Leeds United head coach Marcelo Bielsa loses out to Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp for FIFA award

The Whites head coach was included in a five-man shortlist alongside Hansi Flick (Bayern Munich), Julen Lopetegui (Sevilla), Zinedine Zidane (Real Madrid) and Klopp.

A panel of experts featuring footballing legends Cafu, Bastian Schweinsteiger, Yaya Touré and Hristo Stoichkov selected the shortlist based on coaches' achievements in 2019/20.

Fan votes were used to whittle the list down to a final three, Championship title winning Bielsa going up against Klopp, who won the Premier League, and Flick who completed a Champions League and Bundesliga double with Bayern. Klopp was announced as this year's winner by former Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger at a ceremony in Zurich tonight.

"I am [shocked]," said Klopp via video link, accepting the award for the second successive year.

"I have so many people to thank, most of all my coaches. If I had known this morning we would win it they would have been here standing left and right of me."

Last week Argentina national team assistant and former Bielsa player Pablo Aimar explained why he believed the Whites head coach should be spoken about as a world class coach.

"He has an impact and had a great impact in all of the footballers he managed," he said.

"In all of the countries that he has been in he had a big influence. I think that the word is being a great influencer. In English football I think he left his mark and he is doing it now [with Leeds] in the biggest league.

"I think it's where the best coaches of the world are and that today it's the strongest league in the world.

"We will have to see what will be his legacy in this league... but it's very clear that he is a person and a manager with great influence in all the people that are around him, even in a league so strong, so powerful and with so much history as it is the English one."

Fifty-one-times capped former Columbia goalkeeper Faryd Mondragón, a member of the selection panel, told the YEP that the values shown by the Whites head coach and his historic achievement in ending the club’s 16-year exile from the top flight made him a worthy candidate for the award.

“It is more than well deserved,” he said.

“A gaffer, coach who not only has shown during his career that he has been an exceptionally great professional, he has changed, in some points of view, in a positive way the game.

“He has a lot of values on the pitch and outside the pitch.

“To bring Leeds to the position that their fans and the history of this club deserves and be in the elite of the Premier League as a South American coach showing and demonstrating and transmitting all these values and ideas in a different culture, it is exceptional.

“I consider Marcelo Bielsa’s position on this list more than well deserved.”