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It is coming up to three years now since the evening at Swansea, only four Championship games into Marcelo Bielsa’s reign at Leeds United, when the coach decided to take drastic action. Leeds won the first three games of the season but after 28 minutes, they trailed Swansea and holding midfielder Kalvin Phillips was on a yellow card. Phillips was hooked and, considering these were the early and uncertain days of the Argentinian’s reign in Leeds, it would only have been natural for the player to wonder what may lie ahead.
As he sat on the bench at the Liberty Stadium, alongside Patrick Bamford and Jack Harrison, a serious leap of the imagination would have been required to think that Phillips could soon be a leading contender to anchor the England midfield at a major tournament.
Yet here he is, judged by Gareth Southgate to possess the quality in possession and dynamism without the ball to help make England tick. Much, of course, is down to Phillips’ own determination and dedication but this is a transformation turbocharged by the inspiring Bielsa. The Argentinian’s fingerprints are seen elsewhere in Gareth Southgate’s squad — Ben White was plucked from relative obscurity at Brighton to spend a season under Bielsa’s tutelage at Leeds and, one year on, now finds himself in contention for a place in the England defence. Elsewhere, it is only an embarrassment of riches in the right-back position and up front that has seen the consistency of Luke Ayling and Bamford overlooked after hugely impressive first seasons in the Premier League.
When White first stepped into the facilities at Leeds United’s Thorp Arch training ground two summers ago, he was pointed in the direction of the under-23s dressing room. Leeds’ sporting director Victor Orta had spotted him in a domestic cup fixture against Newport County and identified him as being capable of replacing Pontus Jansson, who was considered to be too disruptive by head coach Bielsa.
The coach challenged White, making him sharper, fitter and in the defender’s own words, to train “like it’s a game, like it’s the final of the World Cup”. At set pieces, Bielsa almost always charged White with marking the tallest opposing player. In training, he spent a couple of days a week performing drills in central midfield, learning from Phillips, to the extent that he coped admirably when Brighton manager Graham Potter asked him to play central midfield against Manchester City in a particularly impressive display this past season. White’s versatility, enhanced by the innovative Potter, was a major factor in ensuring he replaced Trent Alexander-Arnold in the England squad for Euro 2020, as he has experience across the back line and in holding midfield.
White and Phillips have both earned a place in Southgate’s squad (Photo: Eddie Keogh – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
Those close to the Bielsa regime say that the coach finds time for every member of his squad. In the team hotel before a game, he holds a 15-minute individual meeting with each player but in Phillips, a source explains, “Marcelo saw a personal project.” He continues: “Marcelo views his players as buildings, or palaces, and he is the architect behind them.”
One coach who observed Phillips closely in the pre-Bielsa period at Leeds simply says the Argentinian has overseen a “transformation in the player’s mentality and understanding of the game”.
Leeds fans know by now that their players are weighed every morning, using a DEXA scan machine, which clearly details lean mass, fat mass and bone mass. Bielsa encourages a protein-heavy diet for much of the week, then ramps up the carbohydrate intake in the 24 hours before match day, and those who Bielsa does not consider fit enough simply do not play. One player who arrived several kilograms overweight into Bielsa’s first pre-season training camp never recovered his place in the Leeds team. In the case of Phillips, he had to work hard to conform to Bielsa’s demands for his physique. The odd beer or quick bit of fast food was quickly off the menu.
“Kalvin was on the end of maybe one of Bielsa’s most aggressive approaches,” one well-placed source explains. “The coach is exceptionally demanding, particularly about his weight, and he pushes him very hard every day. If a player edges over the precipice of the manager’s required average, he is sent to do extra work on a bike with a sport scientist.”
The fitness requirements extend beyond the vanity of a toned physique and rippling biceps for Phillips. Bielsa believes that his ideal player in the No 4 position must have both the endurance to cover significant ground but also the capability to perform the many short sprints required to receive the ball and add pace to Leeds’ build-up play. Bielsa told his players that Leeds’ “offensive game changes” when Phillips receives the ball. That is why the analysts in the Leeds backroom staff have been ordered to produce numerous clips specifically for Phillips each week, aimed at enhancing the midfielder’s movement and positioning.
Indeed, Phillips is one of the few players for whom Bielsa sometimes hosts more than one meeting in the pre-match hotel. During those conversations, Bielsa explains, in intricate detail, the runs, movements and vision Phillips must demonstrate to dictate, break up and switch the play, drop in between the two centre-backs and take risks in possession. There are still moments when Bielsa becomes frustrated, such as that evening against Swansea, and it is because he has repeatedly explained what the player needs to do and, as human beings, sometimes even Bielsa’s machines falter. “But even that night against Swansea,” a source explains, “it was clear that Bielsa forgets about it by the next day. It is not about holding grudges.”
