The former Leeds United boss got every ounce of quality out of his squad.
Leeds United defender Pascal Struijk has opened up on the test of character he and other youngsters faced when training under Marcelo Bielsa.
Struijk was still a teenager playing for the Under-23s when Bielsa arrived in the summer of 2018 but as became common under the Argentinian, he would regularly be called into first-team training. But standards were incredibly high and the room for error was virtually non-existent.
Bielsa’s exacting standards obviously rubbed off on Struijk, who became a first-team player following promotion to the Premier League in 2020 and has been a core squad member since. But it was not smooth sailing for the Dutchman, who has opened up on the resilience needed after being sent away from training in ruthless fashion.
“[Bielsa was] amazing,” Struijk told the Official Leeds United podcast. “Very intense, but skills-wise I feel like he’s the best I’ve worked with for developing players. You could see where we started as a group - I was there from around the first training session - he was very strict on how we performed in training as well.
“There was this drill and if you didn’t do it well enough, especially as an Under-23s player coming over to train with the first-team, if it was not good enough he'd just say ‘Pascal, finished’, and I’d have to go back to the Under-23s again. This was a big part about how you get that mental strength and resilience from.”
Stuart Dallas view on Marcelo Bielsa’s mentality test
But as with everything Bielsa did at Leeds, there was deeper meaning than simply losing patience with a youngster. Stuart Dallas was an experienced member of that first-team squad at the time and saw what his manager was looking for in Struijk - although not everyone showed the same grit.
“It tests your character,” Dallas said. “Bielsa was clever because, in a way, he wasn't doing it to kill your confidence. He wanted to see how you’d react.
“If he’s seen your reaction he’d have thought ‘this kid wants it’. But if you’d have shirked away from it and maybe not wanted to come back the next day, he’d learn a lot about you. There were a few that were sent back quite a few times but Pascal wasn’t one of those.”
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Struijk remained on the fringes of first-team action during the 2019/20 promotion campaign, playing five league games which came towards the back end of the season. But he played a larger role in a ninth-placed Premier League finish the following term, making 27 appearances.
Since then, the 26-year-old has become an integral part of the Leeds team, often as the only naturally left-footed centre-back. He stuck with the Whites after relegation in 2023 and remains as important to Daniel Farke as he ever did Bielsa.
As far as first-team players go, Struijk is all that remains from the Championship title-winning Bielsa squad. Illan Meslier is still in the building but hasn’t played a senior match all season, while Jack Harrison is out on loan at Fiorentina.
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