Bielsa Quotes

A man with new ideas is a madman, until his ideas triumph.

Aprendí por el deporte que la generosidad es mejor que la indiferencia. Aprendí el valor del coraje, la importancia del esfuerzo y lo trascendente de la rebeldía. Son los tres o cuatro elementos con que después yo traté de orientar mi vida

It wasn’t enough for him to have had first-hand experience of the methods of Cruyff, Robson, van Gaal, Mazzone or Capello, so he travelled to Argentina to deepen his knowledge. There, he met Ricardo La Volpe (a former Argentine World Cup-winning goalkeeper and the former coach of the Mexican national team), Marcelo Bielsa (the much admired former Argentina and Chile national coach, and Athletic de Bilbao manager) and ‘El Flaco’, César Luis Menotti (the coach who took Argentina to the World Cup in 1978) to talk at length about football.

Hago aquí una advertencia útil: el fútbol lo magnifica todo, lo multiplica todo, lo exagera todo. La victoria actúa fundamentalmente de ese modo, aunque la derrota también hace que las cosas parezcan mucho más graves que lo que son.

disputa de personas, y no de ideas, mantiene a la gente atenta pero desinteresada”.

Por eso es más fácil defender que crear. Correr es una decisión de la voluntad, crear necesita del indispensable requisito del talento”.

La obsesión sobre un tema empequeñece al hombre

Pep and Bielsa have much in common: they love teams that dominate, that want to be protagonists on the pitch, to seek out the opposition goal as the main priority.

Bielsa’s teams ‘can play badly or well, but talent depends on the inspiration and the effort depends on each one of the players: the attitude is non-negotiable’, Marcelo, ‘el loco’, told him, adding that his sides cannot win if he cannot transmit what he feels. Pep agreed, taking notes all the time.

Soccer,” Bielsa said, “rests on four fundamentals, as outlined by Óscar Tabárez: (1) defense; (2) attack; (3) how you move from defense to attack; (4) how you move from attack to defense. The issue is trying to make those passages as smooth as possible.

el fracaso es formativo, que tú no tienes que ganar para que te quieran, te tienen que querer para ganar”,