In an alternative timeline, Thomas Tuchel could be the manager of the Germany national team rather than the surprise choice about to take charge of his first match as head coach of England.
After Hansi Flick was sacked by Germany in September 2023, Tuchel was on a four-man shortlist to replace him, according to sources at the German Football Association.
It included Jurgen Klopp, then at Liverpool, Ralf Rangnick, the Austria manager, Tuchel, in charge at Bayern Munich at the time, and Julian Nagelsmann, the coach Tuchel had replaced.
In the end, the job went to Nagelsmann because the others were happy in their roles and he was out of work. Still, many considered it bizarre that Nagelsmann had been sacked by Bayern six months previously, and it could easily have been Tuchel looking for a job and different stars aligning.
The Bayern board decided by February that Tuchel wasn’t for them, and in the summer he was back at the elite football manager job centre, where the waits can be long but the rewards lucrative.
Tuchel came close to joining Manchester United to replace Erik ten Hag – talks reaching an advanced stage only to break down over his wage and backroom staff demands.
United stuck with Ten Hag for a little longer, but the story goes that when they decided to sack the Dutchman in October they were returning to the prospect of Tuchel.
The FA had opened talks with Tuchel in August, in Munich, but when United came back to the table the governing body – won over by his idea of an intense 18-month crack at winning the World Cup – moved quickly to agree a contract in October.
The appointment was met with mixed reviews: a fierce backlash to a foreign coach being handed the job coupled with others thinking that giving a serial trophy winner, with a proven track record working with the talent and egos that come with elite footballers, is worth a shot.
But can he do something that has eluded 13 coaches before him on what will be the 60th anniversary of England’s last major tournament victory?
Speaking to people across the game The i Paper discovered a rulebreaker, a tactical fox, an unpredictable multi-faceted personality – part cool, calm, charming motivator, part confrontational firebrand – who has gone from clueless cocktail waiter to the most prestigious job in English football.
Tactical fox
When Tuchel turned up at German Sports University, in Cologne, for his Fussball-Lehrer course, the then 32-year-old cut a quiet figure. The courses – Germany’s equivalent of the Uefa A licence – attract a mix of former professionals who have won World Cups and Champions Leagues, aspiring assistants, university students, amateur and youth coaches.
Tuchel was in charge of the youth teams at Augsburg and was happy to let the others talk, while he listened and learned.
“Thomas was more at that time the teacher type, from his background,” recalls Erich Rutemoller, one of Tuchel’s tutors.
“Normally the loudest are the former professionals!”
Tuchel excelled in the academic areas – the written exams on psychology, medicine, sports science. “He was very good on theory,” Rutemoller says.
But despite having no elite experience compared to some of his peers they found he was surprisingly adept at translating his tactical ideas into the practical sessions and on the pitch in a final demonstration.
“He was a really good tactician,” Rutemoller says. “We call it a Tactical Fox. In German we say Taktischer Fuchs. Thomas is a tactical fox.”
Rutemoller stresses they had no idea back then that he could go on to have the career he has. “At that time, don’t tell me you could see one day he would be coach of the national team of England!” he says, chuckling.
But tutors did notice he had subtle similarities to Klopp. Tuchel had not played at the highest level but that only increased his determination to succeed in coaching, and blended well with his background in academia.
Tuchel was the perfect student, Rutemoller says, but already there was evidence of the fiery side that has caused rows with executives at his clubs and can erupt on the touchline. “In the course he was really fantastic, calm and quiet. But for sure on the sideline he could explode.”
The waiter
Tuchel may have been quiet then, but he had grown in confidence considerably from the nervy, naïve young man in his mid-20s who traipsed around bars in the centre of Stuttgart’s hip-hop scene trying to blag his way into jobs to pay for a business degree.
He had asked in maybe a dozen or more venues before the owner of the Radio Bar took pity on him.
It was an entirely new world for Tuchel as he strived to discover a new identity. Tuchel had always felt confident in football environments, it was all he had ever known until a bust knee stopped him playing.
But he didn’t know how to speak to complete strangers, nor did he have any idea how to mix cocktails.
At first, he feared people might know he had been a footballer, and that they would judge him a failure. Footballer was all he wanted to be, and there was an element of swallowing pride.
For months on end he collected glasses, helping clean up at the end of shift, well into the middle of the night. But he soon grew into the role, gaining social skills that he would carry into coaching.
It was two years before they let him work the bar but by the time he left he could be seen waltzing between busy tables with a giant tray of drinks propped above his head on the fingertips of one hand.
Rulebreaker
Tuchel had four days to prepare his Mainz players for his first game in professional football. It was 2009, and though he had impressed in charge of Augsburg’s reserves for a season, he was a relative unknown. And these were seasoned Bundesliga players.
So Tuchel surprised them. He loaded them onto a coach and took them to a hotel 60 miles away.
Before one training session, he invited them to the hotel dining room and stood next to a flipchart. They sipped coffee and ate cake while he took them through his list of rules. The first was, arguably, the most important: he wants them to eat together.
He noticed that players tended to arrive at the scheduled time for meals, but would load up plates from the buffet and leave. He told them they must eat together for 20 minutes.
The players thought it was a bit weird. But Tuchel thinks: if you can’t be bothered to eat together, talk together, how are you supposed to win together on a football pitch?
As the team evolved with Tuchel, defied expectations, believed in his methods, 20 minutes became 45 minutes which became only leaving after the last person had finished eating.
Another rule was that players and staff always greet each other with a handshake, that they look one other in the eye and let them know they are ready to train well.
Ironically, via all these rules, Tuchel became known as a rulebreaker, and it would be the theme of the Ted-style talk he gave to business executives posted on YouTube in March 2018.
He explained how he borrowed from the sports scientist Wolfgang Schollhorn the idea of challenging his players in clever ways. He asked his defenders to hold tennis balls. And when he wanted his players to pass diagonally across the pitch, he cut the corners on training pitches, making a diamond, to force them to think about passing in alternative ways.
He rarely trained 11 v 11, but worked on smaller sided routines over and over, until players became exasperated by it, but soon realised it created a flow that came naturally in matches.
After assessing his Mainz squad, Tuchel found them lacking physically and technically compared to other clubs. His masterstroke was to mirror the opposition when defending, so whatever formation they attacked with, his team defended the same. It threw opponents off.
He changed players frequently. In one match he had six new starting players and an entirely new formation from the previous game and stood on the touchline before kick-off suddenly wondering if he had made a huge mistake.
The nagging doubt persisted. One time, he overheard Christian Heidel, the general manager, saying on the bus before a match that nobody knew what team were going to show up or how they would play. It was meant as a compliment, but it worried Tuchel that people thought his football didn’t have an identity.
He left Mainz with a better points record than Klopp.
Tuchel talked tactics with Pep Guardiola, learned about statistical models from Matthew Benham, the Brentford owner, commissioned scouting reports from Rene Maric, a tactics blogger in his 20s.
He came to believe that at the elite end, the sharp apex of the game he will be working in as England manager, it is all about the players: loading them up with ideas but letting them express themselves. “We are the service providers, we support and help that,” he says in the YouTube video.
Service provider, tactical fox, rulebreaker, waiter, German – nobody will care what Tuchel is if he wins England the World Cup.
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