Thomas Tuchel: The making of England’s unlikeliest manager

“Don Alfredo El Tuchel” is one of many nicknames listed for Thomas Tuchel in the 1992 yearbook of the Simpert-Kraemer-Gymnasium, the high school in the Schwaben town of Krumbach where he grew up. It suggests a certain confidence and even a cursory read of the teenage badinage that follows leaves one in no doubt that this was a young man in a hurry.

Having visited Krumbach in 2024 and been handed that old yearbook by the England manager’s former PE teacher, I can say with confidence that it is the kind of hometown the ambitious leave behind. In the Schwaben region of Bavaria, 60 miles from Munich, the man leading England in the national team’s 17th World Cup finals grew up in West German prosperity. The nation Tuchel was born into in August 1973 was booming economically to such an extent that the biggest issue in news reports at the time was what the Deutschmark’s strength against the dollar might mean for exports.

Thomas Tuchel: The making of England’s unlikeliest manager — Tuchel pictured in his school yearbook aged around 17-18 – Craig Stennett

Three weeks after Tuchel’s birth, West Germany was finally admitted as the 134th member of the United Nations – a landmark day in the history of the postwar nation. Unfortunately for the West German delegation, the 133rd member inaugurated that day was East Germany. The Daily Telegraph’s New York correspondent noted that, although protocol dictated the two nations would have to sit alongside one another, “a tactful aisle would separate the rival Germanys”.

The son of Gabriele, a special-needs teacher, and Rudolph, a water management engineer, Tuchel’s early life was middle class. The West German economic miracle meant that part of Swabia was a mechanical engineering hub. His early adult life would not be as straightforward for one who was such a talented schoolboy athlete and academically gifted. Indeed, it would not be until he was in his late 30s that he finally gained the opportunity to showcase, on a national scale, his ideas about football and the working practices he had honed. And from there it progressed very quickly.

Thomas Tuchel pictured iwhen he was around 17-18. Top picture in Simpert-Kraemer-Gymnasium-bottom picture in FC Augsburg-Collect provided by his teacher Hans Komm-now retired. — Top picture is Tuchel aged around 17-18, at his school, Simpert-Kraemer-Gymnasium. The bottom picture is Tuchel in FC Augsburg-Collect – Craig Stennett

In August 2009, Tuchel was thrust into the manager’s job at Mainz 05, a Bundesliga team of little notable history other than that established by their former coach Jürgen Klopp. Tuchel made such a success of it that since then, high-profile jobs, plaudits and wealth have come fast. Now he finds himself in an extraordinary position. A German in charge of England at the World Cup – one who may even have to plot victory over his native country, the source of such neurosis for England over the years in tournament summers since 1966.

Thomas Tuchel — Tuchel was given his big break in management by Mainz 05

He has said it is the biggest job of his life, and with staff and players finally established in the United States for the start of the tournament and all the nation’s focus on the team, it must feel that way.

Tuchel already had a glittering career before England. He has managed Borussia Dortmund, Paris St-Germain, Chelsea and Bayern Munich. In that yearbook, the anonymous author jokes that Tuchel, a very accomplished schoolboy footballer, behaved as if he “already had a contract from FCB [Bayern]”. He had been the star player in the school team that won the German schools title, a fabulous achievement for a small-town school. He had played three times for Germany Under-18s. But peers checking in on his career 15 years later might have felt their confidence in Tuchel’s inevitable stardom was misplaced.

His playing career had gone nowhere, although he had gone on to become a successful academy coach, and director. It was at 35 that he was given his first coaching job in senior football at Mainz. From there, it was lift-off. At 52, he finds himself on the brink of a summer like no other, with the eyes of the English nation upon him. This cerebral, occasionally spiky man is among the most celebrated coaches of his generation.

Twenty years ago, as another foreign coach took England to a World Cup in Tuchel’s native Germany, the man currently in charge of the Three Lions was so hard-up he could not afford to replace a clapped-out Audi. His then-wife Elisabeth – known as Sissi – would drive him around to watch games in his capacity as the head of the academy at Augsburg, its senior team then in the third tier of German football.

Indeed, in his spare time he was still running summer football camps for children as a sideline to supplement his income, but by the time the 2006 World Cup finals came along life had changed a little. After a promising six years coaching in the academy at VfB Stuttgart and then Augsburg, he was on the German Football Association (DFB) course to obtain his coaching permit that would allow him to take jobs in senior men’s football.