Bielsa’s quest for perfection is by now legendary, for a man who has a bed and kitchen installed for himself at the training ground, who obsesses over the length of grass on the training pitches and who, for a while in his first season, had the goalposts suspended off the ground as he argued this would provide a more equal distribution of sunlight across the turf.
This summer, Bielsa has remained in Yorkshire, often stopping by the Leeds training ground to check in on the building developments. In his spare time, he popped along to coach a local under-11 team in Leeds and introduced the kids to his unique brand of “Murderball”, a high-octane training drill.
Bielsa has been known to make similar selfless gestures before, such as in March 2008, when he was Chile manager heading to a match between Universidad Catolica and River Plate to watch Alexis Sanchez. As he walked to the stadium, he saw two children playing football on the street and gave them his tickets. When Bielsa commits, he goes all-in, builds authentic bonds with his local community. He makes a point of ensuring that either he or his assistants respond to letters from admirers around the world. When a Jewish Leeds fan wrote to invite Bielsa to a traditional Friday night dinner at their family home, Bielsa phoned up, politely declined, but then spent time discussing football with the supporter’s Spanish-speaking nephew.
At Athletic Bilbao, he visited a local nunnery as part of his research into creating tight-knit groups between footballers — many Bielsa players will attest that their monastic abstinence is required to cope with his demands — and on his way out, Bielsa is said to have asked the nuns to pray for his team.
When not training Yorkshire’s next generation of talent, Bielsa is building up a dossier of information from Euro 2020. Following the World Cup in 2018, Bielsa asked his staff to study every goal scored in the competition, and then demonstrate training drills that could directly relate to both creating and preventing the goal.
The idea is that players can relate more closely to goals scored in a major tournament and it demonstrates the potential final product of the drills. By keeping sessions fresh, innovative and relatable, Bielsa has maintained standards for three seasons and the progression was underlined by the way Leeds finished the campaign: of their final 11 games, they won seven and lost just one. They conceded only eight goals, averaging 0.72 per game, after averaging 1.7 goals conceded per game during their first 27 matches of the campaign.
Speaking to The Athletic last summer, Phillips explained: “When the manager first came in, we had a meeting where he went through the names of each player telling us which number we’d be wearing. Obviously, I thought I was going to be No 8 or something like that, but when he got to me he said No 4. It surprised me because it hadn’t crossed my mind that I might be playing there. After that meeting, he told me he wanted me to be a defensive-mid and that I’d have to get better defensively and in the air. I started working on it straight away. Up until then, I probably thought of myself as box-to-box. If you’d asked me, that’s what I would have said. I wasn’t a defender and I didn’t think of myself as one. I’d scored a few goals in the previous season. So when I first got told to play defensive-mid I thought, ‘What’s going on here then?'”
Phillips worked on his game: during Leeds’ promotion-winning season he recorded the squad’s most tackles per game and was highly ranked for interceptions, passes, touches and pass accuracy. It speaks volumes for his form in the Championship that England manager Gareth Southgate had first considered calling Phillips up in February and March 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 lockdowns put paid to international football.
In the Premier League, he formed a crucial cog in the Leeds midfield and he is now an established part of the England squad. Off the field, his development continues apace. He is not one of the most vocal forces in the Leeds dressing room — Liam Cooper, Stuart Dallas and Ayling remain the figures most likely to provoke their team-mates into improvement — but his attitude and positive personality are infectious. Bielsa particularly values the role he plays in encouraging the many young players who participate in first-team training sessions, where Phillips, as an academy product, takes it upon himself to welcome newcomers into the group. There’s often a significant number of under-23 or under-18 players involved, as some Bielsa sessions require 33 players spread across three playing pitches.
As for White, his evolution continues to accelerate. After an authoritative display in the warm-up win over Romania, White was under consideration to start the first game of the tournament against Croatia in the absence of Harry Maguire. Despite signing a new contract at Brighton last summer, serious interest remains. Arsenal would like to wrap a deal up for a fee between £40-50 million in the coming weeks, but Manchester United, Chelsea and Leicester have all already watched the defender closely. Liverpool scout Andy O’Brien, formerly a player at Newcastle, Bolton and Leeds, spent several months observing White in the Championship for Leeds but the club’s deal for defender Ibrahima Konate would make a deal unlikely for Jurgen Klopp’s side this summer.
It must all feel a world away from that first week at Leeds when White briefly feared he would not be able to rise to challenge. His mum Carole explained: “The first week, he was on the phone to me saying, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be up to this, Mum’ but he kept saying he was determined to do it. He does not give in. His centre-back partner, Liam Cooper, spoke to him and said, ‘Dig in and you’ll be fine’.
A source close to Bielsa recalls of White’s progress: “He was not struggling but learning. There is no better finishing school than Bielsa’s.”