On the face of it, Marcelo Bielsa enjoyed a promising start to life as the head coach of Uruguay. In the South American qualifying section for the 2026 World Cup, they flew out of the traps, almost immediately a team styled in his image. There were headline wins last autumn at home against Brazil and then away in Argentina.
After the 2-0 victory at La Bombonera, Boca Juniors’ 54,000-capacity stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina talisman Lionel Messi said his team could not live with Uruguay’s speed and intensity. During Copa America, held in the United States this summer, Uruguay’s strategy offered more of the same. They took maximum points from the group phase, banishing the U.S. men’s national team in the process, then battled with 10 men to overcome Brazil in the quarter-finals, before losing to Colombia by a single goal in an ill-tempered semi-final.
Bielsa did have his frustrations, most notably with the tournament’s planning. He was furious with the state of the playing fields in the U.S. stadiums, branding the organisers “a plague of liars”, before pointing out he had promised his superiors at the Uruguayan Football Association (AUF) that he would not chastise those organisers so publicly. He went on to also call the training pitches provided a “disaster”, but his mood had already darkened after altercations between his team and supporters following that defeat against Colombia, where the Uruguayan players’ families were also put at risk.
This all seems pretty usual Bielsa fare; constructing a team in his inimitable style, railing against the establishment and defending the interests of the players he coaches.
Bielsa, the highest-paid coach at Copa America 2024 (following three months of negotiations), has a contract to the end of the next World Cup, which will be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico in 2026. The evidence of the past 18 months suggests his team should be considered outside contenders to win that tournament.
Ronald Araujo and Nunez celebrate after their goals gave Uruguay victory in Argentina last year (Luis Robayo/Getty Images)
This year, Federico Valverde, the Real Madrid midfielder and Uruguay captain, told Spanish website Relevo: “He deserves so much respect for what he believes; it is a different style, a different game and a different intent. I have greatly improved my psychological equilibrium playing under him. Although football with him seems crazy, we are working a lot on defensive and attacking balance and it has helped us know how to think in difficult moments on the field.”
And yet, since Copa America, the landscape has altered dramatically.
The major challenge to Bielsa’s authority and methods came this month when Luis Suarez, Uruguay’s all-time top scorer with 69 goals in 142 appearances, gave a startling interview to DSports’ television channel in which he accused the coach of mistreating his players and disrespecting support staff.
Suarez retired from international football in early September but had been part of Uruguay’s squad at Copa America. The depth and extent of his critique has plunged the Uruguayan setup into crisis.
On Saturday, they lost 1-0 away to Peru, who had not won any of their previous eight World Cup qualifiers. That match followed underwhelming goalless draws against Venezuela and Paraguay in September. That is now three games without scoring a goal, yet the goal they conceded against Peru was also the first Uruguay have conceded themselves in qualification since the 2-2 draw against Colombia last October — a run of almost six games until Peru’s 88th minute winner.
There is some mitigation for the Peru defeat to be found in the fact that key Uruguayan players including Rodrigo Bentancur, Darwin Nunez, Jose Maria Gimenez, Ronald Araujo and Mathias Oliveira have all missed multiple games following their part in the melee against Colombia. Yet Uruguay’s performance was roundly criticised back home and Bielsa’s experiment with a back three — in which holding midfielder Manuel Ugarte played as a centre-half — did not work. Bielsa will at least be boosted by the return of Nunez and Araujo against Ecuador in Montevideo on Tuesday evening.
Bielsa shouts instructions during the defeat by Peru (Martin Fonseca/Eurasia Sport Images/Getty Images)
In this interview, Suarez portrayed Bielsa as a man incapable of understanding the emotional needs of a modern footballer.
“There were situations that occurred at the Copa America that hurt to see, that I didn’t talk about for the good of the group,” Suarez said. “It’s going to continue to happen. The players are going to reach a limit and explode. At the Copa America, players told me, ‘Luis, I’ll play the Copa America and then I won’t play again’.
“That tells you that we’re nearing a difficult situation. Then you get over it and you return because you love your country. We all love representing our country.”
Suarez claimed a group of players even organised a meeting on one occasion “to ask the coach to at the very least greet us with a ‘Good morning’.” He added, “I had a five-minute meeting with him as a leader of the team and in the end, he only responded with a ‘Thank you very much’.”
There was more. Other matters irked Suarez, such as Bielsa’s staff clamping down on the Uruguay players enjoying card games in between training sessions and being told by one of those assistants that the head coach did not want the players to greet fans when the team arrived in New York for a meeting with Bolivia during Copa America’s group stage. Suarez then claims to have been confused when, the following day, Bielsa told his players to win the game for the fans.
Suarez also claimed that before Uruguay’s group game against the USMNT in Kansas City, only his starting XI trained while substitutes were told to stay at the team’s hotel. He said separate practice sessions for starters and substitutes became a common trend, claiming he only trained alongside Liverpool striker Nunez once during the whole tournament.
