"Not doing it is worse than doing it. So we do it." — Marcelo Bielsa talking football and craft

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It's been a high week of Bielsing, from know-nowts dismissing him as a 'myth' to the world of football losing its mind about someone, just one someone, doing something they want to instead of idly going unquestioningly along with everything he's told to do.

Marcelo Bielsa didn't appreciate being asked about his Fifa portrait. But that's not the same thing as disliking questions. Part of his disdain for press duties is that they concentrate on trivial things, and he cites the key experience when he allowed journalists to watch and interrogate one of his training sessions and all the headlines were about him missing a tooth. 

Get Bielsa talking football and he'll talk for as long as you want, and before any of this week's chatter about brusque interviews and refusals to go along with the media, that's what he did. The Uruguayan FA held a summit on 21st May, headlined by Bielsa and his coaches.

The livestream accounts for seven hours of the internet on YouTube. Only an hour-and-a-half of them involve Bielsa, although it's possible he could have gone longer: he wrapped things up after a word from the wings, adding as he rose gingerly from his chair that, "It's not because I'm old, but this seat is uncomfortable."

He'd been sitting the whole time in an armchair to the side, with five of his coaching staff on chairs and sofas alongside him, giving a presentation about what Bielsa said, with what must have been a smile, "we do in our free time" between the five or six games Uruguay play in a year. Obviously, they find plenty to do. 

First to speak was a familiar face from Leeds, our old assistant manager Pablo Quiroga, who talked through the process of compiling data on all Uruguay's potential World Cup players, analysing it, and sharing thoughts with the players. This begins with a spreadsheet classifying an individual player's matches, with the minutes they played and the strength of the opponents among many other stats, all colour-coded by results. This drills down to a technical note listing which scout watched the game, a mark out of ten for the player's performance — 6/10 is marked orange, above six is light blue, below six is red — and then the distance the player ran, and the player's weight as shared with them by the club. This helps Bielsa's staff understand how a player's performances are correlating with their club's results, and highlights issues they might want to query. 

Bielsa intervened here to stress, as he has before, that a player's 'ideal' weight is whatever weight they have when they feel they're giving their best performances — it varies by player — and that they monitor this as an indicator of other problems. In other words, if a player is suddenly gaining or losing weight, they will ask the club if everything is okay with them (or in club management, ask the player). 

"This overview is very useful in preventing a footballer from settling into a habit that isn't right for them," Bielsa said, "and that they aren’t aware of, and ensuring they are alerted to the need to correct it."

Quiroga and Bielsa went further, into what information they share with players, and how, and why. First they build a picture of the player's current form by taking a sample of around ten games, breaking them down into five minute segments, and characterising actions in those segments — good, bad, or absent if they didn't do anything in those five minutes, which is itself an indicator. This information is summarised, and key moments are clipped and categorised — both as positive or negative, and by type of play — with the player highlighted and a key phrase written on the screen to describe it. 

The aim is to send an easily digestible report to the player — a 'compacto' — so they can analyse their own performance compared to their own best form and to what their national team wants from them, both alone and with the help of Bielsa's coaches.

The key insight, Bielsa said, "more than any conclusion we might draw, is the player comparing what the stats say with what he felt during the game ... he can compare what the scorecard says with the feelings he had while playing. 

"When the player distinguishes the moments linked to successes and mistakes, identifies them, and acknowledges them, it's a way to protect himself so there are no fluctuations between the positive and the negative. The twenty minute lapses in activity, or the mistakes: the player knows why that happened to him, identifies it, and reviews it."

It's part of Bielsa's doctrine that, if he's trying to convince a player of something, opinions crumble beneath facts.

"In this type of analysis, the player — either together with us or on their own — interprets why a particular action was chosen (as a clip) — whether it was a success worth repeating, or whether it was a mistake that needs to be corrected. The goal is to ensure alignment between the coaching staff's assessment and the player's self-analysis. 

"If the coaching staff’s analysis and the player's analysis are in sync, it's much easier to correct or capitalise on — correcting the bad and capitalising on the good. It's also very important that the footage helps the player feel convinced, not by the coach, but by the reality."