The authoritative biography of Tuchel is Rulebreaker, published shortly after his 2021 Champions League success with Chelsea. It is written by the German journalists Daniel Meuren and Tobias Schächter, the latter of whom played against Tuchel in the third tier of German football.

It paints a picture of an intelligent man who worked for years and years in relative anonymity to gain the experience that would make him such a rapid success when his chance came. It is clear-eyed about identifying in the younger Tuchel a competitive intensity that has on more than one occasion soured relations with key players and club execs. Friendships burned bright with team-mates and coaching colleagues when their careers converged but they flamed out once Tuchel moved on – and he has moved on a lot.

The intriguing question now is how Tuchel will react in the white heat of an England World Cup summer – a glare that has caused previous incumbents to melt.

When one visits Krumbach, where Tuchel left as a teenager, they remember him best as a superb sportsman – football, basketball, tennis, handball, swimming. His three Under-18 caps are no mean feat when one considers the depth of talent in Germany. Injury ended his career early, but it is also fair to ask whether this tall sweeper was truly destined for the Bundesliga. He finished with 68 appearances in the German third division and less than 10 in the tier above. He had to accept a ruined knee and other scars, of the psychological kind, from a disastrous move to Stuttgarter Kickers – and a coach who damaged the confidence of the young Tuchel.

Thomas Tuchel player — Tuchel’s humble playing career was cut short by injury

Meuren and Schächter point out that much later in Tuchel’s coaching career, he would occasionally turn out for an amateur team in the Royal Bavarian League. He would remark to friends that he would swap all his coaching success for one more year as a player – but there is no doubt that the reputation and earnings he has commanded as a coach have far outstripped anything his playing ability could have delivered.

He developed into a brilliant tactician at Mainz where he was the head of the academy during Klopp’s transformative years there, and later agreed to take the job after the first post-Klopp appointment proved a bust. As the Mainz Under-19s coach, he famously took the squad on a bike ride to the top of the valley in Simmering in Innsbruck in Austria. Once there they made a pact to do everything possible to win the domestic under-19s cup and symbolically buried a metal pin badge to seal the agreement. A week before the final, Tuchel went back up to the peak, dug it out and had it on a table at the front for his pre-match meeting. Naturally, his team won the final.

Thomas Tuchel Jurgen Klopp — Tuchel twice succeeded Jurgen Klopp, first at Mainz in 2009 and again six years later at Borussia Dortmund – Daniel Roland/AFP

One cannot rule out similar grand gestures should England progress further in the United States this summer, and it is moments like these which seem to get to the heart of Tuchel. In many respects he is the archetypal football deep-thinker in the tradition of Lobanovsky, Cruyff or Guardiola. Adept at problem-solving, and tactical innovation, he has the air of the restless young professor striding purposefully across campus.

Equally, he is given to deeply emotional responses. His fallouts at Mainz and later Dortmund were legendary. He has had one senior executive banned from the training ground at Dortmund over a disagreement. He has gone nose-to-nose with Antonio Conte, his Chelsea predecessor, in full view of the television cameras. In his early days as an academy coach, Meuren and Schächter note that Tuchel was sometimes unable to hide frustration with the less talented players who could not carry out his instructions.

He appeals sometimes directly to the player’s intellectual curiosity. At Dortmund he famously gave the mercurial Armenian playmaker Henrikh Mkhitaryan a copy of the seminal sports psychology opus, The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey to hone his mindset. Tuchel is a voracious reader. When he arrived at Chelsea he said he was reading English-language crime thrillers to sharpen his grip of the language. He ended up immersed in one of the great diplomatic-criminal sanctions of the era.

His career seems to vacillate between episodes when he demonstrated high emotional intelligence to others when it appears he simply lost patience with players and club hierarchies. It remains a matter of dispute who at Dortmund supported the Uefa decision to push ahead with their Champions League quarter-final first leg against Monaco in 2017 just one day after the Dortmund team bus was hit with pipe bombs. Many players and staff, including Tuchel, narrowly escaped serious injury or worse.

Days later after the game was played, Tuchel said that he would have liked more time, but accounts of the aftermath of the attack vary. Others have claimed that Tuchel said shortly after the game was postponed that his preference was to play it as soon as possible. Either way, he presents as a modern coach for whom there is little distraction from the remorseless schedule once he is in game mode.

For all the late blooming of his career, it does feel that Tuchel always belonged on the biggest stage of all. It was just a case of when he would get there.

