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The inside story of Marcelo Bielsa's pre-season season training regime at Leeds United last summer - Leeds Live
Prior to his arrival at Leeds United, Marcelo Bielsa’s pre-season training regimes were the stuff of legend.
“The first two days were tests and after that it was hardcore,†Aston Villa's former Lille winger Anwar El Ghazi said during Bielsa’s previous managerial stint in France. “We trained at 10am and second training was 6.30pmâ€.
Bielsa had ordered the construction of 20-stripped down bungalows at Lille’s Domaine de Luchin training complex, with El Ghazi giving further insight into what the Leeds squad could expect.
"We eat here, we sleep here and we do everything here,†he continued.
"They're small bungalows, just a bedroom, air conditioning and electricity, that's all. If you want to take a shower you go to the changing room and we have a room with PlayStation and table tennis.
The Leeds squad are due back at Thorp Arch on Monday morning(Image: Joe Mewis)
"The coach said we had to be a family together and when you're eating together, sleeping next door to each other, you become a family. We are like brothers now."
YouTube videos of a typical Bielsa training session in France did the rounds last summer following Bielsa's arrvial at Leeds, showing players undergoing a series of intense drills before dropping to floor in a state of near-exhaustion.
And that was just the physical side.
Bielsa training Marseille
Manchester City's Benjamin Mendy played under Bielsa at Marseille and he had previously discuss the classroom demand Bielsa would set his squad.
"He made me devour videos like never before," the left-back told Onze Mondial.
"To begin with he put me in front of the videos and I'd fall asleep. But he was happy! I was shocked.
"After a while I stopped sleeping and told myself 'go on, I'll watch two minutes of this thing after all.'
Bielsa arrived with a reputation for tough pre-season sessions
"After that he talked to me, I talked to him and we'd go over moves together. He told me, 'see, that's why I let you sleep. You slept, you slept, you slept but the day you decided to watch you got interested on your own. If I'd pushed you to watch you wouldn't have been interested'... Marcelo is just too good.â€
A clue about Bielsa’s forthcoming arrival last summer was included when the club announced their pre-season plans at the end of May, confirming that they forgoing a pre-season tour in favour of ’three weeks of intense training’.
While Thorp Arch was not yet ready to house the first-team squad overnight for the pre-season schedule, it was clear Bielsa was steadfastly standing by his methods.
Double and triple sessions - some lasting up to two-and-a-half hours - followed in the days and weeks after Bielsa’s arrival in the country, with players spending ten hours-plus at the training ground, staying at nearby hotels to minimise travel time.
Every players was weighed when they arrived in the morning, with a DEXA scanner outlining lean mass, fat mass and bone mass, with those not meeting Bielsa’s exacting standards not joining the core first-team squad for training until they were considered to be fit.
Sessions involved high-intensity sprints to prepare the team for the pressing game which has been a key feature of Bielsa’s teams over the years, with repetition being key.
"I think there’s no secret. He’ll tell you his methods himself, he’s quite happy, he’ll go lecture on them,†Leeds' head of medicene and performance Rob Price said last season.
"Reptition is the key to everything he does. He feels if you’v put the hurt of practice in and you’ve done the movements in training it becomes second nature in the game. Rafa [Bentiez] was exactly the same. Rafa did repetition of shape, movements, organisation."
Patrick Bamford was the club's big summer transfer and the much-travelled forward admitted that Bielsa's methods were new to him.
Patrick Bamford was Leeds' biggest summer signing(Image: Leeds United)
"I’ve never had this style of training before," he told the BBC. "There’s passing drills that I’ve never done before. I remember when i first came in I thought I was doing the passing drill right and he pulled me to the side and said no, you’ve got to slow down, pause, explosive, slow down, pause, explosive. So it took me a few weeks before I got inured to learn this.
"As I thought about it, sometimes I thought, ’these drills must have a point’ and then something in the game today, I realised it was a carbon copy of one of the drills we do. With a one-two receive pass and then run in behind. And I thought, he’s obviously a very clever man, because they came naturally to me today and by drilling it in to us every week, it will hopefully start to come naturally and we’ll start playing the way he wants."
Speaking two weeks into the pre-season last summer, Angus Kinnear offered some insight into what was going on at the training ground.
"I think all of the physical training appears to be in context, so everything, rather than just running for the sake of running, everything's with the ball, everything's in-game scenarios,†he said.
"There's huge attention to detail of the finer points. I think the players have received a lot more individual coaching than they have previously, which we're excited about because anybody who followed Leeds last season will see the players didn't play to 100 per cent of their potential.â€
This individual coaching extended to 15-minute sessions where Bielsa and his staff would be show players clips from training sessions to drill home the work done out on the grass. As they season went on, opposition clips would also be sent via WhatsApp ahead of matches.
Kalvin Phillips also offered some insight into Bielsa's man mangement during those long summer days at Thorp Arch.
