Angus Kinnear tells French media Leeds United’s transfer limits for Marcelo Bielsa

Leeds United’s Angus Kinnear has been speaking to France Football about the club, and mainly Marcelo Bielsa.

The weekly French magazine have covered Bielsa plenty down the years, through his interesting time with Marseille and the brief, yet very turbulent, period he spent at Lille last season.

Things are working out better in Yorkshire than they did in the north of France, and whilst Leeds United have slipped down from the top of the Championship they still look well placed for a strong promotion fight.

On top of that, there’s a genuine feel-good slant around the club at the moment, and the Bielsa way has been bought into by fans and players alike.

Those in charge at Elland Road also had to buy into Bielsa’s concepts and work with his demands before the Argentine would take over. There was no point promising the world to the manager and then not bothering about delivering, as Lazio very quickly found out.

France Football put it to Kinnear that Bielsa is very demanding of those above him at clubs, and the Leeds chief explained there were red lines on transfers, but there needn’t have been worry because the manager was reasonable.

“He was demanding but reasonable,” explained Kinnear. “If he had wanted nine new signings, we wouldn’t have reached an agreement. Marcelo had no quirks, he is always respectful of the culture of the club. With him, I did not experience any of the tensions I had heard about in some of his previous clubs. Everything was very smooth. The idea of ​​bringing sleeping giant Leeds United back to the Premier League galvanises him. More than taking care of an average club in Spain or Germany.

“Marcelo is a pragmatist who wants everything to be clear before committing himself: on the team, the training centre… For our first meeting, he had already seen all the Leeds United matches of last season and gave the feeling of knowing the team better than we did ourselves. He could name the players he wanted to keep, those who would not adapt to his system, and those who he wanted to test.”

One thing Bielsa did insist on, just like at Lille, was changes to the training ground, and Kinnear told France Football: “He wanted the players to be able to spend the day there, to go to the gym, to study videos, to eat, to rest… The idea is to create a sense of belonging, hence the construction of a clubhouse where players spend time together, for a cost of around €1.2m.”