In the office of El Ciudadano, Rosario’s daily newspaper, they kept the front page clear. It was a typical Friday afternoon in Argentina and the news agenda was dry. Like many people in Rosario, the paper’s staff had their eyes on an old mill town in northern England.Across Argentina, ESPN was televising Huddersfield Town vs West Bromwich Albion, the opening game of the penultimate round of matches in the Championship’s regular season. For years, interest in the English second division in Argentina was nil. Major broadcasters did not even bother taking a look. “ESPN would never have considered showing a game like that,” says Ariel Senosiain, a journalist in Buenos Aires. To them, the Premier League was English football. But then came the fairy tale of Marcelo Bielsa and Leeds United.El Ciudadano is big on compelling page one ‘splashes’. As is traditional with newspapers, it wants its front page to be eye-catching and emotive and, as that Friday developed, only one story appealed. West Brom’s 2-1 loss to relegation-threatened Huddersfield confirmed Leeds’ promotion from the Championship and Bielsa’s first major achievement in club football for more than 20 years, going back to the days when he was managing Argentinian club Velez Sarsfield. The streets around Leeds’ Elland Road stadium were filling up, alive with flags, flares and euphoria. Parts of Rosario stood and observed.Jose Odisio, one of El Ciudadano’s writers, followed the celebrations unfold from 7,000 miles away.“There was no doubt about what the cover story would be,” he told The Athletic. “Bielsa is a symbol of (local club) Newell’s Old Boys and Rosario is a city with a lot of passion for football. Everything he does at Leeds has great repercussions.” The Argentine leagues had been halted by the coronavirus and the pandemic itself was dominating the daily papers constantly. Leeds’ promotion was a pulsating story, a thrill for a captive audience in Rosario. El Ciudadano ran the next day with a wipe-out picture of a fan flying a ‘Viva Bielsa’ flag by the Billy Bremner statue outside Elland Road (above). The headline read “Su Reino Unido” — “His United Kingdom”.“El Ciudadano is characterised by (front pages) that transcend the stories themselves,” Odisio says. “The headline ‘His United Kingdom’ did not need an explanation. We were in the midst of negative covers, often related to COVID-19. Leeds and Bielsa was an unbeatable opportunity to momentarily shift the axis and the agenda, to gratify the readers.”Bielsa’s currency at Newell’s Old Boys remains extraordinarily high. The people who follow the club, as opposed to the city’s other club, Rosario Central, adored him when he managed their team and have been addicted to his career since he left in 1992. What has been unique about this period, his two years in England, is the way in which Leeds have seeped into the consciousness of the Argentine population, more deeply than his other European clubs, Marseille and Athletic Bilbao, did. Leeds have the advantage of the sport’s ever-expanding global reach — the ability to spread the word online — but Senosiain thinks the captivation will last long after Bielsa’s time in Yorkshire is done. Senosiain has commentated on some of Leeds’ fixtures and says only matches involving Barcelona produce consistently better viewing figures.“Before Bielsa arrived in Leeds, almost nobody (in Argentina) watched the Championship,” he says. “In the last two seasons, I know people (including me) who tried to watch matches on clandestine web pages whenever ESPN didn’t televise them and he’ll influence our coverage of the Premier League even more, without a doubt. Only a few people here were interested in Leeds before Bielsa.” There is a sentence in the bio of an Argentinian fans’ page which on Twitter makes that point for him: “Following Leeds United since 2006. There are lots in the good times. In the bad times, we were few.”El Ciudadano was very quick to the party after Leeds hired Bielsa. The paper began covering his first season and gave it the same prominence as the Premier League, La Liga and Serie A. At points, the coverage was more in-depth than any of those leagues (ESPN Argentina’s website also produces vast amounts of Leeds-related copy but barely touched the rest of the Championship). El Ciudadano now has a specific area of its website dedicated to Bielsa and Leeds, the first time it has given any club outside Rosario so much attention. Odisio says their online traffic is strong and vindicates the view taken by the newspaper: that Argentina has an appetite for a constant narrative from one particular part of West Yorkshire.“The impact Bielsa has is unique,” Odisio says. “You can’t say that similar things happen with Diego Simeone (the fellow Argentinian in charge of Spain’s Atletico Madrid) or other successful coaches abroad. Before Bielsa, we wouldn’t even see pictures from the Championship each weekend. Now people here, Newell’s fans, wake up early to see the games. Huddersfield’s goal against West Brom was celebrated like a goal of their own.” In Argentina, it trended on Twitter for most of the day.Not everyone there is so impressed. Bielsa cuts a divisive figure in the sense that love for him in certain quarters is counterbalanced by disapproval in others. It has been that way for a long time. Shadows linger from his Argentina side’s early elimination from the 2002 World Cup finals, a failure the media pinned on him. “He awakens love and he awakens contempt,” says Andrea D’Emilio, a Bielsa biographer. Odisio agrees. “Today in the media he is probably more loved in Chile (who he also managed), Marseille or Leeds than he is in Argentina,” he says. “That won’t change with the title at Leeds.”Newell’s, as a club, work hard to cultivate their relationship with Bielsa. They work hard to shine a light on the best of him. Their stadium carries his name and a state-of-the-art facility at their training ground was funded by him two years ago. When Leeds’ promotion was confirmed on July 17, the board at Newell’s arranged to send a letter to Elland Road congratulating the club and their former coach.