With his ‘spygate’ PowerPoint, Marcelo Bielsa has enhanced his legend | Jonathan Wilson

The Leeds manager has an almost pathological honesty and there are few people in football so ready to admit fault as him

Marcelo Bielsa’s first job in coaching was at the city university in Buenos Aires. He hadn’t made it as a player, too slow to make more than four appearances in central defence for Newell’s Old Boys. He had floated about the lower leagues for a while, studying agronomy and physical education. A university side was an obvious stepping-stone to greater things, but Bielsa didn’t treat it as such. Rather he watched 3,000 players before selecting his squad of 20.

The 63-year-old has always been meticulous. When he was given a job in youth development at Newell’s, he wondered whether clubs were missing out on players from the interior, so got a map of Argentina, divided it into 70 sections and arranged a trial in each. Because he didn’t like flying, he ended up driving more than 5,000 miles in his Fiat 147 to see the results, establishing a theme that would become familiar of human fallibility, often his own, banging up against his plans and principles.

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