Man City player raves about ‘Fantastic’ Leeds senior man
We all know by now that Leeds United boss Marcelo Bielsa is not the most conventional of managers in the world of football.
Since being appointed by Leeds in 2018, the Argentine has bewildered fans and the media with his methods but results have proven that what he has done at Elland Road has been hugely successful.
Manchester City defender Benjamin Mendy has revealed in an interview that earlier in Bielsa’s career when he was in charge at Marseille, he also turned heads with the way he goes about doing things.
“Yes, he is special,” Mendy told FourFourTwo. “The videos! The meetings! For me, when you go to France you need to try to speak French, but he spoke in Spanish all the time – that’s how much he was focused only on the game. He always had a guy with him to translate.
“For our first match, we had a friendly and some of the staff had been making jokes. He didn’t like them. So before that game he told them not to bother coming – we got on the coach and it was only the players, Bielsa and the doctor. We all thought, ‘This manager is crazy’. But after that it was OK – he’s a great personality, a fantastic coach, and you had to respect him for what he did.”
Mendy maintains a good relationship with Bielsa and has been spotted at Elland Road in the past, cheering on his former manager’s team.
The French left-back spent the 2014/15 season playing for Bielsa and it would be fair to assume that the now-Leeds boss had a transformative effect on the Man City player’s career.
He has been well known to get the best out of certain players he manages.
Since joining Leeds, players like Kalvin Phillips and Stuart Dallas have been turned from pretty average footballers into vital mainstays of a team that is on course for automatic promotion to the Premier League.
Bielsa still gets fans talking with his unconventional methods, such as his press conferences and team selection policy, but there is no doubting that he is the best manager in the Championship and better than a lot of those in the top-flight.
In other Leeds United news, Don Goodman has pointed out the turning point to the Whites’ season.