“It’s been a pride to witness Marcelo’s achievement and all that he has generated in Leeds,” Newell’s vice president, Cristian D’Amico, tells The Athletic. “It fills our hearts with joy to see an idol of our house prevail, and more so when his journey through someone else’s country generates constant links with Newell’s life and history. This, without him being directly related to us in a professional sense for almost 30 years, only highlights what it means for our institution.”The two cities, Leeds and Rosario, are slowly becoming unofficially twinned. There are Newell’s supporters who devote time to helping fans from Leeds visit Rosario. There are supporters in Leeds who reciprocate. Juan Mattos, a Newell’s press officer, is used to seeing the odd Leeds shirt on the terraces of Estadio Marcelo Bielsa, in among the home team’s red and black. “The connection generated by two cities so far away from each other is incredible,” Mattos says. “And just by one person.“Bielsa is known for leaving his mark wherever he goes and it’s true that before he went there, Leeds United did not have the relevance here that they have now. I almost think that Leeds is the club where the Bielsa connection has had the biggest impact for us. There has never been so much talk about the English second division.”They feel that connection in Leeds, too. Argentina falls into the top 10 of countries watching content about the club on LUTV and other websites. LUTV subscriptions from South America would be considerably higher were ESPN not so committed to televising their fixtures. D’Emilio, a journalist who writes for the website Centrofobal.com and authored Los Locos Del Loco, a book about Bielsa, says Leeds have created a small “revolution” in Argentina. Since 2018, she has made friends through a sole and mutual interest in the 65-year-old and the Championship. “I have virtual friends with whom I only talk about Leeds and Marcelo,” she says. “When Leeds play we are watching at home and commenting on WhatsApp, giving opinions on the team.“I get lots of calls about him and Leeds from Argentine newspapers and radio stations. This never happened before. My book was much more popular than I expected. It surprised me. As another example, my nephews wear Leeds colours. They are already ‘Leeds’. And people who had not been watching before decided to watch the last nine (Championship) games.“Everything around Bielsa’s world is unusual. What caught my attention most is the affection aroused for an English team in Argentina. I know people who cried about Leeds’ title — and also because Bielsa’s career deserved it.”Odisio admits that not everyone in Rosario is revelling in Bielsa’s success. “The city has two rival teams,” he says. “This means that Bielsa — one of Newell’s greatest icons — provokes love and hatred and divides Rosario. For this reason, everything he does and everything he does in Leeds has big repercussions. So we think the coverage of it is very important.”Nobody wants to labour the conflict between the UK and Argentina over the Falkland Islands, or the Malvinas as they are known in Argentina, but Odisio says that “an Argentinian who is an idol in an English city provokes greater admiration. Personally I think Leeds has a lot more significance here than when he was with Chile, Marseille or Bilbao.”The same might be true in reverse.Bielsa earned affection in France and Spain but nothing on the scale of what is greeting him in Leeds. And in Argentina, some critics are still at large. According to Odisio, there are journalists there who class the Championship as a “second-rate tournament”. Nicholas Bloj, a Newell’s fan who lives in Rosario, has seen those dismissive comments too. “Despite his win with Leeds, there are people in Argentina for whom it changes nothing because of 2002,” Bloj says. “That year was a breaking point for some journalists and fans.“They see the Championship as a second-division title, but they don’t recognise the wider context of Leeds’ status in English football. I try to explain that it’s the equivalent of a big Argentine team, like Racing Club or San Lorenzo, being relegated and not coming back up for 16 years. Then they start to understand the significance of the achievement.”In Leeds, though, Bielsa walks on water — a home away from his home in Rosario. They have already named a street after him in the city centre and last week, a glorious mural of him was unveiled on the side of a building in Wortley. In it, Bielsa is dressed in robes and posing like the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro with an old Leeds badge on his vestment. Above and below him, the words read “Marchando Juntos, Dos Mil Veinte”: Marching Together, 2020.Argentina is famous for its murals and Bielsa has several of him in Rosario but the trend is now spreading to Leeds. The painting in Wortley was designed and completed by artists Nicholas Dixon and Andy McVeigh, who is known as the Burley Banksy. It took around 60 hours to complete but stands resplendent in Oldfield Lane, on the gable end of a pet shop by the Asda supermarket.A mural of Bielsa in Wortley, with its creators Andy McVeigh (wearing cap) and Nicholas Dixon“I know he’s not Brazilian,” Dixon says, “but I wanted to highlight his god-like status. There were days when we were fighting with the rain and you had to go to your happy place and count to 10 but as soon as the club got there, as soon as we got promoted, I wanted to get it painted.“Bielsa’s done so much for the city and the people. What he’s done in the last couple of years will, I think, be here for a long time to come. You’ve got kids here who will grow up with a Premier League club and a Premier League team now. He’s done that.”At El Ciudadano, they dubbed it the “Locovirus”; the outbreak of adoration for Bielsa as his Midas touch infected everyone in this corner of West Yorkshire. “It’s one of the beautiful things about football,” Mattos says, “and the link between fans at Newell’s and Leeds, that will not end. It won’t be erased.”Some bonds are made to last. Some of Bielsa’s last a lifetime.(Photo: Michael Regan via Getty Images)Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone. _______________________________________________ Leedslist mailing list Info and options: https://mailman.gn.apc.org/mailman/listinfo/leedslist To unsubscribe, email [email protected]
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