Marcelo Bielsa, during a Leeds United England match in November 2020.MICHAEL REGAN (Portal)
Marcelo Bielsa returns to football. The 67-year-old Argentina coach, who is as revered in the world as questioned in his own country, will lead the Uruguay team. It will be his third national team after the six years he led Argentina (1998-2004), with the intervening loss at the 2002 World Cup, and the four years (2007-2011) that he led Chile and laid the groundwork for a dominant team put America years later. The Uruguayan Football Confederation (AUF) has not made any official announcement, however, according to national media reports, the coach is already in Montevideo and will sign his contract next Monday. It will be four million dollars per season, with the goal and expiry date: the 2026 World Cup.
Bielsa has not directed England since his sacking from Leeds United bench in February 2022. His four-year adventure in the United Kingdom, during which he managed to promote the team to the Premier League after 16 seasons in the second division and left the team abruptly after a string of defeats, is a reflection of a manager falling into the category of the coach was raised myth because there are inalienable principles. .
His penchant for man-to-man marking, possession and attacking play is less well known than his motivational speeches and search for an ethic about sporting success. At Leeds, they will still remember the 2019 game against Aston Villa, in the midst of their battle for promotion, when the manager ordered his side to go for the tie after taking the lead while an opposing player asked for help from doctors to be examined. Some players from this cycle also say that the coach once stopped training to hand out plastic bags to them so they could go out and collect the rubbish on the property.
The Uruguayan team seems to need this epic right now. In March they drew with Japan and narrowly defeated South Korea in two friendlies, but the final image they left on the world bordered on tragedy: on December 2, Uruguay beat Ghana 2-0 in their third World Cup match. from Qatar, but it wasn’t enough and they were eliminated in the group stage. The historic Luis Suárez cried on the substitutes’ bench, defender José María Giménez followed a camera screaming at the referee and coach Diego Alonso blamed FIFA for the points lost in previous games. Alonso had taken over the team’s technical management a year earlier to follow in a big footsteps: Óscar Washington Tabárez, the coach who marked an era at the helm of the team at the age of 15, was relegated after a series of defeats nullified, suddenly dismissed in jeopardy for the World Cup. Following the Qatar disaster and the end of the cycle of a number of players who shone over the past decade, the AUF renewed its powers and sacked its technical director.
The rumor that the chosen one would be Marcelo Bielsa started circulating almost two months ago. “It’s a matter of hours. It’s something that’s practically defined, but it’s a contract that has its complexity,” summarized the new vice president of the AUF, Gastón Tealdi. in a radio interview This week. The weeks of discussions came to an end this Thursday after Bielsa approved the contract proposal. The Argentine will become the second foreign coach to lead the Uruguayan side that won the first World Cup in 1930 and repeated the title two decades later after Daniel Passarella, also Argentinian, had a brief stint between 2000 and 2001. He will not be an unknown quantity in the next qualifying rounds: he is the seventh Argentine to take the helm of a South American team.
The challenge has the format of a coach who has traveled the world without leaving indifferent the demanding fans of Leeds themselves, Newell’s from Rosario, Athletic Bilbao or Oylmpique from Marseille. His football made school in Chile. A stadium was named in his honor in the city of Rosario. In Leeds, fans renamed a city center passageway after their own. And he’s no stranger to Uruguay: The newspaper El País reported this Thursday that Bielsa has been happily strolling through the city streets for years and one day asked a local radio station for a toilet without being recognized. When they realized who the visitor was, they named the service after him. It could be the first tribute to another bielismo revival.
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