"Bearing that burden is worth far more than you can imagine" — down and out in Uruguay, Marcelo Bielsa still has his purpose

Somehow, Marcelo Bielsa still loves football. Speaking at a press conference he called, to call time on his work managing Uruguay after they went out of the World Cup, he didn't only sound accepting of what happened to the team in their three group games but still as fascinated as a child first discovering the game.

"What’s the bottom line?" he said. "The game is what it is, and that’s why it’s so compelling. Sometimes it gives you something, and sometimes it takes it away.

"Football is about taking risks, and football is about making mistakes. Otherwise, there's no football. Otherwise, there's no football for me. Olivera's mistake, Muslera's mistake, the missed chances. That's football, that's why it's so captivating. Sometimes it goes your way, and sometimes it goes against you."

The press conference itself, Bielsa implied, was a rigmarole he had to go through to respond to the emotions of the most important people in football: the fans. He couldn't say anything to justify what happened at the World Cup, but he had to explain himself anyway, as a kind of offering to the people.

"At its core, football is something that stirs up strong emotions," he said. "Emotions and explaining what we went through are a formality — no matter how it’s said, no matter how sincere the explanation may be — that cannot be accepted."

"Do you think that the person listening to this," he added later, "who cries when Uruguay loses, finds any meaning in this? 'Spouting hot air' is the description. Anyone who explains a failure, who explains a failure with arguments, is described as spouting hot air. Arguments don’t make the failure any less of a failure. A failure is a failure because it hurts people. So there’s no way to fix it."

And again, when he was talking about how the statistics showed Uruguay should have won at least two games:

"I don’t like saying it because those who are listening — not you, but the football fans — say, 'Keep talking'. 'Keep talking — everything you say is useless, because you didn’t achieve what you should have'. This current sadness felt by all football fans is the burden I must bear. And bearing that burden is worth far more than you can imagine."

Fans don't want explanations for failure, he was saying, fans want to keep watching their team while the World Cup is on. And an important responsibility of people working for the happiness of football fans is to bear the burden of the fans' unhappiness when they fail.