The legacy Marcelo Bielsa will leave for Leeds United and English football and the lessons not heeded - Graham Smyth

Whether it's this summer or, preferably for Whites, years from now, his legacy will forever include an historic promotion, a league title and the awakening of a slumbering, amnesiac footballing giant.

It will include a group of footballers who swapped a very good level for the highest domestic level, a midtable Championship position for their current station, halfway up the Premier League table.

READ: The Frenchman enjoying legendary status in Mexico thanks to Bielsa transformation.

Some of those players will now go on to have stellar careers that previously would not have been possible and others, further down the line, will go into coaching and surely use some of what they've gleaned from Bielsa, even if only the knowledge of the potential rewards intensity in your work can bring.

His legacy will include a FIFA Fair Play award and memories of goals and players running until they could run no more.

Beyond that and beyond the Leeds fanbase, what will his legacy look like for English football? What is being learnt from his time here?

It always struck me as an incredible thing to say when opposition managers in the Championship would ensure they mentioned Leeds' fitness levels, as if to partly excuse the result or their team's performance.

Accepting as fact that another team will be fitter than yours, when you know fine well it will cause problems when you play them, is odd. Bielsa and the Leeds United staff might be thorough, detailed and demanding but as far as we're aware they don't have access to some secret sport science. The key to Leeds' fitness is the amount of running they do and the willingness the players have to do it.

Even in the Premier League they have been named as the fittest in the division. Some coaches might decide their players don't have to do that much running, maybe due to their technical ability and quality that allows them to do in one pass what it might take a pair of Leeds players to each put in sprint to achieve. But for others, particularly last season, to not at least try to match their fitness, felt defeatist.

We've all seen what Mateusz Klich has been able to do now that he does everything at greater pace, running so many kilometres per game. It appears to be the easiest lesson to learn from Bielsa.

There are others.

At times he sounds like a missionary, sent to a foreign land to reteach beliefs that once underpinned the culture there, although he will often point out his own insignificance as a recent arrival in English football.

When asked, however, he will give his opinion on things he once saw in our game, things like patience, the refusal to cast aside long-held philosophies due to single results, giving managers the chance to build something that lasts, things he fears football is losing.

When every Leeds result is followed by conclusions that can be torn asunder with the very next result, you begin to understand why Bielsa makes no predictions at all and why he grows weary of the media narrative.

A pundit telling viewers or listeners it's important to wait until all the games have been played before judging a team would soon be out of work. You'll get very little social media engagement with that one, Marcelo. So teams, players, managers and ideas are written off at breakneck speed and no matter how strong a coach's voice is, he's quickly drowned out by others on the outside telling fans a different story.

If fans begin to listen, so too will chairmen and the result is short-termism and a bigger picture that fades to black.

Expressing disgust at 'schoolboy defending' when the real story unfolding is one of a newly promoted side attacking their way to Premier League midtable comfort, despite severe injury issues at centre-half, suggests the wood obscured by a single tree.

In almost three years at Leeds Bielsa has tried to gently introduce a different way of talking about and looking at football, but if people in the media and the game haven't listened by now, they never will.

Of course, results are the very thing that have given Bielsa the time to develop his ideas at Elland Road and thus have an impact on English football, so maybe in the end they are all that matters.

And maybe his arm's length relationship with the media gives him an unknowable, mythical aura that suggests a higher, superior way to the one he takes in reality.

But if, at the very least, Bielsa doesn't make you think about football and challenge what you think you know, then forget his legacy, you've missed the point of it all.