In his latest column for leedsunited.com, lifelong supporter Jon Howe looks at the impact Marcelo Bielsa has had on the style of football at Elland Road.

Howe is the author of two books on the club, ‘The Only Place For Us: An A-Z History of Elland Road’ - which has been updated as a new version for 2021 - and ‘All White: Leeds United’s 100 Greatest Players’ in 2012.



If Marcelo Bielsa has taught us anything during his three and a half years at Leeds United, it is to forget everything we thought we knew about football. And if that sounds like a pretty broad and reckless discarding of theories, ideas and conventions, then I think that’s a fair reflection of how fundamentally the great man has changed how we see and think about the game.

And it is quite possible that Bielsa’s greatest triumph is that within weeks of being at the club he had us watching Gaetano Berardi as a converted centre half pinning Bailey Peacock-Farrell to his goal line with a robust back-pass and convincing us it was the right thing to do. Yes, the kitten population of LS11 multiplied several times over as we watched Liam Cooper join the uneasy triumvirate as they passed in triangles out of the tightest of corners, rather than “launch it!”, while seasoned Championship brutes bore down on them like grizzled cartoon villains.

Somehow, and often by the skin of their teeth, Leeds always survived those moments, and very quickly we learned to trust Bielsa and we learned to treat conventional team formations like the punk movement treated 1970s prog-rock. It was time to move on, 4-4-2 was for squares and Leeds United were re-writing the rulebook.

The fluidity of formations within Bielsa’s Leeds United has been a central feature of the last three and a half years; the one thing that hasn’t changed is that everything changes. And this is to the extent that TV and radio pundits make me chuckle when they talk about how certain teams play in a certain formation; as if they are wedded to a system that is ingrained in their DNA. Bielsa left that thinking behind before many of these experts were even born, and in reality most top teams have followed his lead in educating players to be multi-disciplined, open-minded and deep-thinking about the game.

Stuart Dallas has long been considered our modern day Paul Madeley; capable of playing to a good standard pretty much anywhere on the pitch, and somehow a staple feature of almost every Leeds United eleven without carving out a core position. Pascal Struijk is becoming another version of this. Like Dallas, there always seems to be a place for Struijk in the team, whatever formation we start the game playing. Already this season Struijk has featured as a midfielder, centre half, on the left of a back three, and on Sunday versus Leicester, on the left of a back four.   

To the uneducated, it might look like Bielsa is simply shoe-horning players like Dallas and Struijk into his side and making up a formation to suit, but of course we know that this is the fruits of a belief that every player should be able to fill-in in numerous positions to cover for absences, and without the team output materially changing. Leeds haven’t quite perfected that so far this season, but on Sunday we had perhaps the closest example of Bielsa’s philosophy working to the letter.

Looking back through history, Leeds United’s best sides have been identified by a pretty rigid 4-4-2 formation, and in particular, by a midfield fulcrum that trips off the tongue easier than your date of birth. Bremner-Giles-Lorimer-Gray, Batty-McAllister-Strachan-Speed, maybe even Batty-Dacourt-Kewell-Bowyer at a push. Seeking solace in such knowing, nostalgic comfort and tried and trusted reliability is sometimes a safe place we like to retreat to, but then Marcelo Bielsa doesn’t do ‘safe’ and wouldn’t know how to retreat even if he was facing an entire Zulu tribe with one functioning limb and a pair of wonky glasses that Patrick Bamford smashed to bits with a wayward volley.

Arguably, Bielsa’s Leeds is also identified by its midfield, but bear with me on this, because it’s in a very different way. Essentially you have Kalvin Phillips playing in one position and everyone else playing everywhere else. This was particularly true in the Championship, and while Phillips now finds himself more evenly represented all over the pitch because of the very nature of the Premier League, those around him play to a formation that seemingly changes every five minutes. Whether that’s 4-1-4-1, 3-3-3-1 or 4-2-3-1 is quite often impossible to establish, and to us mere mortals with one eye on the half-time beer queue and the other on our Fantasy League standings, largely irrelevant. It is to be hoped that the players know the system, because the opposition certainly won’t; and you imagine coaching teams in the opposing technical area jotting down their own version of Numberwang, hoping to land on a configuration that makes some sense of what they are seeing on the pitch. Meanwhile, Leeds are swarming all over them and a nasty rash is incoming.

At least that’s how it used to work. And last time out, a 1-1 draw with Leicester saw Bielsa’s Leeds show the first signs of that indefinite brilliance returning for 2021/22. Was that down to Adam Forshaw starting his first league game in two years?

Given the complexity with how Leeds inter-change, man-mark and overload space, it seems churlish to suggest the presence of just one man made it all click, and maybe it was just a coincidence, because Leeds had slowly been recovering their form in each sequential game since the debacle at Southampton. But it can’t be ignored that Forshaw gave Leeds more presence in midfield, provided another link for the likes of Rodrigo, Dan James, Jack Harrison and Raphinha to work around and offered the work-rate to do the simple things that allow others to flourish. Brilliant as Kalvin Phillips is, the demands of Premier League opposition can sometimes spread him thin and I’m sure he was as happy as anyone to see Forshaw provide another anchor.

When we talk about formations and identity, it is probably best we don’t attempt to define Bielsa’s reign until he is gone. The beauty of watching a Bielsa team is living in the moment and not over-analysing it, just feast on the romance. In that sense, the best thing about watching Leeds United is when they play with a swagger and some audacity, in a way that even the opposition can’t believe what they just tried to do. A few years ago that was Berardi and Peacock-Farrell playing their way out of a blind alley as if two prepubescent youths had turned into two hardened gunslingers overnight. And on Sunday versus Leicester it was Raphinha’s nutmegs, Dallas making relentless bombing raids down the right flank and Forshaw seeing off four Leicester attackers in his own penalty area.

This was Leeds United being audacious, living on the edge and throwing caution to the wind; the very essence of what Bielsa set out to create and in the mould of what has brought them so much success.

Formations are patterns and structures, which are scripted and practiced. That is absolutely what Leeds United are, and what hours and hours of analysis and coaching creates. But formations are also rigid, and the very best Leeds United are anything but inflexible. The very best Leeds United comes when you can’t tell what the formation is, when there is a freedom that fizzes like a firework and when that formation is shifting, laughing and dancing before your very eyes.