Fourteen years ago, two coaches crossed paths at Athletic Bilbao in the most unremarkable way possible. One was arriving. The other was leaving.
That is exactly where Marcelo Bielsa and Luis de la Fuente find themselves now, on opposite sides of a qualifier that matters enormously for Uruguay and rather less, in terms of pressure, for a Spain side that has already established itself as one of the dominant forces in world football.
A Bilbao connection, thirteen years in the making
The summer of 2011 is where this story starts. Bielsa had just been appointed Athletic Bilbao’s head coach. De la Fuente, a former left-back who had spent eight years as a player at the club and then coached their under-19s and B team, was heading in the opposite direction, joining Deportivo Alavés, roughly 50 miles to the south and operating in the third tier of Spanish football.
Eleven games later, de la Fuente was back at Athletic. He returned to youth development, quietly building a coaching philosophy that, by his own admission, bore the imprint of what Bielsa was doing at the club he had just rejoined as a youth coach.
