Genius didn't guarantee success, it could have been so different for Marcelo Bielsa at Leeds United - Graham Smyth

The Whites captain is on international duty with Scotland, but the conversation always turns to Bielsa.

“He’s a genius to be fair,” said Cooper, not for the first time.

Mateusz Klich tells a story about his return to the Polish national team after a long absence, only to be met with questions about his club boss.

“I was tired because they were asking about him, not about me or Leeds, just him,” he said.

By now, Cooper, Klich and the rest of the Leeds United squad are as accustomed to talking about Bielsa as they are playing his style of football.

Ending the club’s 16-year exile from the Premier League only intensified the interest in Bielsa and his methods and crowned the achievement of rekindling a city’s love for its club with a trophy.

It could have all been so different. The manager’s genius was no guarantee of success.

When, during the negotiations that brought the Argentine to Elland Road, he watched all of Leeds United’s 2017/18 season Championship games, he may have spotted potential to play his way in that group of Whites players, but it’s unlikely he saw any guarantees that they would respond to his training methods as they did.

While Bielsa does not consider his demands excessive or out of the ordinary, Leeds players have often spoken of the big changes that occurred when the new manager came in: increased scrutiny on nutrition, weight targets, regular weigh ins, multiple pre-season sessions and long days spent at Thorp Arch, not to mention the exercise they came to call murderball.

When a new manager comes into a club, the noises players make in public are almost always of an identical nature.

“The gaffer’s been brilliant since he came in, training’s been great,” said thousands of players countless times.

Privately, it’s not always a rosy picture and you only have to listen to podcasts involving ex players to hear the real stories of how they or their team-mates ‘weren’t having’ a new man in charge because of his training methods, his extra sessions, communication or how he wanted them to play.

That kind of attitude, if it spreads, can rot a manager’s chance of building anything.

So when you consider that Bielsa was not simply tweaking things at Leeds but overhauling what they knew, demanding much more and, in some cases repurposing them in brand-new roles, it took a certain kind of player, or a squad full of them, to throw themselves completely into something wholely unknown.

“When I explain how we train, what we do and how it looks at Leeds they [Polish international team-mates] can’t believe it, because Marcelo is different and no one trains like us,” said Klich. “Nobody has fewer days off than we have.”

Their acceptance of the requirements did not go unnoticed or unmentioned.

“I live with professionals,” said Bielsa.

“I have learnt to respect them, admire them and love them. This group works really hard to get positive results because they are human beings with great integrity, they are good people.”

What if they hadn’t been?

What if there had been a handful of bad apples?

Had any of the dressing room leaders, like Cooper, Stuart Dallas, Luke Ayling, Barry Douglas or Pablo Hernandez taken umbrage with what Bielsa was asking for, it could well have spelled disaster.

Instead, they said ‘yes’ to a new way of working.

That’s what they’re paid to do, you might say, but how many of us would respond so favourably and enthusiastically to a sudden and extreme increase in workload from a new boss whose track record isn’t littered with trophies?

That willingness to do what Bielsa deems necessary has underpinned all Leeds have achieved since 2018 and is one solid reason for optimism in the Premier League because it now goes hand in hand with the trust that stems from achieving something together. Saying ‘yes’ to Bielsa got them this far. Who is to say it won’t take them farther?