At the end of the 2011-12 season, after Swansea had consolidated their freshly minted top flight status, Brendan Rodgers – who had been their manager for just the past two seasons – left for pastures he thought at the time would be greener, joining Liverpool.
The club had had three different managers in the preceding five years, and now were looking for a fourth. Michael Laudrup, the coiffured, elegant Dane, jumped aboard, and brought with him immediate success. Swansea thrived in the league playing a hugely attractive style, and won the League Cup the next season. As a sparkling cherry on cake, the board announced a record-setting year of profitability; the sheen glinting off this fine Welsh organisation was blinding, and they appeared, to most, to be the exemplar for how to run a small, successful football club.
A few years later, and two managers on, Swansea City’s patina is slightly less lustrous. Laudrup left not long after that first stellar season – something of a habit for him – and Garry Monk, who had been at the club as a player since 2004, stepped into a caretaker’s role. Monk excelled in this temporary position, and appeared to relish the steep learning curve that all new managers have to negotiate. A permanent deal was soon drawn up, and Monk took on the role proper. He, regrettably, has now also been released by the club, and their now-familiar search begins again.
As soon as the new man is found, he will become the seventh manager Swansea have had in the last decade. Not a terrible strike rate, but for a club with such a concerted vision, one that has straddled regimes with ease, it does seem strange that they haven’t stuck fast with one manager yet. And equally compelling is the vast range of manager-types they’ve tried; from domestic journeymen like Kenny Jackett, to continental aesthetes like Roberto Martinez, to the groomed aristocratic Laudrup, to the wholly home-grown and reared Monk, they have taste-tested the full smorgasbord. And now an exciting new dish, with a delicious, tempting aroma rising with fervor from it, is poised to join the banquet; Marco Bielsa.
Ah yes, the fancied South American maestro, the mad genius, who rushes in, starts a revolution, then burns himself to a crisp, immolated by the very ardent brilliance of his own ideas. Or something like that. He has managed only four teams; Argentina, Chile, Athletic Bilbao and Marseilles. He refuses exclusive interviews, communicating to the press exclusively through press conferences. His football teams are as idiosyncratic as they are potent. Players love him, players hate him, other managers, more famous and lauded than he, cite him specifically as a figure of immense inspiration.
One thing is for certain; hiring Bielsa will not spell the end for the manager-merry-go-round at Swansea City. If there’s anything to learn from Bielsa’s career – and we can learn many, many, things indeed – it’s that restlessness is a hallmark. Sudden resignations, mysterious sackings, downturns in form that are as rapid as the upturns that preceded them, all of these things follow Bielsa around like a slightly deranged, stir-crazy hound. He has – to use a phrase made infamous by another ex-Swansea manager – great character, but that character can inspire mutinous uproar just as quickly as it can applause. Swansea have staled over the last few months, strangely so, and could do with a jolt. Bielsa will provide that.
There is also something promising about this potential marriage. Since Roberto Martinez stamped his possession-first policy on the club, it has, while changing slightly over the years, endured. This is a club, and these are players, for whom dedication to a footballing ideal comes easily, even surrounded as they were by the thud-and-blunder of the lower leagues. Most clubs aren’t owned or run in the same way as this Welsh anomaly, and yet it hasn’t deterred them from pressing on alone in their ways. There is a philosophical groundwork here, one that at first glance seems to dovetail well with Bielsa’s own way of doing things. He demands so much, regardless of fashion or results, and so what better club to test the Premier League waters with?
One hopes that Swansea take the gamble, and remain a little apart from the rest of the Premier League, in their own little hipsterish, alternative circle. He will be skittish, and it may all blow up in glorious Technicolor, but it’s worth the risk.
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