MARCELO BIELSA is the ultimate footballing maverick — but the El Loco magic is wearing thin.
The Uruguay boss arrives at Wembley tonight under a dark cloud with the Montevideo media baying for blood.
Bielsa, 70, is facing huge pressure after November’s 5-1 thumping by the USA — when he even branded himself as “toxic”.
The Argentine is still revered by Leeds fans for dragging them from mid-table Championship fodder to Premier League entertainers in his four-year spell.
But his career has followed a well-trodden trend of adoration followed by implosion — partly due to controversial training and man-management techniques.
Whether it is high-octane “Murderball” sessions or refusing to say “good morning” to his players, Bielsa’s methods are both bizarre and brutal.
While the Uruguayan FA have backed him for this summer’s World Cup, another tactical collapse against England could see the axe fall.
But former Leeds striker Kemar Roofe, 33, warns Thomas Tuchel’s men that a cornered Bielsa is dangerous.
He told SunSport: “Bielsa won’t treat this as a friendly — and nor should Tuchel. They will have to run, run and run again.
“This is a perfect World Cup warm-up for England because getting through an intense game against a Bielsa team in terms of work-rate will make everything else feel easier in comparison.”
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Roofe still shudders at the memory of working for Bielsa at Elland Road, saying: “Those training games were called Murderball because we ended up kicking the hell out of each other — fouling and retaliating — because there were no rules, no refs and no free-kicks.
“Everyone was losing their heads and getting angry. You’re at your max, you’re tired and getting fouled. It was murder.
“But once you complete those sessions, you know you’re fit. It made the actual games at the weekend easy. Maybe England should try it.
“It’s like boxing. They do 15 rounds in training so that when the 12-round fight comes, it’s nowhere near as brutal.”
Bielsa will be remembered for one of the most bizarre moments in English football history — when police caught a member of his staff loitering near bushes outside Derby’s training ground.
It emerged the man was spying on a Rams session to give Bielsa inside info.
The Argentine not only owned up but invited journalists to Leeds’ Thorp Arch base for an extraordinary 70-minute press conference explaining how he had done it for years.
Roofe said: “We were shocked, but it was a lightbulb moment.
“We thought, ‘It all makes sense now’ because he knew everything in our meetings — if players were injured, who was taking set-pieces and who was involved. We thought, ‘How on earth does he know this?’.
“We knew he was intelligent so didn’t dig deeper — we’d never witnessed anything like that. When it got exposed, it was like, ‘Ah, OK!’. Many top bosses have high levels of detail on opponents.
“I’ve known situations where someone has spoken to someone they know in the opposition set-up to get insight.
“It happens all the time — but Bielsa went far beyond that.
“I didn’t think the extra detail was necessary because he had so much information anyway.”
Roofe was not surprised Bielsa owned up and promptly paid a £200,000 fine for breaking EFL “good faith” rules.
He said: “Marcelo was a devout Catholic and it would gripe with him if he had done something wrong.
“In South America, everyone was doing it — so he didn’t think he was doing anything untoward.
“It’s like when he ordered the team to allow Aston Villa an uncontested equaliser after we scored in a Championship game in 2019 while one of their players was down.
“That goal ended all hope of automatic promotion that season — but he had morals. He wasn’t a person who cheated.”
Roofe has now opened the KR10 Academy in his home town Walsall and eventually wants to go into management. He remains a disciple of the Bielsa way.
He said: “The bottom line is the world’s best players actually run the most. It looks like they have so much time on their hands but that’s because they’ve already done the work.”
KEMAR ROOFE’S KR10 Academy is open for new players aged from 4-14 years old in the West Midlands — including specialist Striker Clinics. For more details on how to sign up, check out their official social media channels.
