Marcelo ‘El Loco’ Bielsa rolled into Murphy in the dead of night. In the mid-1980s the manager, who had spells with Argentina, Athletic Bilbao and Lazio, was working in youth development at Newell’s Old Boys – the Rosario club that gave us Lionel Messi.
Bielsa hated flying, but he was convinced there was talent in Argentina’s rural interior that was being missed by the bigger clubs. So he divided a map of the country into 70 sections and methodically travelled around – clocking up more than 5,000 miles in his Fiat 147.
It was 2am on a Monday when Bielsa knocked on the door of the Pochettino house with colleague Jorge Griffa. The future Spurs manager was 13, and fast asleep.
Bielsa has a reputation as something of an eccentric figure, and the story goes that he asked Pochettino’s parents if he could see their sleeping son’s legs. “He looks like a footballer,” he declared, and they signed him on the spot.
Pochettino grins. “Yes, that was the reality. I woke up in the morning and my mum explained the story. I said: ‘Yeah come on, it was in your dream. What did you drink before you went to sleep?’”
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