Notably, he has never sought the connection with supporters that Klopp, whom he followed at Mainz and then Dortmund, cultivated so assiduously. It is at Chelsea, a fanbase not easily impressed, where Tuchel is remembered most fondly. Not only did he win the Champions League, he guided the club through the chaos that followed. That being the enforced sale by Roman Abramovich, sanctioned by the Government after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Thomas Tuchel Champions League — Tuchel won the Champions League in his first season at Chelsea – Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images

That move plunged the club into a kind of financial limbo which Tuchel responded to with energy. When it looked like the limits imposed on Chelsea’s day-to-day spending might even preclude booking the team flights to games Tuchel said he would gladly drive the bus himself. It was not just a joke to ease the tension. Having managed some of the world’s famous players in their gilded lives at PSG and Chelsea, he is very clear that the roots of his career lie in his days as an under-15s coach when facilities were basic and resources limited.

His new contract at the Football Association, which was signed in February in some haste on the part of the governing body, to keep him for Euro 2028 is worth around £5m annually, with a significant World Cup win bonus. That is not even likely to be the most lucrative deal he has agreed in the last 17 years. Tuchel is now a very wealthy man. Nevertheless, unlike all his players he has also been decidedly impecunious in his adult life. Not just when he began as a student at university in Stuttgart, aged 25, when his playing career was finally put to bed.

He likes to recall how working as a waiter in the city in the licenced premises Radio Bar – long since closed – was a formative experience. Meuren and Schächter uncovered another interview where Tuchel recounted the last days of his career at the now fourth-tier southwestern German club SV Ulm where he “sorted rolls in a bakery”. He has admitted in the past that the support of his wife Sissi, with whom he has daughters Emma and Kim, was crucial in those difficult early years as a coach.

Tuchel and Sissi divorced in 2022 and it is not clear whether Tuchel is still in a relationship with the Brazilian Natalie Max Guerreiro whom he is understood to have met in London. The television cameras that pan across the players’ family section at games in the US will give some clues as to whether the England manager has any family or loved ones supporting him in person at the tournament.

As well as England and Germany, Tuchel also has an association with another of the teams at the World Cup this month. The development of Qatari football has been enough to ensure qualification for this tournament after their 2022 host’s place. In addition to managing the Qatari-owned PSG for 2½ seasons, Tuchel is also understood to have been a connection to the Gulf state’s Aspire Academy. Some of his most revealing lectures have been made on behalf of that institution.

But naturally it is the prospect of England playing Germany this summer – with all that tournament history between them – that is most intriguing.

Julian Nagelsmann, the Germany manager, was an academy player under Tuchel when the latter was a coach at Stuttgart. It was Tuchel who gave Nagelsmann his first scouting assignment when the younger man found his own career curtailed by injury. That the pair of them have become such huge coaching names demonstrates how much the last two decades have been a golden period for German coaching. It has been marked by the encouragement of new ideas in academy football, a move away from the ubiquity of big-name former players to specialist career coaches and the promotion of the most successful to the men’s game. Both Tuchel and Nagelsmann have benefited from that.

Thomas Tuchel and Julian Nagelsmann — Tuchel set Julian Nagelsmann (circled, right), now Germany manager, on the path to coaching

Perhaps also England, although the notion of the FA wielding its considerable financial advantage to appoint a leading foreign coach will always go against the principles of international football that some of us hold dear. That is the FA’s problem – not Tuchel’s. He simply accepted a job offered to him. Indeed, over the last 15 years, senior people in football have been falling over themselves to offer him jobs.

Tuchel famously learned French in a few months ahead of his arrival at PSG in 2018, and his English is leagues ahead of that spoken by the two other non-Englishman to manage England previously. Indeed, one might argue that Tuchel speaks a more sophisticated version of English than some of the Englishmen to have taken charge of England, although it would be impolite to name names.

In 2006, when Sven-Goran Eriksson led an England team fatefully undermined by injury to Wayne Rooney, and the unwillingness to drop David Beckham, to the World Cup in Germany, a 32-year-old Tuchel was watching. His DFB course place, Meuren and Schächter discovered, meant the then Augsburg academy director was able to attend World Cup games in person. He was a long way away in those days from the great pinnacle of international football, although Tuchel being Tuchel, presumably he will have known that his time would come.

A man who can be very affable, and also one with a reputation for being difficult, within three years he would be a Bundesliga manager. Back in the summer of 2006, things were starting to come together for Tuchel. Even then, no one could question that he knew his own mind and over the next two decades that perspective served him well. Occasionally it might also have been construed to be his undoing. What he has learned from it all we are about to find out, in what will surely be an intense few weeks for the man currently in charge of the hopes of the English football nation.