(On Soccer)
As you turn out onto Burley Road, where the last remnants of the city of Leeds slowly dissolve into the Yorkshire countryside, there is a barn in the middle of a field. It’s there, alone, the size of a shed, on a piece of land that marks the border between a pet aesthetic and a dog park.
For a long time, it was as ordinary as any structure. A barn, in a field, in a part of the world where there are many barns and many fields. And then one day, a year or so ago, it changed. One side, the one you see straight ahead when you go down the hill, was suddenly covered with an impressive monochrome mural by Marcelo Bielsa.
Perhaps what attracted attention was the incongruity between the work and its location. Bielsa’s face, solemn and with glasses, appeared out of nowhere, observed everything it scrutinized —which, in this case, was equivalent to a series of dogs in various states of cleanliness— and gave it the air of a border post, a territorial marker. He proclaimed that this field was Bielsa’s territory.
In the days following the curtain closed on Bielsa’s three-and-a-half years as Leeds United manager, the debate understandably centered on the state in which he had left the team. Did the famously demanding methods of the Argentine coach, his ideological intransigence, leave the club in a genuine risk of relegation? Or was his firing a premature reaction to a difficult series of games and an ongoing injury crisis that had deprived a small squad of key players?
However, as he left Leeds, the place was much more significant. Sometimes it can be easy to exaggerate the impact of football on a city, a country, a population as a whole. The success or failure of a team is supposed to have a kind of seismic effect on your house; sport has enough arrogance to believe that the spirits of millions of people depend on every turn it takes.
However, Bielsa’s impact at Leeds has a physical form. The Burley Road mural hasn’t been the only piece of street art to appear in recent years. There is another portrait of Bielsa in Wortley, near Elland Road, the club’s stadium, in which the Argentine is portrayed as Christ the Redeemer.
In Headingley – a district similar to Brooklyn, only better, because it has a cricket ground and a Greggs bakery – Bielsa’s image is accompanied by one of his axioms: “A man with new ideas is a madman until his ideas they succeed”. In the center of town, there’s a huge representation of Kalvin Phillips, the club’s local idol, just around the corner from the Victorian grandeur of the Corn Exchange.
And all over the city there are electrical distribution boxes – those grim gray street furniture that our eyes blot out of sight – that have been daubed in the club’s colors (blue, white and yellow) and have been painted by street artist Andy McVeigh. decorated with the slogans and iconography of the team.
All of this has happened since Bielsa’s arrival, since he gave life to a sleepy club, since he brought order to a decade and a half of chaos. By the standards of modern football, where superclubs weigh their trophies in tons, Bielsa’s legacy is slim. He won a promotion to the Championship. He took Leeds to ninth place in the Premier League and left them worried regarding relegation. He did not deliver a litany of medals, an era of glory.
He did something much less tangible, but much more important. He gave Leeds an identity. He not only made the fans fall in love with his club once more, he gave them something to defend, to represent them, that they might recognize as their own. He made Leeds the emblem of a style, a belief, a strategy. And, in the process, he elevated the place the team calls home.
These types of claims are often difficult to verify. This is not the case. Bielsa, in every way, has left Leeds a much more colorful place than she found it.
Of course that is not necessarily ideal for its replacement. Jesse Marsch may have just the kind of background most English clubs hope to have these days – a former student of New York Red Bulls, Red Bull Salzburg and RB Leipzig, steeped in the principles of the German pressure game, de rigueur among the inhabitants of the Premier League—but it lacks Bielsa’s seriousness, his reputation and, more immediately, his emotional connection with the fans, with the city.
Nevertheless, perhaps 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, white and yellow. His rewards were not prizes, but portraits. He earned them because he gave the club, and the city, something they might be proud of, something they might believe in. He made the place more colorful. Marsch’s task, that of any technical director, is to do the same.
the model owner
Roman Abramovich changed much more than Chelsea. His impact on English football – and the World Cup – extends far beyond taking a glamorous suitor and transforming him into the most consistently successful English club of the 21st century. The Stamford Bridge stadium has not been the only one that during the last two decades has lived under the “Roman Empire”, as the Russian flag that adorns the Matthew Harding stand of the building says. We have all been.
Abramovich’s arrival, those early years of seemingly endless spending, set off an inflationary spiral that pushed transfer fees and salaries across Europe higher than ever, limiting the number of clubs able to compete. , first for the talent, then for the trophies, which pushed some of the old elite clubs into irrelevance and others to the brink of something much worse.
Largely thanks to Abramovich, European football felt the need to introduce a form of financial fair play legislation. Largely thanks to Abramovich, the Chinese conglomerates, the Gulf states and all sorts of little princes decided that soccer was the place to invest their money, to service their egos, to launder their reputations.
And, above all, Abramovich provided the model of the ideal owner for fans around the world. Ever since he appeared out of nowhere in 2003, fans at countless clubs have longed for their own Abramovich, someone with an impossible fortune who seems happy to splurge on whatever it takes to find success.
The pervasiveness of his example is evident in the response to his decision this week to put Chelsea up for sale. The fact that Chelsea fans consider him a good owner, a fond memory, a silent idol, is not so surprising. Just look at what he has given you. The fact that those not linked to the club insist on giving it the same rating is extraordinary.
In effect, Abramovich pumped money whenever it was needed. In effect, he produced trophies on an industrial scale. Indeed, he has turned the club into not only a cutting-edge superpower, but a vehicle for some admirable charitable initiatives, particularly related to fighting anti-Semitism and promoting Holocaust education.
And, in fact, it is possible, if you wish, to ignore the questions that persist around all this: Why? Why did he do all that? For what purpose? Did he really fall in love with football following watching Ronaldo and Real Madrid destroy Manchester United? Did he just want a shortcut to British high society? Or was it something else? If yes, what was it? Why has all this happened?
However, the manner of his imminent departure should not be excluded from the discussion of his legacy. Thanks to Abramovich, Chelsea might still be under threat from the impact of economic sanctions imposed (perhaps very conveniently slowly) by the British government once morest Russia’s oligarchs.
Thanks to Abramovich, Chelsea is now in the process of being sold almost like a used asset. Abramovich has said he is not going to “rush” the sale, but the fact that his advisers seem to have contacted whoever came to mind, and put a deadline of just a few days on offers, rather suggests that Abramovich is not It has the months that a process of this type usually requires.
Make no mistake regarding it, Abramovich doesn’t have the time to make sure he’s passing the “custody” of the club to precisely the right people. He will sell it to whoever offers him the most money. And that money, at the price he’s asking right now, will cover a good chunk of the $2 billion he’s given Chelsea over the years. Abramovich will not be left without a peso in his pocket.
Simply put, this is not what a good owner does. A good owner doesn’t put a club in that kind of political stance. A good owner does not sell in a hurry. A good owner doesn’t run away because a war instigated by a despot with whom he insists on denying any kind of connection changes the world overnight. They say it has been a beautiful romance. But a romance cannot be separated from the way it ends.
