Marcelo Bielsa, the ultimate “take it or leave it” manager

Losing by a big margin is always going to be complicated, but it’s even more so when you’re Marcelo Bielsa because they always ask you “Why do you play like that?” Manchester United hammered Leeds United last Sunday and The Peacocks never stopped with their gung-ho approach. So why is that?

Marcelo Bielsa is the ultimate “take it or leave it” manager. He does plays football in a very high risk/high reward way, trying to constantly attack the adversary and always trying to press and keep hold of the ball. It’s the way he has always been and he is going to stay that way in the future.

So when Manchester United beat his Leeds team by a 6-2 score last Sunday, there was a lot of talk of why Marcelo Bielsa constantly decides to leave his team so open and exposed in the defensive side of things. This was very clear in the first minutes of the game as Scott McTominay scored a brace in quick succession.

Marcelo Bielsa was very clear in his press conference after the game that he is not going to change; that he was quite proud of his team and that he was not going to change his methods, regardless of context and the opposition. Now, this is a reasoning that is still quite shocking to a lot of people, despite the fact that Marcelo Bielsa and his unique perception of football is common knowledge at this point. And the reality is that the Argentinian usually picks lower profile clubs like Leeds because he knows that mentality would never work in a big team that is focused on winning.

For now, Leeds are doing quite well. Their goal this season is to stay up in the Premier League and they are bound to do that if they maintain this level of performances, but the biggest question mark should be if the players can keep up their levels of fitness as Bielsa’s teams tend to be run into the ground. Definitely a very unique manager and one that is never going to change, regardless of what we think of him.