Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball

Fig 01. Final Artwork

Project Dossier Zine Cover

Bielsa El Loco

A tarot-inspired Marcelo Bielsa cover for The Square Ball — El Loco as card 0, The Fool, where glorious success and total disaster sit a single position apart.

Client The Square Ball

Category Zine Cover

About the Project

Copy 127 words

Figures 18

Client The Square Ball

The biggest name Leeds have had in the dugout for decades, drawn after the tarot's card 0 — The Fool, or El Loco in Spanish. Read one way it is glorious success; flip it and it is total disaster, which felt like exactly the right amount of risk to hang a Bielsa cover on.

Didier Roustan said some kind words about it on L'Équipe. I think. (18:15, if you want to check my translation.)

He was going to have a sly little smile, right up until I realised the horror of it and painted over my sins. It also ended up in The Square Ball's 2018 Charity Calendar for the Leeds Hospital Trust.

Print is available here, and the process is detailed here (sort of).

Selected plates 17 figures

Arrangement Details, crops, and WIPs

Sequence Fig 02–18

Viewing Open still plates

Open any figure to inspect surface, print detail, and framing more closely without losing the overall sequence. Motion plates play inline at full page size.

Fig 02. Detail View

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 2

Fig 03. Material Study

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 3

Fig 04. Print Context

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 4

Fig 05. Detail View

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 5

Fig 06. Material Study

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 6

Fig 07. Print Context

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 7

Fig 08. Detail View

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 8

Fig 09. Material Study

Fig 10. Print Context

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 10

Fig 11. Detail View

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 11

Fig 12. Material Study

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 12

Fig 13. Print Context

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 13

Fig 14. Detail View

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 14

Fig 15. Material Study

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 15

Fig 16. Print Context

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 16

Fig 17. Detail View

Marcelo Bielsa, Leeds United — illustration by John Tregoning for The Square Ball — view 17

Fig 18. Material Study

Sequence note

The closing plates are intended to read like a print-room pass: object, surface, and image held in sequence rather than treated as isolated uploads.

Deep zoom appendix

Print-resolution studies

01 figures Inspection tiles

These appendix plates are wired for the Deep Zoom lightbox flow described in the implementation spec: inspection JPEG first, then tiled print-resolution detail once the viewer is ready.