“A German with a Brazilian soul.” It sounded good. In January 2021, when Chelsea announced the appointment of another managerial superstar on its merry-go-round, the club included a series of quotes from those who had worked with Thomas Tuchel.
The Brazilian defender Dani Alves, who had played for him at Paris Saint-Germain, saw Tuchel as one of his own. Others also spoke of the Bavarian’s passion, bordering on Latin hot temper. There was talk of Tuchel bringing pleasure and energy to his training grounds, but also of a requirement for microscopic precision, of perfectionism.
All of this is what England hope will finally deliver them to the promised land: a World Cup victory in Donald Trump’s America, 60 years after Bobby Moore lifted the Jules Rimet trophy at Wembley.
The Three Lions have been losers for so long – albeit narrow ones in recent years – but Tuchel is undoubtedly a winner. He may have lasted only a tempestuous 18 months at Chelsea before falling foul of the club’s new owners, but he did manage to capture Europe’s top competition, the Champions League, against the odds.
There are some for whom a German manager will never be right for the England football team – the Daily Mail called Tuchel’s appointment, in October 2024, “a dark day for English football. We are the laughing stock of the world game.”
For less hysterical observers, however, it is not that Tuchel is German, but that he is not the German whom everyone had taken to their hearts, the one with the foppish hair and toothy grin: Jürgen We-Like-the-Krauts-After-All Klopp.
As the national team embarks on yet another emotional rollercoaster, this time in the hostile climes of Trump’s America, they are in the hands of someone who doesn’t do touchy-feely. Tuchel is no Klopp. He is also no Gareth Southgate.
The announcement of England’s new manager in October 2024 (he took up the role three months later) didn’t cause as much of a stir in Germany as might have been expected. That is because Tuchel doesn’t press the emotional buttons in his homeland either.
He is quite content to be judged – in both countries, anywhere, in fact – on one thing alone: results. “He wants to be accepted as a technician, pure and simple,” says Tobias Schächter, a journalist who has co-authored a biography of the manager. Its English subtitle is “Rulebreaker”.
The story is one of dedication, hard work and an obsessive attention to detail. After showing promise in his teens, Tuchel made it as a player in the lower tiers of German domestic football. A knee injury brought his career to a premature end in 1998 at the age of 25, but he had already turned his eye to coaching while studying for a business degree.
After several seasons of working with young players, his first break was as reserve team coach of the small Bavarian outfit Augsburg. Among his players was Julian Nagelsmann, another injury-prone defender, who is now the Germany manager.
In 2009, Tuchel got his first Bundesliga position, at Mainz, which a certain Klopp had left a year earlier. Five largely successful years there led him to one of the big teams, Borussia Dortmund, where he directly followed a certain Klopp.
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Now he had made it to the European elite. He took Borussia to the quarter-finals of the Champions League, where they were knocked out by Liverpool, thanks to a certain Klopp.
According to those who have worked with him, Tuchel has tempered his annoyance at comparisons with Klopp, particularly the idea that he is in some way the pupil and Klopp the master. It now merely irritates Tuchel, and as they are no longer direct competitors, they get on fine and speak respectfully of each other. That doesn’t hide their differences, though.
Christoph Biermann, one of Germany’s best-known football writers, describes Klopp as a Menschenfänger – someone who draws people to him. The C word: charisma, or at least one form of it.
When Liverpool won the Premier League in 2020 for the first time in 30 years, the pandemic and the lockdowns had only just begun, the remaining games were played in empty stadiums, and they were unable to celebrate. But what people remember Klopp saying was that football didn’t matter: “Please look after yourselves and look out for each other. You’ll Never Walk Alone.” After a surly 2025-26 season under the now-sacked Norwegian Arne Slot, how the Scousers miss their adopted German.
Tuchel enjoyed his time in France at PSG, where he handled the galácticos on and off the pitch, securing two league titles and two domestic cups. According to Biermann, he was happiest at Chelsea, working with a tight-knit management team – until a new set of owners arrived and combustibility returned.
Almost all managers get the chop these days, and although Tuchel’s spells at both Chelsea and PSG were relatively brief, both clubs are known for their hire-and-fire culture. His points-per-match record remained impressive, however, and ensured his star didn’t wane. After Stamford Bridge it was back to his homeland, to the cauldron of Bayern Munich, where he lasted just over a season. Bayern was, according to Schächter, a mistake. It set back Tuchel’s reputation in Germany.
