In the summer of 2011, at about the time Marcelo Bielsa was arriving at Athletic Bilbao, Luis de la Fuente was leaving. Bielsa was the revolution. De la Fuente was a former left-back with long, curly locks who had come through the academy, played eight years in the first team and coached Athletic’s under-19s and B team but now he was joining Deportivo Alavés, 50 miles south and in the third tier. Eleven games later, he was back again.
Sacked from the first senior club job he had, and the last too, De la Fuente was sure that someone would call but time passed, no one did and he started to wonder whether they would until the Spanish federation got in touch a year and a half later and asked him to coach its under-19s. In the meantime, as the months passed and the concern grew, he returned to Athletic’s Lezama training ground, convinced he had much to learn and that he knew where to do so.
“I’m a big admirer of Marcelo Bielsa,” De la Fuente said on Thursday. “He made Athletic play wonderfully. When I was on the dole for 18 months, I spent five, six months [of those] watching all his training sessions. I learned so much from him and he was very innovative. I was fortunate enough to be part of talks with him and it is an honour to play against him for the first time.”
De la Fuente was looking back 15 years later and 5,750 miles away. Not long after Spain’s coach walked out of the room under the main stand in Guadalajara, Bielsa walked in. “We had some contact, and I might have passed on some of my ideas,” the Uruguay coach said, in that way of his, head low, voice lower. “The football he’s achieved with Spain is exquisite. Of course they don’t represent my style: the reality is that his football is much more beautiful than what I’ve managed with my team.”
Bielsa’s legacy is huge, his success hugely significant, but when it comes to the places they find themselves in right now, that much is true. On Friday Bielsa and De la Fuente face each other in their final game of Group H. Spain, the European champions and unbeaten in 33 games, are top, qualification guaranteed; Uruguay, without a win at the World Cup, are on the edge of elimination. “A branch of hell, the collapse of a false hope, an empire of the fleeting,” as the newspaper El Observador called them after the 2-2 draw with Cape Verde. Unable to defeat Saudi Arabia either, they probably have to beat Spain.
“We don’t feel inferior to anyone,” their midfielder Agustín Canobbio says. “Uruguay has always been strong when it believes in itself and that has to be our starting point.” But that’s not so easy. Many have “no positive expectations at all”, Bielsa admitted. And 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. This goes deeper.
The first thing Bielsa did when he turned up in the press room in Guadalajara was position the mic and say good afternoon, which was a start. After the 2024 Copa América Luis Suárez left the national team and one of the many things he revealed was that the players had asked for a meeting to request that Bielsa at least say buen dia when he saw them. He painted a bleak portrait from inside the national team, a cold, dysfunctional place where the manager barely talked to his players and they – and the staff – didn’t want to be there.
“What the national team is going through hurts,” Suárez said. He told the tale of how when he had tried to comfort Darwin Núñez after the striker broke down in tears at half-time, Bielsa had told him not to; Suárez asked out loud why Matias Vecino had walked away from the national team at 30 (answer: because he could take no more); and he defended Canobbio for a confrontation with the coach, insisting: “He’d held back long enough.”
Curiously, sadly too, Bielsa appeared to agree. All the noise around him not posing for his World Cup picture hid the fact that he had posed, and in the most Bielsa way possible. When Uruguay were beaten 5-1 by the US in November, he described himself as “toxic”, admitting: “Those who have a relationship with me come out of it worse. There are toxic people who only see errors, who demand, who correct, who are never satisfied with anything, who only like to talk about work, who go to eat and take a newspaper with them because they don’t want to integrate with the rest. But do you know what that behaviour is based on? Fear. One doesn’t enjoy winning; he fears losing much more.”
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There weren’t many wins either. The internal crisis was calmed, if not entirely overcome, but Uruguay haven’t won since. And nor is it only about the group dynamics. Perhaps it is not even about that, although it cannot help. There is a debate to be had about the disconnect between expectation and reality; whether Uruguay are in part victims of a history of overachievement, an identity, culture and a narrative of upsetting 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 more recently to 2010, when they were semi-finalists.
“Something mad happened: we had Luis Suárez, Diego Forlan and Edison Cavani at the same time,” the former goalkeeper Gustavo Munúa told AS recently of 2010. Uruguay have not won a World Cup game without Suárez since 1990. And yet look at the squad and the federation president talks about them as a team that should reach a quarter-final. Now they have to do enough against Spain, led by De la Fuente, who could plausibly bring Bielsa’s international career to a close.
While Bielsa talked about “elements” that allowed him to believe even if others don’t, as he talked about the need to take the ball off Spain, others are determined to do it their way, Uruguay’s way. “Playing well against Spain is not enough; you have to compete for every ball with Uruguay’s mentality,” Canobbio says. “We can’t just stand and watch. This group has pride, hunger and belief. When you wear the Uruguay shirt, there are no excuses. The most important thing is for Uruguay to be Uruguay again.”