IIn the summer of 2011, around the same time Marcelo Bielsa was arriving at Athletic Bilbao, Luis de la Fuente was leaving. Bielsa was a revolution. De la Fuente was a long, curly-haired former left-back who had come through the academy, played eight years in the first team and coached Athletic’s under-19 and B team, but now he was 50 miles south and joining Deportivo Alavés in the third tier. After eleven games, he came back again.
Dismissed from his first senior club job, and also his last, de la Fuente was sure someone would come calling but as time passed, no one did and he began to wonder if he would until the Spanish federation contacted him a year and a half later and asked him to coach the under-19s. Meanwhile, as the months passed and concerns grew, he returned to Athletic’s Lezama training ground, convinced that he had a lot to learn and that he knew where to do so.
“I’m a big fan of Marcelo Bielsa,” de la Fuente said on Thursday. “He made the athletic game great. When I was on the dole for 18 months, I spent five, six months watching all his training sessions. I learned a lot from him and he was very innovative. I was lucky to be a part of the conversation with him and it was an honor to play against him for the first time.”
De la Fuente was looking back 15 years later and 5,750 miles away. Bielsa entered shortly after the Spain coach left the room below the main stand in Guadalajara. The Uruguay coach bowed his head, lowering his voice, “There was some contact between us, and I may have passed on some of my ideas to others.” “The football he has achieved with Spain is excellent. Of course they do not represent my style: the reality is that his football is much more beautiful than the football I have achieved with my team.”
Bielsa’s legacy is immense, his success widely significant, but when it comes to the places he finds himself at the moment, the same is true. Bielsa and De La Fuente will face each other in their final game of Group H on Friday. European champions and 33-game unbeaten Spain are on top, guaranteeing qualification; Uruguay, without a win, is on the verge of elimination from the World Cup. “A branch of hell, a fall of false hope, an empire of the fleeting,” as the newspaper El Observador called him after a 2–2 draw with Cape Verde. Can’t even beat Saudi Arabia, they have to beat Spain.
“We don’t feel inferior to anyone,” says their midfielder Agustín Canobbio. “Uruguay has always been strong when it believes in itself and that should be our starting point.” But this isn’t so easy. Many people have “no positive expectations”, Bielsa admitted. Nor is it just about two games here in which they probably deserved more, victims of mistakes that were almost absurd. Or the last six games without a win. It goes even deeper.
The first thing Bielsa did when he arrived in the press room in Guadalajara was to put on the mic and say good afternoon, which was a start. Luis Suarez left the national team after the 2024 Copa America and one of the many things he revealed was that the players requested a meeting with Bielsa to say the least buen diya When he saw them. He painted a bleak picture of inside the national team, a cold, dysfunctional place where managers barely talked to their players and they – and the staff – did not want to be there.
“It’s sad what the national team is going through,” Suarez said. He told the story of how when he tried to console Darwin Núñez after the striker cried at half-time, Bielsa told him not to; Suárez asked aloud why Matias Vecino left the national team at the age of 30 (answer: because he couldn’t take it anymore); And he defended Cannobio for his confrontation with the coach, insisting: “He stayed for too long.”
Curiously, Bielsa, sadly, seemed to agree. The noise around his not posing for the World Cup photo obscured the fact that he did pose, and in as Bielsa a way as possible. When Uruguay was beaten 5–1 by the United States in November, he described himself as “toxic”, admitting: “Those who have relationships with me come out of it in a worse situation. There are toxic people who only see mistakes, who demand, who do what’s right, who are never satisfied with anything, who only like to talk about work, who go out to eat and take a newspaper with them because they Don’t want to integrate with the rest. But do you know what this behavior is based on? A person does not enjoy winning and much more.
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There weren’t many victories either. The internal crisis subsided, if not completely resolved, but Uruguay has not won since. Nor is it just about group dynamics. maybe it’s not like that even About that, though it can’t be helped. There remains debate about the disconnect between expectation and reality; Is Uruguay somewhat a victim of a history of overachievement, an identity, culture and story of defying the odds that goes back to their first two world titles (in 1930 and 1950), the Olympic golds that came before (in 1924 and 1928)) And most recently in 2010, when they were semi-finalists.
“Something strange happened: we had Luis Suárez, Diego Forlan and Edinson Cavani at the same time,” former goalkeeper Gustavo Munua told Spanish outlet AS as recently as 2010. Uruguay have not won a World Cup game without Suárez since 1990. And yet look at the team and the president of the federation talks about them as a team that should reach the quarter-finals. Now they will have a lot to do against the de la Fuente-led Spain, which could potentially end Bielsa’s international career.
While Bielsa talked about the “elements” that allow him to believe even if other people don’t believe, just as he talked about the need to take the ball from Spain, others are determined to do it their way, the Uruguayan way. “It’s not enough to play well against Spain; you have to compete for every ball with the Uruguayan mentality,” says Canobbio. “We can’t just stand by and watch. There is pride, hunger and belief in this group. When you wear the Uruguay shirt, there are no excuses. The most important thing for Uruguay is to be Uruguay again.”