Even though he secured the Bundesliga title in 2023, which the Bavarian outfit regards as its natural right, Tuchel was in regular conflict with the club’s hierarchy, and particularly the former German international Uli Hoeness, who had the nebulous title of honorary president. Hoeness wanted to discuss tactics with him; Tuchel made it clear that he didn’t want others meddling in his decisions.
Maybe the stop-start rhythm of the national game might suit him. Tuchel appears to have developed a good working relationship with the FA. But what matters is what happens from now.
Qualifying for the World Cup was seamless, but the opposition was poor and the football hardly had a Brazilian soul. Two recent disappointing friendlies have rekindled English self-doubt.
So, have the love affair with Klopp and the appointment of Tuchel finally put an end to the English hate-love-hate-envy obsession with the Germans? The answer, as the Germans would say, is jein – yes and no.
For sure, the English have moved on from Piers Morgan’s “Achtung Surrender” headline of 1996 in the Mirror. The Ten German Bombers song still gets an occasional airing from some fans when England play away, but with much less gusto than of old. Tuchel might yet kill it off, along with “two world wars and one World Cup”, too.
These days German managers come and go from all four English divisions, as do Italians, Spaniards and the odd Englishman. From Ralf Rangnick to Daniel Farke, they haven’t quite left their mark, although Farke’s success at keeping Leeds United in the Premier League might change that. As for players, from Jürgen Klinsmann of yesteryear to Kai Havertz of now, they are treated no differently to other foreigners. Mesut Özil appeared to receive no more and no less racism in both countries.
But it doesn’t take much to scratch that itch. When Southampton – whose manager is a young German by the name of Tonda Eckert – were caught red-handed spying on rivals Middlesbrough ahead of a crucial play-off last month, it didn’t take long for the Sun to send in the Spitfires. Its “inside” story of Germany’s “crazy hidden spying culture”, in which seemingly all teams seek to benefit from sending interns to others’ grounds to take snaps on their mobiles, was endearingly headlined “Germ Warfare”. It almost makes you nostalgic for the old days.
All this nonsense will be cast aside if Tuchel delivers. Now that his contract has been extended to the 2028 Euros, which the UK home nations and the Republic of Ireland will host, he will have two opportunities to do at least as well as Southgate.
And what of the comparison between the two? It didn’t take long for Tuchel to be brutally honest in his assessment. The shirt, he said, continued to weigh heavily. Watching the last Euros in Germany in 2024 (in which England succumbed to Spain in the final), Tuchel said: “I felt tension and pressure on the shoulders of the players, and they were playing not to lose.”
He could have chosen his words more diplomatically, but that isn’t his way. Southgate has achieved the status of national treasure, and criticising him is seen as not the done thing. Yet he was only saying what many were thinking. As in the 2018 World Cup semi-final, the Euro 2020 final and the 2022 World Cup quarter-final, his predecessor’s cautious nature was part of England’s undoing.
Tuchel used the same approach when announcing his squad for the USA, Mexico and Canada, and the inevitable omission of several well-known players. He didn’t smother them with public (or private) love; he just said he was doing what he had to do, picking the technically strongest group.
Cue fury from some of those rejected, notably Harry Maguire and family. But it would be wrong to say that Tuchel doesn’t engender loyalty. He does, and many players stand by his approach. He is a relentless taskmaster. He is desperate to win and he gets emotional, but in his own way.
Germans have low expectations of Nagelsmann’s team. Some may look vicariously at England to see how Tuchel fares.
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As for Klopp, he seems to be enjoying life as head of global soccer at the Red Bull company, with its international network of clubs including RB Leipzig, RB Salzburg and the New York Red Bulls. Plus, he has his luxury villa on the German island of Mallorca to tend to. Another big club may beckon for him, if he cares to join one. The same goes for another darling of English fans, the former Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola.
Tuchel is unlikely to achieve that most-favoured status. Which is why, Schächter suggests, he might turn out to be a smart appointment. “History is not weighing on him. He sees the job as a technical endeavour, though he knows that the English see it as far more than that.”
Might the hard man from Germany manage to end 60 years of England hurt? That would be the irony of all ironies.
John Kampfner is the author of the bestseller Why the Germans Do it Better, Notes from a Grown-Up Country. His most recent book is Braver New World (Atlantic)
