Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
At his first public appearance in charge of a struggling Chelsea team in early 2021, Thomas Tuchel set himself an ambitious target. The Premier League title was already beyond reach, he said, so success would mean winning the Champions League, European club football’s highest honour.
Four months later his transformed side beat Manchester City in the final. Afterwards, Tuchel insisted the triumph would have little impact on him personally. “It was a relentless performance,” he said of the 1-0 win. “I don’t want to rest . . . I want the next success.”
This week Tuchel was named as the next head coach of England’s men’s team, and set out a new goal: to lift the World Cup in 2026. Speaking to the UK press in a crisp white shirt and dark grey suit rather than his trademark tracksuit and baseball cap, he said: “We will try to install values and principles and rules as quickly as possible to make the dream come true.”
In Tuchel, England have secured one of the most respected coaches of his generation, a master tactician who strives for perfection but has the pragmatism required to win. Yet for the FA, the choice of the combustible German is a gamble, and marks a sharp change of tack after the largely peaceful eight-year reign of Gareth Southgate. While Southgate delivered a cultural rebirth, Tuchel demands results.
“England are not getting a flawless person,” says Derek Rae, who commentates on German football for ESPN. “But if you let him do what he does best — which is coach a football team — then the chances of success are very high.”
Things will be different on the pitch, too. Author Michael Cox describes Tuchel as a “tactical chameleon” who reshapes his teams for every opponent, and embraces fluidity and unpredictability. England players must brace for Tuchel’s innovative, sometimes punishing training methods. He never practises on a full-size pitch, instead cutting off the corners or shrinking the playing area so that his team learns to operate in tight spaces. In training games he uses small goals, and makes players hold tennis balls to reduce grappling. He even fires maths questions at them during drills to overload them psychologically. His mentally exhausting approach makes a real match feel easy, and earned him the nickname “Der Regelbrecher”, the rulebreaker. Some former players prefer the term “dictator”.
The 51-year-old will cast a very different shadow off the pitch, too. Southgate had a delicate touch, never ducked the politics of the job and became a champion of “progressive patriotism”. But although he’s a self-professed Anglophile, Tuchel wants none of that. He has vowed to “build” on Southgate’s work with the team, but said he became convinced about taking the job only once the parameters were clearly set. “It’s about football,” he has been assured.
Born and raised in the small Bavarian town of Krumbach, Tuchel’s coaching journey began when injury ended his playing career at the age of 25. He took a bar job and started studying, but was lured back to football by Ralf Rangnick, then a coach at Stuttgart but now regarded as one of the pioneers of the modern game.
Tuchel trained youth players and moved to Mainz. In 2009 he was abruptly elevated to first-team manager, despite having no experience of coaching adults. A successful stint led him to Borussia Dortmund, one of European football’s biggest clubs, where he would win the German Cup. At both Mainz and Dortmund, Tuchel followed in the footsteps of another young coach making waves in German football: Jürgen Klopp. Comparisons (and rivalries) with Klopp and Pep Guardiola, Tuchel’s idol, have followed him ever since.
After two years at Dortmund, relations with senior management broke down, a pattern that has since been repeated. He moved to Paris Saint-Germain to manage a constellation of superstars. Domestic league and cup titles followed, as did the club’s first Champions League final. But he was sacked midway through his third season after another high-profile falling out.
Then came Chelsea, where he lifted a team on the slide, took them on a 14-game unbeaten streak and on to European glory. In London he fell in love with English football and English culture, and struck up a good rapport with the British press. Just over a year later, however, he was gone, shortly after being fined by the FA for a pitchside dust-up with a rival manager.
He was spotted a few days later in southern India, where he had gone to experience Ayurvedic therapy, a new addition to his clean living ways. He avoids meat and sugar, while his consumption of alcohol is “very, very close to zero”.
He returned to Germany where he steered Bayern Munich to the league title but was sacked midway through the following season after making enemies of both players and executives. Yet fans wanted him to stay — 28,000 signed an online petition calling for his reinstatement.
Asked this week why he had only agreed an 18-month contract with England, Tuchel slyly acknowledged that in previous jobs the “good experience” had typically only lasted about that long, but added: “I am working on my long-term game.”
No nation has won the World Cup with a foreign coach. This will be England’s third attempt to do so. When Tuchel gets to work on January 1, the clock starts ticking.
