
Bielsa’s impact on Leeds, though, has a physical form. The mural on the Burley Road was not the only piece of urban artwork that has appeared in recent years. There is another portrait of Bielsa in Wortley, close to the club’s Elland Road stadium, in which the Argentine is depicted as Christ the Redeemer.
In Headingley — which is a bit like Brooklyn, except it is better, because it has a cricket ground and a Greggs — Bielsa’s image is accompanied by one of his axioms: “A man with new ideas is a madman, until his ideas triumph.” In the city center, there is a vast depiction of Kalvin Phillips, the club’s homegrown idol, around the corner from the Victorian grandeur of the Corn Exchange.
And all over the city there are electrical boxes — those grim and gray pieces of street furniture that our eyes erase from our vision — that have been daubed in the club’s colors, blue and white and yellow, and decorated with its slogans and its iconography by the street artist Andy McVeigh.
All of that has happened since Bielsa arrived, since he brought a somnolent club to life, since he imposed order on a decade and a half of chaos. By the standards of modern soccer, where the superclubs weigh their trophies by the ton, Bielsa’s legacy is a thin one. He won promotion from the Championship. He guided Leeds to ninth in the Premier League, and left it fretting over relegation. He did not deliver a litany of medals, an era of glory.
What he did was far less tangible, but much more important. He gave Leeds an identity. He did not simply make the fans fall in love with their club again, he gave them something to stand for, to represent, to call their own. He made Leeds an emblem of a style, a belief, an approach. And in doing so, he lifted the place it called home.
Often, those sorts of assertions are difficult to prove. Not in this case. Bielsa, in a very real sense, has left Leeds a much more colorful place than he found it.
That is not, of course, necessarily ideal for his replacement. Jesse Marsch might have exactly the sort of background that most English clubs now expect — an alumnus of the New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig, steeped in the principles of the German pressing game, de rigueur among the denizens of the Premier League — but he lacks Bielsa’s gravitas, his reputation and, most immediately, his emotional bond with the fans, with the city.
That is not the only obstacle in Marsch’s path. Whether there are enough American coaches in European soccer is not, in truth, an especially pressing question: Chances certainly seem to fall more easily to them than they do to, for example, African coaches, or those working outside the bounds of the continent.
The challenge, instead, is in the perception. Chris Armas, another graduate of the Red Bull school, was nicknamed “Ted Lasso” within a few weeks of arriving at Manchester United as an assistant to Ralf Rangnick. The same punchline was trending within minutes of Marsch’s appointment at Leeds.
Bob Bradley, scarred by his experiences at Swansea City, found it surprising just how much controversy was stirred by his use of certain terms — “P.K.” instead of penalty, say — or his pronunciations: He made a conscious effort to say “defence,” instead of “defence,” and never to refer to the Premier League.
If he is to succeed, Marsch will have to overcome that same stigma, to make sure he does not fall into any of the linguistic traps that await him. Even if he does so, he will know, most likely, that he will never inspire the same sort of adoration that was awarded to Bielsa. Bielsa was the man, after all, who took Leeds United home. Marsch will never be able to match that.
Perhaps, though, Marsch’s predecessor offers the perfect illustration of the nature of the task at hand. Bielsa’s success was not measured in silver and gold, but painted in blue and yellow and white. His rewards were not prizes, but portraits. He won them because he gave a club, and a city, something to be proud of, something to believe in. He made the place more colorful. Marsch’s task, any manager’s task, is to do the same.