Suarez, above with Bielsa, listed complaints that were chiefly about the coach’s methods (Ira L Black – Corbis/Getty Images)
In Uruguay, Suarez’s words have been taken seriously and credibly. While his on-field conduct has received substantial criticism and punishment — most notably bans for racism and biting multiple opponents — the Inter Miami forward has rarely been at odds with his coaches during a playing career that has also included spells at Liverpool and Barcelona.
It is also notable on watching the interview that Suarez does not provide a wholesale admonishment of Bielsa. He appears to recognise the need for the Argentinian to assert his methods but what becomes clear repeatedly is Suarez’s exasperation by what he perceives to be an absence of tact and emotional intelligence when dealing with players and support staff.
Diego Godin, the former Uruguay captain and Atletico Madrid defender, told DSports’ radio station: “Luis is not questioning how Bielsa trains or his manner of leading a group or wanting to compete. He is being the voice of people who are not having a great time in terms of interpersonal relationships.”
Godin went on to explain that Suarez’s preference had been to speak internally, where he “could not find a response”, which left him with no choice but to speak out publicly in the interests of his team-mates following retirement. Godin added: “This follows a long cycle with Oscar Tabarez (the previous head coach) where we had generated a form of coexistence, codes or rules that were not written but were imposed: how to the deal with the boss, the groundspeople, how to act at a meetup and training — and those things changed today. It is neither better nor worse, but different. Luis is talking about the human part, the relationship, the communication and the respect between everyone.”
Within the national team setup, Suarez’s comments have been backed up.
Valverde, speaking to Uruguayan reporters, said: “What Luis said is all true — he never lied, he never said anything that wasn’t the case. He didn’t exaggerate, he said things as they are.”
Asked how the matter can be resolved, Valverde said: “As we’ve done various times since Marcelo’s been here, we fixed it by talking. We’ve always done it that way and this is going to be another thing that we’ll fix that way.” Goalkeeper Sergio Rochet also told reporters that “some problems” need to be “resolved”.
Ignacio Alonso, the president of the AUF, told Uruguayan newspaper El Observador that Suarez had raised the issues privately with himself and the association’s sporting director, Jorge Giordano. Alonso said he had held meetings this week with Bielsa. “I saw him working as he always does,” the AUF president said of their coach. “The squad received from him the same attention that they always receive. He (Bielsa) has the fundamental objective that is a transition from one era toward another that has the same pride in wearing the Uruguayan shirt.”
This, we should remember, is the core objective for Bielsa — overseeing the end of a generation for Uruguay following the international retirements of Suarez, Godin and Edinson Cavani, the top three names on their appearances list, into a new era that will be led by players such as Valverde, Nunez and Manuel Ugarte.
In typical Bielsa fashion, he shook things up. During his first year in the Uruguay job, he has called up more than 50 players, including a series of youngsters. His methods have not only surprised and impacted the playing staff.
As The Athletic recounted during Copa America, Sebastian Abreu, who won 70 caps for Uruguay between 1996 and 2012, told TyC Sports that everyday employees were experiencing demands that they had not been exposed to in 15 years under Tabarez, claiming that up to eight workers had quit the setup. Goalkeeping coach Carlos Nicola exited in June after disagreements with Bielsa, while ESPN reported that Alberto Pan, chief of health at the AUF, left because he would not comply with the coach’s wish for him to be present in the office every day.
Bielsa’s ways have long been unconventional but he has had success with them (Ernesto Ryan/Getty Images)
Carlos Manta, an executive within the AUF, drove 200km (around 125 miles) to the training complex, admittedly without a scheduled meeting in the diary, and Bielsa decided not to greet him at all, instead concentrating on other tasks he had organised that day. “I’m going to see if he will return the gas (money),” Manta later joked.
As ever with Bielsa, these are the idiosyncrasies that are lauded in the good times and chastised in the bad. The Athletic spoke to a colleague who was part of his staff when he was managing Leeds United from 2018-22, and he describes the period as the most rewarding of his career — but there were also plenty of times when Bielsa’s relentless and exhaustive demands pushed him to his limits.
“Nobody can imagine the demands that every player receives from Marcelo,” the colleague, who is an ally of Bielsa and so wishes to remain anonymous, explains. “I have never seen anything like it. The problem with this comes if you are not succeeding. Who will accept these demands in that situation?”
For all the tears that were shed when Bielsa was sacked at Elland Road in February 2022, there was no shortage of individuals who, at the time, felt they could no longer comply with his required level of intensity.
Yet at the same time, he remains a hero to so many, such as the new USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino, who played under him for Argentine side Newell’s Old Boys at the turn of the 1990s. This week, former Leeds midfielder Kalvin Phillips said on the BBC’s My Mate’s A Footballer podcast that Bielsa was “the main reason we did so well (Leeds were promoted from the Championship) and why I progressed”.
