Leeds United finished ninth in their first Premier League season back, and the And It Was Beautiful audiobook is the record of how a club managed that after sixteen years away from the top flight of English soccer. Phil Hay covered all of it for The Athletic and reads the book here, which turns a season diary into something closer to testimony from the press box.
Marcelo Bielsa is the subject even when the scoreboard is not. The book pulls the curtain back on the training schedule that defined his time at Leeds, including the murderball sessions the description calls infamous, and on the tactical methods that turned Championship regulars into Premier League stars. What emerges is less a portrait of a genius than an account of a method applied without exceptions, to everyone, every week, until a whole city started behaving differently.
A November 2023 five-star reaches for an unexpected comparison to explain the appeal, saying the chapter on game analysis will land for anyone familiar with Bill Belichick's pad system, and that the book removes any doubt about why Pep rates Bielsa so highly. That response also notes it holds up regardless of where Leeds sit now, which is the fair test for a book written inside a single season.
The structure follows the campaign rather than the man, and that discipline is what keeps it honest. Promotion, the return, the survival questions, the finish in ninth, then the ending nobody wanted: on February 27, 2022, after 170 matches in charge, the club parted with the most successful manager it had employed in a generation. His parting gift, as the description has it, was to walk out and embrace the crowd that came to say thank you. Knowing that ending while listening to the promotion chapters gives the whole thing a shape the season itself did not have at the time.
Highlights
Author-read reportage has a particular value that hired narration cannot reproduce. Every interview in this book was conducted by the person speaking it, every judgment about a player or a decision was formed at the training ground rather than from a transcript, and the emphasis inside a sentence about a bad night in the league belongs to somebody who was there for it. For a book whose selling point is access, that is not a small thing.
The listening experience is closer to long-form radio than to a sports memoir. Seven hours and thirty-eight minutes is roughly a season's worth of match weeks compressed into two long sittings, and a September 2021 five-star describes what carries it: resilience, humility, effort, and the sense that a city, a club, a staff and a set of players were all doing the same thing at once. Read aloud, that accumulation works better than it does in print, where it can look like repetition.
A companion PDF ships with the audio, according to the listing, which is where any visual material would sit. Worth downloading before you start rather than hunting for it later, particularly if you want to follow the tactical sections rather than let them wash past. Tactical writing is the part of a soccer book that most needs a diagram, and a recording on its own cannot supply one.
Things to Know Before Starting And It Was Beautiful
One rating is what this page counts, and 4.7 is the average it prints. Beneath it the page prints five written verdicts, all of them at the top grade, so nothing visible produces the number displayed above them. The response occupying the most recent slot in that column is two words long and concerns delivery speed rather than the book, which tells you how much weight the star display can carry here.
Edition dating is the more useful warning. The description opens by saying the book has been updated to include the 2021/22 season and then describes events from February 2022, while the release date on this listing reads August 26, 2021. A recording published in the summer of 2021 cannot contain a season that had not been played. Check which version of the text this file actually carries before assuming the Bielsa departure is in it.
Expectations about scope deserve a note too. This is a season chronicle rather than a biography, so the years before Leeds arrive as context and not as narrative, and the personal insight the publisher advertises from Bielsa is seasoning rather than the main course. Listeners hoping for a cradle-to-present account of one of the most argued-about coaches in the sport will find a much narrower book than that. The narrowness is deliberate and mostly pays off, since a single season examined this closely shows more about a method than a career summary ever does, but it does mean the book assumes you already care about Leeds before the first chapter starts.
Is This One for You?
Leeds supporters are the obvious audience, and a five-star filed on October 17, 2021 sets out the tiers precisely: essential for anyone who follows the club, likely to resonate for anyone interested in English soccer generally, and of no interest whatsoever to somebody who does not follow the game at all. That is an unusually honest piece of audience mapping and I would not improve on it.
Neutrals should know what they are buying. Coaching obsessives will get a great deal out of the method sections regardless of club loyalty, and anyone who enjoys embedded sports journalism will recognize the form immediately. Ninth place is not usually the stuff of celebration, and the achievement of this book is making you understand why, for one city, it was.
Good to Know
Is the And It Was Beautiful audiobook a Bielsa biography?
No. It chronicles Leeds United's first season back in the Premier League, with the manager as the organizing presence rather than the subject of a life story. His methods, training sessions and tactical thinking get sustained attention, but the timeline stays inside the club and the campaign it covers.
Does the audiobook include the 2021/22 season and the departure?
The description says the text was updated to include it and covers the February 2022 exit, yet the listing dates the recording to August 2021. Those two facts cannot both be true of the same file, so confirm the edition with the seller if the later material is why you are buying.
Is this reporting or a fan tribute?
Reporting, and a five-star filed on October 28, 2021 makes the case for the author's standing as a journalist rather than as a supporter. The affection is real and unhidden, but the material comes from access and interviews, and the book is willing to describe bad decisions and worse nights.
