Jorge Sampaoli builds upon Bielsa’s legacy
http://controllingthespace.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/jorge-sampaoli-builds-upon-bielsas-legacy/

Jorge Luis Sampaoli Moya grew up in the Caseros Department Province of Santa Fe in central Argentina, where his childhood was no different from any other South American boy. His adoration and ambition for football eclipsed his studies. However, that, was not to say young Jorge did not like education. He would spend his time watching, talking and playing football, refining an impressive understanding of strategies and approaches to the beautiful game from a young age; watching his national side Argentina, host and lift the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Buenos Aires aged eight. His footballing consciousness contributed significantly to his development as a player, under coaching at local clubs in the Santa Fe leagues – where he blossomed as a defensive-midfielder. Aged 17, he was scouted by Newell’s Old Boys, one of South American’s most prestigious clubs, where he signed his first professional contract. However Sampaoli’s playing career was unfortunately cut short, just as it was getting started. He decided to retire aged 19, following a horrific tibia and fibula fracture.

The Argentine turned his devotion towards coaching; taking a decade away from football to recover from his injury and to construct a system and philosophy that he would adopt during management. He studied South American coaches such as Carlos Bilardo and Carlos Alberto Parreira, who were successful coaches at the time of his absence from the game. In 1995 he departed his first coaching role at Aprendices Casildenses (a reign lasting four years) to join Belgrano de Arequito, whom he led to the domestic championship in his first season, 1996. The 1995/96 season at Belgrano proved influential in his ascendancy as a coach. Accompanying his league title triumph, Rosario newspaper ‘La Capital’ published a photograph of Sampaoli positioned in a tree, overlooking a pitch, at a stadium where his Belgrano de Arequito side were playing an away league fixture. Sampaoli had been denied access to the stadium ahead of the game following a verbal row with the referee in charge, a few games back in a cup fixture. Instead of accepting his sanction, the head coach prompted to climb a tree and order instructions out to his players. The story soon spread and one individual who particularly took absorption in the incident was Jose Eduardo Lopez, president of Newell’s Old Boys. Lopez resultantly offered Sampaoli a contract as head coach of second division club Argentino de Rosario at the end of the season, which he owned, and retained as a feeder/development squad for Newell’s Old Boys.

After spending four seasons with the club in Primera B Metropolitana, ‘The Professor’ was offered his first professional job in Peru with Juan Aurich, his tenure cut short after just eight games, where he was fired, winning just a single match. Success however eluded Sampaoli in the next decade, as he pursued an itinerant career learnong his trade with Sport Boys, Coronel Bolognesi and Sporting Cristal in Peru, before moving to Deportivo O’Higgins in Chile. He was then further appointed at Sport Emelec in Ecuador, in 2010. After underachieving yet again, now in Serie A and the Copa Libertadores he returned to Chile with Universidad de Chile.

It was at Universidad de Chile where Sampaoli demonstrated his potential as a coach. Under his management in 2011, La U were recognised as one of South America’s best club sides. What followed under his monarchy was a period of unprecedented success. Sampaoli is a perfectionist, who would spend more time in his office at the training ground than he would at his family home. “Jorge arrives at around 8.30am, and doesn’t leave until after 9pm, and even when he goes home, he sits in bed watching DVD footage and doing video analysis on his computer.” Told Gabriele Marcotti; an Italian journalist who travelled to Chile to study and report on the clubs development under Sampaoli for The Times.Profe Sampa has admitted to being obsessed with his mentor, Marcelo Bielsa. It was in Santiago, with Universidad, where Sampaoli began to perfect the operative and electrifying system pioneered by Bielsa, who at the time of the formers appointment was in charge of the Chile national squad – who had been starved of success for decades. Prior to the job, he boasted an impressive CV in Mexico, his native Argentina and Spain. Bielsa went on to become one of Chile’s most beloved figures in history, where in a national poll, he was voted the best football coach in the country had ever seen. The reason Bielsa was such a popular character, was because of the blistering system that he himself had constructed – the result being a hard running, physical side that adapts in transition quickly to overwhelm the opposition.

La U secured the Apertura and Clausura titles, as well as the Copa Sudamericana, the clubs first ever continental trophy, which was part of a 36 match unbeaten streak across the course of the season. But it wasn’t just the trophies that got people talking. His side played a remarkable brand of football, enforced by Sampaoli, but stemming from the concepts of Bielsa. They displayed flexibility, sometimes playing with a back three, sometimes playing with a back four , but always a playmaker behind the two forwards, who pulled wide and utilised the space in the channels in between opposition full backs and centre backs. This system worked effectively, and along with the Bielsista principles of pressing high and aggressively, passing triangles, attacking with pace and vitality down the flanks – they savaged any team who stood before them.

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