Adam Forshaw, another former Leeds midfielder, recalls Bielsa’s unique approach.
Forshaw told The Athletic: “He was trying to create a culture of good people. When we first went in for pre-season, we had to leave our mobile phones in the car. We used to do litter-picking around the training ground between sessions. We had reading sessions – it was called ‘Reading is Freedom’. That came more from Salim Lamrani, his interpreter. We’d sit in a circle, read passages ourselves and then we’d break it down, what it meant.”
Bielsa’s demands extended beyond the training ground. “He (Bielsa) would give us homework,” Forshaw continues. “It might be an article (to read), and then the next day we would sit in a meeting room and talk about the meaning of it. The 2018 World Cup was on when he came in and we had to watch certain games, work out what formations teams were playing, then come in the next day and say what we would do (against them), filling in a piece of paper. We were learning his way, so we would work out what we would do up against that team — we all had to know the formation we would play. Sometimes we would sit in pairs while there was a game on.
“We were saying that players who were signing (for Leeds then) would be thinking, ‘What on earth am I doing?’. You don’t even tell these stories to people because it’s almost too far-fetched — but we just hung off every word he said. We thought he was a genius. The change was so fast and so evident. We finished 13th (in the second-tier Championship) the year before. We signed Pat (striker Patrick Bamford), we signed (wing-back) Barry Douglas and we got to the play-off semi-finals. The next year, we blitzed the league.
“We had a full pre-season on the training ground; he didn’t take us away, he didn’t believe in the tours. We had a hotel in Wetherby (near the training ground) for six weeks. Between the morning and afternoon sessions, we’d go to the hotel and then, after training, we’d go back and stay there. I had a young son and lived two minutes away from the hotel. For six weeks, apart from the weekends, we would stay in the hotel.
“But I was at an age, around 27, when I was so invested. I’d been to the Premier League, so I was all-in. I loved it. I didn’t tell my missus that at the time! I never forget Stuart Dallas, who had three kids, saying to me, ‘I can’t do this. I’m going to have to tell the manager I need to leave because this isn’t going to work for me and my family’, and then Bielsa and Leeds went and changed his life. He had never been anywhere near the Premier League before.”
Perhaps buy-in for such methods is easier to achieve at club level, where everyday exposure normalises habits and creates a culture. Yet the counterpoint to that can be found in the fact this is Bielsa’s third spell as a national-team head coach, having previously managed Chile and his homeland, with whom he won Olympic gold in 2004. Or perhaps it may be the case that some more established players, who do not owe a breakthrough or significant career development to Bielsa, are less persuaded to sacrifice their pride at the altar of his unusual working methods.
Suarez offered an example of how Bielsa’s occasionally cold approach does not work with all players.
During that 2-0 win against Argentina last November, a half-time rebuke for forward Nunez was so severe that the player was crying in the tunnel afterwards. Suarez noticed his team-mate was upset and told him: “You are here on your own merit, because of how you work, because you are a goalscorer and you are the best. You have to continue like this, forget what others are saying. Wash your face, go out there and smash it.”
In the second half, Nunez scored, which Suarez saw as evidence of the player needing support and care. Yet Suarez bumped into Bielsa afterwards and claims the coach told him that if he had not rebuked Nunez in the manner he had, then the player would not have run as hard in the second half. Suarez insisted to Bielsa that it was necessary for him, as a player, to support his team-mate.
Suarez congratulates Nunez against Panama (Carl Kafka/ISI Photos/Getty Images)
And so two men were vindicated: Bielsa in believing the stick had stirred a reaction, and Suarez in his conviction the carrot had calmed Nunez down.
Following Friday’s defeat in Peru, Bielsa conceded that the week’s events had negatively impacted his leadership. He consumes a huge amount of media, not only sports but also films, art and architecture. At Leeds, he regularly asked staff members to translate articles for him. Suarez’s interview will not have passed him by.
“I know that my authority is affected in some way,” Bielsa told reporters. “But I prepared for the match with the utmost seriousness and the players’ response was the same as when I started working here. It did not alter the conviction with which the match was prepared in any way.”
Speaking to The Athletic this week, former Athletic Bilbao president Josu Urrutia described Bielsa, who coached the Spanish club between 2011 and 2013, as a “very intense person at all levels”.
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Urrutia said: “He is a very good communicator, not only in public but also in private conversations, a person who enriches the conversation. Marcelo has a methodology that he is constantly correcting. He is a perfectionist and with the intensity with which he works, I’m sure he continues to modify it. His work is focused on improving what he did yesterday.
“He is an intense person, also reflective. He transmits honesty and gives 100 per cent. When he makes a mistake, he recognises it and asks for forgiveness. He has left a wonderful memory. Not only what we did but how we did it.”
Whether Bielsa will leave the Uruguay job with such wonderful memories remains to be seen.
Additional reporting: Stuart James, Guillermo Rai and Sergio Gonzalez
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Publish date : 2024-10-13 17:16:00
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