"To be fair you don't really see him much," the midfielder said following the first pre-season friendly at Forest Green.
Kalvin Phillips during the opening day win over Stoke City(Image: Nigel French/PA Wire)
"The only time you really see him is obviously on the training ground. Obviously the reputation that he has and what we've heard he has, that's the type of guy he is. He's very supportive and hard working and that's what he expects from you all the time. He expects one hundred per cent from us all.
"He's never negative. Obviously he tells you when you're doing something wrong but he's never negative, he always supports you, pushes you to do what's best for you and what he thinks you should be doing and I think that's great in a manager. Hopefully throughout the season he keeps on doing that.
"We've got a lot of Spanish lads so they translate pretty well but the stuff that we've been working on throughout the game I felt like it had paid off quite a bit and you could see glimpses of what we've been working on. With more work and more concentration we'll be able to showcase it throughout the games."
Given his World Cup exploits with Sweden, Pontus Jansson was a late-comer and he was quickly impressed with how much had changed over the summer.
Jansson arrived late after Sweden's run to the World Cup quarter-finals
"Everything was new, a lot of staff, new people around here and everyone was so more professional in a good way, of course" said the centre-back.
"Now everything has been good since day one, since I came back. I worked hard, exactly as the guys have done in the weeks before I came back and, yeah, you can see on the pitch the results, how we run, how we play and that the training we have done has made results for us."
"[It was] long days," he continued. "A lot of meetings. Long training, hard training. A lot of high-intensity in training, a lot of sprints.
"He wants us to train exactly how we want to play. I'm actually quite used to that from my time in Italy from the coach I had there. Him and Marcelo are quite similar so I'm used to it.
"But it's long days and you have to concentrate on every moment of the day."
And it was shortly before the start of the new season when Bielsa’s side were put through their paces in an entirely different manner.
Marcelo Bielsa puts in the hours in the classroom(Image: Beren Cross)
After a few weeks of exhausting physical exercises out on the grass, gruelling gym sessions and marathon tape-watching programmes, Bielsa’s next move was aimed solely at shaping his players’ mentality purely his own humble image.
Bielsa made it clear in his introductory press conference just how he sees his relationship with the fans.
"I'm really hopeful that the fans identify with and have that desire to support the home town in the same way which they support Bilbao," he said, drawing back on his La Liga experience.
"Working in football gives you a chance to see just how a city and group of fans can identify with each other. The fans - and I'm sure it's the case here - become part of the club. That’s what I’ve been told here and I'm excited to see if it does."
And that is why he instructed his players to spend a July afternoon picking up litter from the Thorp Arch training ground. After some rough calcualtions pointed out to the fact that the average fan would need to work three hours in their job to afford a match ticket, that’s how long Bielsa’s entire squad were put out to work for.
Jamie Shackleton, was began last summer as a recent academy graduate with aspirations of being part of the club’s pre-season friendlies, explained:
Jamie Shackleton first full senior pre-season was an eye-opener
“In the second week of pre-season, we spoke about the fans and how they’re the most important people to this club, how passionate they are and what it means to them to go and watch us play football,†said the teenager.
“Their lives involve a lot of hard work throughout the week to be able to afford a ticket for the weekend, so we had our own insight into a bit of hard graft away from football by going round the whole training ground clearing all the litter from the pitches, bushes, everything really.
“At that stage I hadn’t played in the first-team yet, so it was still my dream to play for the club and I’m a Leeds fan, so I knew exactly what it meant to come and watch anyway. The lads are all really grounded anyway, but a task like that definitely just reinforced what the club means to everybody.
"I think that was to get an understanding and the meaning behind it. I don’t think it was just picking up litter - he maybe wanted to bring us down back to earth. It was good and the whole place got a little tidy up as well.â€
Kemar Roofe, a far more established professional admitted he had to get his head around the idea at first.
The Leeds squad will be well aware of what faces the this summer
"It’s a natural reaction to think ‘what’s going on here we’re here to play football, not to pick litter up,’ but everything he does, there’s a hidden message behind it and I think that’s what you have to look at more then what we’re actually doing,†he said later in the season.
The move had all the hallmarks of Bielsa. Showing empathy with the common man, building team spirit and showing the kind of discipline that he has utilised throughout his career. It is this kind of behaviour that saw him earn the nickname ‘El Loco’ and when the first reports of this session hit the media on the eve of the new season, it quickly slotted in at the top of the 24-hour news cycle.
With a freshly-enriched soul, the Leeds squad would continue with their gruelling training schedule ahead around their domestic slate of pre-season friendlies.
While these would bring about a mixed set of results, it was this summer of hard yards and complete focus that would culminate in their statement-making opening weekend victory over pre-season title favourites Stoke City when the campaign got under way on August 5.
As Leeds United's squad prepare to return to training on Monday morning, it's been no surprise to see plenty of players posting clips of them in the gym on social media over the last few days, as they know exactly what is coming.
