Leeds United are watching you - Phil Hay's take on astonishing insight into the world of Marcelo Bielsa

Frank Lampard devoted 15 hours to watching footage of Leeds before taking Derby to Elland Road on Friday. Footage of Derby studied by Bielsa ran to almost 300.

Leeds’ analysis was weeks and months in the making and Bielsa’s backroom team compile the same mass of information about every club in their league: four hours a game and each game scrutinised.

Stoke City, as of last week, are in the hands of a new manager and Leeds play there on Saturday. Bielsa has already procured data from every fixture which Nathan Jones, Stoke’s latest incumbent, contested with Luton Town this season.

No rest, no sleep and no bases uncovered, including reconnaissance of opposition training grounds.

Yesterday Bielsa took the extraordinary step of inviting members of the media to Thorp Arch for a presentation of the detail of his pre-match scouting methods. After a weekend in which he was chastised and condemned - albeit amongst pockets of support - for asking a young intern to watch Derby train from a vantage point on a public road, it was Bielsa’s way of painting the controversy as overblown; that nothing the intern brought home with him could enhance the data Leeds produced legitimately.

That when all was said and done, Bielsa appeared to know as much about Derby as Lampard himself.

Leeds United head coach Marcelo Bielsa admits spying on every Championship club during unprecedented rebuttal

Staged at 5pm with two hours warning, the briefing was sold as a press conference but it involved no questions. Bielsa directed it from the start and over 66 minutes explained without saying as much why one scouting trip on a Thursday morning was a needle in a haystack of staggering amounts of videos and spreadsheets put together by his staff. More than once he described the bulk of the information as “useless”.

He berated himself as “stupid” for obsessing so much about it. So why bother, he asked aloud? “Because it allows me to keep my anxiety low.”

That comment was a window not only into Bielsa’s psyche but the paranoia and restless way in which managers think and act. It was paranoia that got to Lampard before Derby’s 2-0 defeat at Elland Road on Friday. Bielsa tried to stress last week - to no avail as far as an angry Lampard was concerned - that he was in the habit of scouting opposition training sessions for no other reason than to turn over every stone.

“The way to respect football is to make the effort to know the players in the team,” he said, talking through his translator Salim Lamrani. “I might not be able to speak English but I can speak about the 24 teams of the Championship.”

Bielsa was not there to pick a fight with Lampard or to ask English football to accept his methods. He was there to clear his name by disputing the accusation that he cheated last week and, in light of investigations launched by the EFL and the Football Association and the threat of sanctions in the offing, to ask the question of whether anything seen at Derby’s training ground last Thursday could have made a material difference to the game the following evening. It was an attempt to kill the onslaught against him with a weight of irrefutable numbers.

The transparency was at odds with questions about his integrity and honesty.

Leeds United fans defend Marcelo Bielsa as reaction to Spygate conference unfolds

No manager at Leeds, or any other English club for that matter, has ever opened their methods of analysis to such intense scrutiny by journalists. At certain points Bielsa asked those gathered if they wanted additional examples - none were necessary - and by the closing minutes he was letting a few reporters with other places to be through the door behind him. When the end came, he thanked his audience and walked straight out (of the room rather than the club. The arrangement of an impromptu press conference by a head coach who quit Lazio after two days and resigned from Marseille at a moment’s notice had set alarm bells ringing beforehand).

The presentation, provided through PowerPoint, was bewildering in its detail. Lamrani sat across the room, translating everything, and Bielsa’s entire coaching team were lodged behind the media, watching silently until Bielsa sought contributions from them.

Derby, for obvious reasons, were used as a case study by Bielsa but every team in the division had been given the same surgery: statistics, formations, a close look at individual players and numbers related to set-pieces. Data drilled down to the very bottom. “Apart from the players, in your staff you have around 20 people,” Bielsa said. “These 20 people create a volume of information which is absolutely not necessary.”

There were breakdowns of Derby’s line-ups and the percentage of time players spent in each position, the type of systems County struggled against most, videos clips of Lampard’s attacking play and a look at what Harry Wilson, the Derby winger whose fitness Leeds were seeking to establish last week, planned to do when he purposely raised two hands before taking a corner.

"All the data we can have about Wilson, we know about his past,” Bielsa said. The same applied to every one of Wilson’s teammates. Bielsa and his analysts watched all 51 games played by County last season, purely for the purpose of assessing any squad members who were still involved now.

“Why did we do that?” Bielsa asked. “Because we think this is professional behaviour. It's to try and avoid being ignorant about the competition we're playing in.

Full transcript of every word Marcelo Bielsa said in Leeds United spygate conference

"When you watch an opponent, you’re looking for specific information. You want to know what is the starting XI, what is the tactical system that's going to be used and the strategic decisions taken on set-pieces. All this information, I don't memorise it but if I have a doubt, I can ask myself the question and have a look at these documents.”

He took no pleasure in revealing the depths of his diligence, much as those watching were captivated by it. “I feel ashamed to have to show you this,” he said, but the criticism of him over the weekend - including Stuart Pearce calling on Tuesday for the FA to reverse Leeds’ victory over Derby - had driven him to fight his corner.

Time and again Bielsa came back to the word “useless”. So much of the information, he said, was of precious little value to him. He told the story of how, as Athletic Bilbao manager, he offered Pep Guardiola the chance to look through his pre-match analysis after Barcelona won the Copa Del Rey final 3-0 in 2012.

“Guardiola had a look at it and he told me 'you know more about Barcelona than me',” Bielsa recalled. “But it was useless information because they scored three goals.” Likewise the time spent by him studying opposition set-pieces this season. “Was this useful? No, because half of the goals we concede are from set-pieces.”

There would have been a danger of Bielsa protesting too much had his work not been so impossibly deep, to a level most likely unmatched in Championship circles. Stacks of paper files lay under the video screens, each one devoted to last season’s fixtures and the summer’s pre-season friendlies. What Bielsa was allowing the public to see looked above board but still Bielsa was not sure if anyone was buying his argument.

“I'm doing this because I consider that you don't believe me,” he said, in reference to his claim that he had not gained any specific “sports advantage” from snooping on Lampard last Thursday. “I wanted to give you factual elements to convince you I'm telling the truth.

“I want to be judged by my intentions because for me, I feel I'm not guilty. I don't have bad intentions.”

The EFL and FA will take their own view on that and there is pressure from within the sport for both bodies to make an example of Bielsa but they were faced yesterday with a display of competence and attention to detail which made Bielsa an example to others in his profession. In one sentence, stood like Rainman with a baffling array of numbers in front him, Bielsa summed up the point of it all.

“I don't need to go to watch a training session of an opponent to know how the opponent plays,” he said. As he dropped the microphone, metaphorically, and left the room, it was hard to disagree.