Preferential Option for the Fan

For the liberation theologians, the question of the church’s relevance was unavoidably a moral one. How could priests across Latin America preach the gospel of a decadent Western Christianity when the faces of those looking back at them in the pulpit were riven with the tears forged by hardship and lack?

Liberation theologians took up the principle of a ‘preferential option for the poor’, arguing that a preference was always given to the well-being of the poor and powerless of society within the teaching and commands of Jesus. This was the divine ‘predilection for those on the lowest rung of the ladder of history’ that Gutiérrez spoke about in his introduction. With an account of the ‘preferential option for the poor’, the liberation theologians were able to argue for a renewed relevance for Catholicism in a world wracked by poverty.

The question of relevance is one that is not often raised within the hinterland of world football. With its ubiquitous global reach, the so-called ‘beautiful game’ has probably never been more relevant. And yet in recent years, a nagging doubt started to percolate beneath the surface of the terraces which finally bubbled over last year with the announcement of a European Super League.

Much as the liberation theologians had struggled to relate the Catholic magisterium to the every-day people of Latin America, it was starting to look increasingly as though football clubs were failing their own congregants: the fans. To retain its relevance in the modern world, what football needed was some sort of account of the ‘preferential option for the fan’ in the modern game. There is perhaps a fittingness to the fact that this ‘preferential option for the fan’ would emerge from Latin America.

Peronism and Bielsa’s Populism

Marcelo Bielsa was born in Rosario, Argentina, into a family of overachievers. At one point in 2003, his older brother, Rafael, was Argentina’s foreign secretary, his sister, María Eugenia, a renowned architect, had recently become vice-governor of Santa Fe province, while he, the middle child, was managing the Argentine national team. Although Marcelo would spend his career operating within the world of football, his siblings’ political involvement would have had a marked impression on him.

In the late 1970s, Argentina was living through the military junta of Jorge Rafael Videla, who came to power in a coup d’état that saw Isabel Perón deposed. Under the junta, the Argentine people were exposed to the widespread torture and extrajudicial murder of activists and political opponents as well as their families at secret concentration camps.

Videla himself would speak openly of the tens of thousands of people who went missing at this time, saying, ‘They are neither alive nor dead. They are disappeared.’ In 1977, Rafael Bielsa would disappear. After two months of questioning and torture, Marcelo’s older brother would eventually be exiled to Spain for three years.

Once democracy returned to Argentina, Rafael and later María Eugenia would find themselves interpellated into the mainstream political system of the country. Both would ascribe to the leftist Peronism of the Justicialist Party; Rafael working for administrations of both Carlos Menem and Nestor Kirchner, with María Eugenia working in the provincial government.

Peronism itself is a notoriously difficult political ideology to tie down, but an important aspect to the popularity Juan Perón achieved in the mid-twentieth century was his own iteration of a ‘preferential option for the poor’. One of Peron’s ‘Twenty Peronist Tenets’ from his Peronist Philosophy read: ‘Peronism is essentially of the common people. Any political elite is anti-people, and thus, not Peronist.’

‘The Only Irreplaceable Thing Is the Fans’

Flashes of this Peronism would periodically break through in Marcelo’s footballing career. In a press conference at Leeds United in 2019, Bielsa meandered into the topic of his own infamous obsessional tendencies. He noted that there can be negative aspects to obsession:

‘There is an ideology that links obsession with effort and work… A certain class of society tells the workers, “If you work hard, you will get rewarded”… This message is used because it’s in the interest of one class to send this message to the workers. That’s why the obsession for work that is well done can be just as bad as the absence of effort.’

It’s also important not to gloss over Bielsa’s own Catholicism. On 3 October 2011, he visited the Santa Clara convent in Guernica, Spain, with his wife Laura. ‘He told us that he had a religious aunt and that she strengthened his faith in prayer,’ recounted one of the nuns. ‘In addition, he told us that he is a great believer and asked us to pray for Athletic [Club] and for him.’ After standing down as coach of the Argentina National Team in 2004, Bielsa went to live in a monastery for three months, forgoing access to a phone or a television.

This miscellany of influence forms the theoretical basis for Bielsa’s ‘preferential option for the fan’. He would go on to flesh out his ideas about the place of the supporter within the footballing hierarchy in a press conference given as the manager of the Chilean national team. ‘Everything that soccer generates, it generates because there is an eagerness to capture the emotion of the one who cries because the team wins or loses. The onlooker is a person who sees and enjoys—or not—depending on the beauty of what is offered. The fan is something else. That’s why I say that in football, the only irreplaceable thing is the fans.’

But the ‘preferential option for the fan’ was never merely a theoretical affectation on the part of Bielsa. When he arrived at Leeds United in 2018, he sent the entire squad litter picking around the club’s Thorp Arch training facility to give the players a sense of what the fans went through every day to earn the money that they used to pay for a ticket to watch their club play.

They Don’t Worry About Us

Throughout his tenure at the club, accounts of his extraordinary acts of kindness to fans of the club would become commonplace; from the large-scale, in giving away cars to members of staff at Christmas, to the small-scale, in taking time to engage meaningfully with supporters whatever the time of day.

This ‘preferential option for the fan’ imbues Bielsa’s account of football fandom with an inherent localism. In an interview with DAZN, Bielsa talked about the place of the football club within a community. ‘How are we to be happy in my city Rosario when we see a boy in a Real Madrid shirt?’ he asked. ‘Love [for football] has to start with your own, with your place, with who you are and what’s at hand.’

For fans of a club like Leeds United, exiled as they were from the Premier League for sixteen seasons, the idea of starting with what was at hand was a resonant one. They quickly fell in love with the manager who restored a level of credibility to a club which had lost its way in recent years.

When the news of a proposed European Super League broke in 2021, it came as no surprise that Marcelo Bielsa was one of its most intransigent critics. ‘It shouldn’t surprise us,’ he claimed in a press conference in April shortly before Leeds’ home fixture against Liverpool.

‘In all walks of life, the powerful look after their own and don’t worry about the rest of us… [This makes] the powerful… more rich and the weak… poorer. It doesn’t do good to football in general. There are a lot of structures that should have prevented these forces from coming. The same thing happens [in all walks of life], so why wouldn’t it happen in football?’

Last week, Leeds United relieved Bielsa of his services as the manager of their club. At sixty-six years of age, it is not impossible that this could be the end of his managerial career. This would represent a huge loss to football, not simply because the game would be losing one of its finest tacticians, but because it would be losing one of the biggest advocates for the ‘preferential option for the fan’.