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Published on Oct, 16 2024
For the third time -- after Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello -- England's Football Association has turned to a foreign coach, appointing Thomas Tuchel as manager of the national team.
That's not as much of a big deal in England these days, since Eriksson was given the job in 2000, but it's a big enough deal among the game's other heavyweights that Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France or Italy have never looked abroad. Then again, none of these countries have a league as outward-looking, as diverse and as globalised, as England. So that part makes sense.
Nor are they facing a long-standing dearth of talent among homegrown coaches like England is, where Newcastle's Eddie Howe is the only Englishman to have managed a top-10 league finish in recent years. That, too, make sense.
But most of all, the choice of Tuchel (like Capello and Eriksson before him) is born out of a desire to win, and to do so straight away. He is seen as a shortcut to success -- a guy to execute rather than build. There are no certainties, only percentages -- as his last club, Bayern Munich, found out -- and Tuchel, at least among those coaches who were available, has shown he can move the needle and give you the best possible chance of winning while your window of opportunity is still open.
It's not that this is an aging team -- other than Harry Kane, most of the key players are the right side of 30 -- it's just that they have reached two finals, a semifinal and a quarterfinal in the past four major tournaments, and the time is right to take that final step towards silverware before a nation convinces themselves they are cursed for eternity.
The fact that he was given an 18-month deal -- and not the monster long-term contracts, replete with references to philosophy and mentality, we've seen in the past -- is further evidence of this. It all fits how Tuchel is seen now: an instant-fix, deliver results type of guy. It's sort of ironic when you consider what he was before.
There's a 2012 TED Talk-type video titled "Rule breaker" of a much younger-looking Tuchel -- who at that point had taken little Mainz to consecutive top 10 Bundesliga finishes -- standing in a black T-shirt and discussing his approach to coaching and team-building. At times, he skews towards being a junior mad professor: like when he says that by changing his formation (and personnel) every game in order to mirror whoever Mainz are playing, he makes the task simpler for his players. Or when, because he doesn't want his players to play down the wing but hit diagonal balls instead, he redesigns the training pitch, turning it into a diamond and cutting off the corners. (He did a lot of fiddling with pitch shapes in his time at Mainz, from circular ones to rectangular ones, both long and very narrow and short and very wide.)
At others, he sounds like a New Age motivational speaker: "We try to achieve 'flow' and when we do we become unwitting 'rule breakers' ... we look each other in the eye and shake hands when we greet each other and tell ourselves how happy we are to be working together." And then he caps thing off with that corny (but valid) Michael Jordán quote about achieving success by failing again and again.
That Tuchel won plaudits for style of play, vision and creativity more than the results. At Mainz, he overachieved with an under-resourced team; at Borussia Dortmund, he won style points but finished 10 points and 18 points off the top in his two seasons while winning the German Cup.
This Tuchel emerged at Paris Saint-Germain after a one-year sabbatical following his sacking as Dortmund boss in 2017 (when he fell out with the front office ... it wouldn't be the last time, either). It's not so much that he won silverware at Paris Saint-Germain -- let's face it: most do, and for obvious reasons -- but the way he harnessed the club's individual talents and turned them into a unit, capable of not just dominating Ligue 1, but also reaching the Champions League final in 2020. And while he may not admit it, that also meant occasionally adopting a healthy dose of pragmatism and safety-first mentality.
Thomas Tuchel says he is "proud" to be England's manager and speaks about whether he will sing the national anthem.
It's a rep Tuchel was able to maintain, at least initially, in his next two stints. He guided Chelsea to a Champions League crown in the pandemic year, beating Pep Guardiola's Manchester City in the final and he delivered a title for Bayern in 2022-23 after replacing Julian Nagelsmann in March 2023, a decision prompted by the fact that he was seen as more "concrete" and more of a "winner" than his predecessor.
That's the reputation Tuchel takes with him into the England job: A pragmatic, tactical savant who can squeeze the most out of his players and who turned the idealism of his youth into something serviceable and results-oriented. It's not undeserved, but it comes with several caveats, starting with the fact that his final season at Bayern saw them finish third, 18 points from the top, their worst showing in more than three decades.
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The other warning sign lies in the fact that he was fired early in each of his last four gigs, each time falling out with the club over personnel issues. Each case is different, and you can find mitigating factors for each one -- from the madness of Todd Boehly's first few months in charge at Chelsea, to the toxic environment at Bayern, to the egos at PSG, to the weight of the Jurgen Klopp legacy at Borussia Dortmund -- but the facts don't change. For the past decade, every time he has left a club, he has done so early, under a cloud and looking like a spent bundle of nerves. Who can forget the famous alpha male handshake incident with Antonio Conte? (It's more fun when set to music.)
Come to think of it, there are more than few parallels with Conte: tactical brilliance and early results, followed by clashes with the folks upstairs and loopy behaviour. But maybe there's another and, perhaps, it's the most significant.
In 2014, fresh off his dismissal from Juventus, Conte made the step into international management, taking on one of the least-gifted Italy sides in recent memory. He could have held out for a top club job, but he chose to his challenge himself, putting his reputation on the line, knowing that failure could mean getting bumped off the elite job carousel.
James Olley reacts to Thomas Tuchel's appointment as England manager.
Tuchel is doing the same with England. He could have waited for a top club vacancy -- Manchester United being the obvious, but by no means only, opening in the next eight months. Instead, he's opting for England knowing full well that radical change awaits. True, he won't have sporting directors acquiring players he doesn't want (and not signing those he does want), but equally, the only way he can outperform his predecessor is by actually winning major silverware, something the England team has achieved just once in more than 150 years of history. Not to mention the fact that, until the World Cup rolls around in 2026, he'll only get to work with his players for a few days at a time, which is a massive departure from a club job, especially for such a tactically oriented manager.
In other words, he's betting on himself and he has skin in the game, because another flop or early departure will mean moving to the back of the elite manager queue. That part is encouraging, almost as much as the tactical savvy and experience he will bring to the job.
After seeing Tuchel the "rule-breaker" idealist and Tuchel the big-club pragmatist, maybe we'll get to see an entirely new Tuchel.
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