Bielsa’s quest for perfection is by now legendary, for a man who has a bed and kitchen installed for himself at the training ground, who obsesses over the length of grass on the training pitches and who, for a while in his first season, had the goalposts suspended off the ground as he argued this would provide a more equal distribution of sunlight across the turf. This summer, Bielsa has remained in Yorkshire, often stopping by the Leeds training ground to check in on the building developments. In his spare time, he popped along to coach a local under-11 team in Leeds and introduced the kids to his unique brand of “Murderball”, a high-octane training drill. Bielsa has been known to make similar selfless gestures before, such as in March 2008, when he was Chile manager heading to a match between Universidad Catolica and River Plate to watch Alexis Sanchez. As he walked to the stadium, he saw two children playing football on the street and gave them his tickets. When Bielsa commits, he goes all-in, builds authentic bonds with his local community. He makes a point of ensuring that either he or his assistants respond to letters from admirers around the world. When a Jewish Leeds fan wrote to invite Bielsa to a traditional Friday night dinner at their family home, Bielsa phoned up, politely declined, but then spent time discussing football with the supporter’s Spanish-speaking nephew. At Athletic Bilbao, he visited a local nunnery as part of his research into creating tight-knit groups between footballers — many Bielsa players will attest that their monastic abstinence is required to cope with his demands — and on his way out, Bielsa is said to have asked the nuns to pray for his team. When not training Yorkshire’s next generation of talent, Bielsa is building up a dossier of information from Euro 2020. Following the World Cup in 2018, Bielsa asked his staff to study every goal scored in the competition, and then demonstrate training drills that could directly relate to both creating and preventing the goal. The idea is that players can relate more closely to goals scored in a major tournament and it demonstrates the potential final product of the drills. By keeping sessions fresh, innovative and relatable, Bielsa has maintained standards for three seasons and the progression was underlined by the way Leeds finished the campaign: of their final 11 games, they won seven and lost just one. They conceded only eight goals, averaging 0.72 per game, after averaging 1.7 goals conceded per game during their first 27 matches of the campaign.

In the case of Phillips, however, the challenge extends beyond video analysis and attention-to-detail as Bielsa’s man-management encourages his player to imagine the game differently, and imbues the player with fresh belief.

Speaking to The Athletic last summer, Phillips explained: “When the manager first came in, we had a meeting where he went through the names of each player telling us which number we’d be wearing. Obviously, I thought I was going to be No 8 or something like that, but when he got to me he said No 4. It surprised me because it hadn’t crossed my mind that I might be playing there. After that meeting, he told me he wanted me to be a defensive-mid and that I’d have to get better defensively and in the air. I started working on it straight away. Up until then, I probably thought of myself as box-to-box. If you’d asked me, that’s what I would have said. I wasn’t a defender and I didn’t think of myself as one. I’d scored a few goals in the previous season. So when I first got told to play defensive-mid I thought, ‘What’s going on here then?'” Phillips worked on his game: during Leeds’ promotion-winning season he recorded the squad’s most tackles per game and was highly ranked for interceptions, passes, touches and pass accuracy. It speaks volumes for his form in the Championship that England manager Gareth Southgate had first considered calling Phillips up in February and March 2020, shortly before the COVID-19 lockdowns put paid to international football. In the Premier League, he formed a crucial cog in the Leeds midfield and he is now an established part of the England squad. Off the field, his development continues apace. He is not one of the most vocal forces in the Leeds dressing room — Liam Cooper, Stuart Dallas and Ayling remain the figures most likely to provoke their team-mates into improvement — but his attitude and positive personality are infectious. Bielsa particularly values the role he plays in encouraging the many young players who participate in first-team training sessions, where Phillips, as an academy product, takes it upon himself to welcome newcomers into the group. There’s often a significant number of under-23 or under-18 players involved, as some Bielsa sessions require 33 players spread across three playing pitches. As for White, his evolution continues to accelerate. After an authoritative display in the warm-up win over Romania, White was under consideration to start the first game of the tournament against Croatia in the absence of Harry Maguire. Despite signing a new contract at Brighton last summer, serious interest remains. Arsenal would like to wrap a deal up for a fee between £40-50 million in the coming weeks, but Manchester United, Chelsea and Leicester have all already watched the defender closely. Liverpool scout Andy O’Brien, formerly a player at Newcastle, Bolton and Leeds, spent several months observing White in the Championship for Leeds but the club’s deal for defender Ibrahima Konate would make a deal unlikely for Jurgen Klopp’s side this summer. It must all feel a world away from that first week at Leeds when White briefly feared he would not be able to rise to challenge. His mum Carole explained: “The first week, he was on the phone to me saying, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be up to this, Mum’ but he kept saying he was determined to do it. He does not give in. His centre-back partner, Liam Cooper, spoke to him and said, ‘Dig in and you’ll be fine’. A source close to Bielsa recalls of White’s progress: “He was not struggling but learning. There is no better finishing school than Bielsa’s.”