LEEDS, England — Marc Roca lets out a shout of frustration as a move breaks down, and his group head back to halfway to try again. It’s early Wednesday morning at Leeds United‘s training ground Thorpe Arch and the team are preparing for the Sunday match against Chelsea.
The whole passage of play restarts. The attack wins the ball off the defence in midfield, Jack Harrison emerges down the wing, zips past a defender and slips it to Roca, who squares it for Tyler Adams to thump it home. Roca turns to two people watching and roars approval, and amid some laughter they head back to start the drill again. All the while Jesse Marsch and his coaches watch, offering tweaks here and there.
Once training has finished and the players have had lunch and showered, they head off in various directions, but Brenden Aaronson is left holding a soaked sponge; the USMNT star is covered in water and foam. He lost one of the games in training, and his forfeit was to clean Adams’ car.
It’s all very relaxed. Four days later, Leeds hammered Chelsea 3-0 and moved up to second in the Premier League. You wouldn’t know that months earlier, the club were scrapping against relegation.
When Marsch took over from Marcelo Bielsa at the start of March, Leeds were fighting for their Premier League life. The environment he encountered was tense, the strain of the situation getting to the players. “I could see the stress when I came in, and I knew the job I thought I had to do was maybe five times harder,” Marsch tells ESPN.
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But as they hit a midseason reset, they started clocking up the points and on the final day, the club avoided relegation thanks to their win at Brentford and Burnley dropping points elsewhere. Then the focus shifted to the next season in the Premier League under their new boss.
The summer saw two star players leave in Raphinha and Kalvin Phillips, with that money reinvested in seven new faces, giving Leeds an opportunity to evolve. The players brought in all slot into how Marsch wants his team to play: high-pressing, quick-tempo, relentless, claustrophobic football. The recruits were perfect for Marsch’s system and made an immediate impact. But though there’s a short-, medium- and long-term plan for the club, none of that detracts from the weekly necessity of racking up points and making sure they’re nowhere near another relegation scrap.
“I know the longevity of a person in these positions is not great,” Marsch says. “But every job I take, I treat it as I’m the custodian of the club. I try to operate in the best interests of the club and team, and I find if you do that effectively, you can create both short-term, and long-term success. Now, here at this level, it’s the biggest challenge of my life, right?”
When he was first approached by Leeds, Marsch wasn’t sure if he was ready for a return to the hot seat. The outgoing manager was seen as a footballing deity by Leeds fans, having led the club back into the Premier League for the first time in 16 years and into the ninth spot in their return to the top flight. But their form was troubling in the 2021-22 season and by the end of February, the club and Bielsa went their separate ways.
When February ticked around into March, Marsch was enjoying time away from the daily rigours of management. His previous role at RB Leipzig hadn’t worked out, and he left in December after just four months in the post.
He spent the intervening period travelling, visiting friends, spending time with his family and soaking up new experiences. Then the phone rang.
“Leeds came knocking before I thought I would get back to work, and my first thought was the timing wasn’t right,” Marsch says. He spoke to his wife, Kim, and to his three children. Hearing he was approached by a club is nothing new. Kim’s message to Jesse has always been to not tell the family of potential interest “until it gets serious because things get tossed around all the time,” he says.
Marsch was approached by the club after sporting director Victor Orta had identified him as the best man from 42 potential candidates to replace the outgoing Bielsa. “I would say Victor and his team do a really good job of scouring the world really looking for — and using data very heavily, data and analytics — the right types of players that can fit into the way that we think about football,” Marsch says. “This was how they found me as the coach.”
Marsch was originally keen to take over at the end of the season, rather than midway through the campaign, but as he thought more about the opportunity, he envisaged these jigsaw pieces clicking together.
“The more I looked at the potential of what I thought the club and the team could be, the more excited I got,” Marsch says. “I changed my mind overnight. I knew I was going to have to dig into everything on a higher level and faster than I wanted to, but that the reward and opportunity was bigger than the threat of failure. I came here because I felt like Leeds was the right place for me.”
Leeds also went for younger players, and it’s their policy to offer such talents long-term contracts. They have the sixth-youngest average age of their starting XI in the Premier League, and it’s all tuned into their policy in the transfer market.
“It’s always an opportunity,” Marsch says of the summer’s business. “I don’t care. If you’re talking about failure, success, money, losing players, gaining players, it’s always about seeing the opportunity and then seizing it. And so it’s the reason I came here in the end was because I saw the opportunity even in a relegation fight of what Leeds United could become.
“And we tried to, at every moment, see what’s happening within our team, within our transfer politics. Within every decision we make we see where the opportunities are and how to grow and how to get better.”
Their vast database includes many matching capabilities, but it comes down to a human touch. “Once the metrics match their metrics, then it’s about really investing in who the person is to ensure the person we’re bringing in honours the environment that we really are establishing and trying to create every day,” Marsch explains. “And I think the balance of the two is what Victor does so well.”
Some of the transfers were planned before Marsch’s arrival, such as Aaronson from Salzburg. Leeds went for him in the January transfer window, but he decided to see the season out in Austria. And just days after Leeds’ survival was confirmed, he was the first signing of the Marsch era.
Aaronson remembers his first meeting with Leeds and the appeal of the club. “Just the plan that the club had, you know, and the people surrounding it,” Aaronson tells ESPN. “The club wanted me here and was so supportive and showed me how much they wanted me here and how they wanted me to be a part of that plan. We have high expectations of the club and the fans do, too. And that’s something I want to be a part of developing me as a player and as a person.”
He was later joined by fellow USMNT starter Adams. While Aaronson finished the 2021-22 campaign on a high, Adams struggled in his last season at Leipzig while managing some niggling injuries, but his class endured. He was the player Leeds identified to form a double pivot with Roca in midfield, but they had to be sure about where his head was at first.
“I had a tough conversation with Jesse before I came here about finding the old Tyler,” Adams said. “I felt like in my time at Leipzig I lost a little bit of confidence. I lost the way of, you know, who I was and what I wanted to become. And I got a little bit too much in my comfort zone.
“So we had a tough conversation, we talked over it, not an argument in any way or sense but some difficult points came across.”
“I’ve known him for so long,” Marsch said. “I’m very proud of him and I’ve always believed in him. Always, but I’ve also known that he’s had challenges, you know, big challenges. And it’s not just about playing or not, it’s about how an environment works and how people interact.
