Marcelo Bielsa speaking in Uruguay: enthusiasm, running, and everything else

"Overall," said Marcelo Bielsa, "I'm very happy with everything."

His Uruguay team had just beaten Peru 3-0 to ensure qualification for the 2026 World Cup, and Bielsa was keen to bask in the positives. Winning at home, he said, "Is a good way to qualify." They attacked well. Individuals performed well, particularly Giorgian de Arrascaeta. There were plenty of highlights, lots of chances, three goals.

"There were a lot of people in the stadium," he said. "How fortunate that the performance was valuable, to offer to the public. It would not be the same to qualify without winning and without playing well." He was even happy with the grass. "One thing to highlight was the condition of the pitch," he said, "which facilitated the attacking."

Bielsa had been chirpy in his pre-match press conference, too, at least until he got distracted by the state of contemporary journalism and social media addiction. I wonder if this good mood is deliberate. Bielsa's time in charge of Uruguay so far has been uneven, since Luis Suárez loudly quit because the new manager wasn't friendly enough, and Edinson Cavani quietly quit around the same time, and after finishing 3rd in the Copa America results declined. One fan interviewed last week, a 63-year-old shopkeeper, was held up as typical in articles about why Uruguay has not fallen in love with Bielsa the way Chile did: "He has bad manners when he talks and I don't think the players like him very much," he said, preferring his predecessor Oscar Tabarez.

That fan probably won't have enjoyed Bielsa's pre-Peru press conference, clocking in at one hour twenty. But Bielsa was in a better mood than at previous pressers, looking up at the audience, drawing journalists into conversations, even telling one of them, "That is a great question".

The answer to that question, as with much of what Bielsa said, felt relevant to Leeds United Football Club. It was about the ideal form of a World Cup squad, and whether Bielsa would prefer a 26 or 23 player squad at the tournament. He was less interested in that as an absolute, but more willing to talk about how a squad of 26 will work. 23 players is two players for each position and three goalkeepers; 26 means three spaces for three 'third choices'. "Do we take the fourth player who is proud to be third choice or do we take the third player who is annoyed to be third choice? What would you do?" he asked.

The journalist replied that he imagined the situation would not be so strictly about third and fourth choices, and he would expect Bielsa to take more attackers to give himself more options.

"You represent journalism," Bielsa replied. "If there is one thing I have avoided all my life, it is ingratiating myself with journalism. But why do I say you are very intelligent? Because what you say is true."

The 'worst' performers, Bielsa said, are usually the forwards. Why does he think that? Look at substitutions. Players are subbed when their performance decreases. The players subbed most often are forwards. Forwards, then, must be the worst performers. There is a good reason for that, though: "They are the ones who play the worst because it is the place on the field where it is the hardest to play well." "Defending is always easier than attacking," he went on, so he would take more attackers in his squad, because there will be more chances for the third choices to play because the first and second choices are struggling.

You may now look at the impact of Leeds United's summer transfer window on their squad balance for 2025/26 and scream into a pillow if you wish.

Bielsa had already spent a lot of time in the press conference defining what makes a good performance, for a team and individual, and how he analyses that, and what he sees as important, and how by these measures he evaluates his work as Uruguay coach so far. He underlined it all by saying that, with the quality of the players they have, the team should have achieved better results than it had. But, he went on, "the worst thing a trainer can do is to wrongly value those expressions that summarise his work. The expressions that summarise the work I do are football matches. So, I am going to spend ten minutes to explain this in the shortest and most synthetic way possible."

(It took longer than ten minutes, so long that Bielsa eventually observed, "By the expression of those who listen to you, you can tell whether or not you have managed to transmit something interesting to them. I don't think so. By how I interpret those who are listening to me, I don't feel that I have.")

His argument, in summary, is that the fundamental questions to ask of a coach's work are: are the players enthusiastic, or not? And are they performing according to what they are capable of, or not?

"If they play a line of four, a line of three, three forwards — all these are, from my point of view, things that the coach manages but that have a minimal impact on achieving success and triumph," he said. "Plan A, plan B, for me all these things do not have an impact."

The impact comes from enthusiasm and playing as well as you can. And the key to both is running. If a player runs a lot, it doesn't mean he is playing well, Bielsa said. But players who run a lot never play badly.

"Why? Because he has a state of mind that activates virtues. When a player has virtues, what activates the virtues is the state of mind. And the state of mind makes the player try, through energy, to activate everything he has inside ... The enthusiast runs, and the enthusiast who runs activates his virtues. There is a process there, which is a very valuable process for the players to achieve their best expression."

Not all running is the same, of course. When Bielsa and his staff analyse the physical performance of a player, "there are five qualities: total distance, intensity, sprint, accelerations and decelerations, maximum speed. Those are the aspects, right? And each player, we are looking at his average, that's why when you do 40 or 80 weekly analyses, because almost all of them play twice a week, you start to see patterns." And you see facts, too. The coach might score a player 7/10 and the journalist might give him 6/10, but they can't dispute how much running he did, and over years of analysis Bielsa has seen enough data to confirm his idea.

"The better the players are, the more they run," he said. "I see that it is very difficult for there to be a 7/10 with a down arrow of physical performance. When I see above 7, it's very difficult that I don't have an arrow showing vertical up or diagonal up in physical performance."

It sounds like Bielsa, with the more time allowed him as a national coach, has been monitoring this — and developments in world football — more carefully. "I value very much what I think," he said, "but I look to see if the environment confirms what I think, and if the environment does confirm what I think, I distrust myself less, which is also an important thing."

The summary of all this was, "I am saying that when the physical performance is good, there is a great possibility that the football performance will be good," so Uruguay's results under Bielsa have to be read in the context of their physical performance.

"In each game I evaluate if we ran above our average and if we ran more than the opponent." Both had to have happened for Bielsa to decide he had done his work properly. It was not enough to run more than the opponent: the opponent might not be a high level team, so outrunning them is easy. And it's not enough to run more than your own average — the opponent might be a high level team that runs more than you. And even doing both — outrunning the opponent and your own average — doesn't guarantee winning, because of luck. And vice-versa: against Brazil, Uruguay ran less than them and less than their own average, and "we drew a match that we didn't deserve to draw. A very good result, but not a result like the ones we want to build."