But what about the pathway? What kind of message does it send out to all the promising English coaches out there? What does it say about the system when the Football Association needs to import a head coach from abroad? Why won’t you sing the national anthem? Is it hypocritical for you to wear a poppy when it was your lot who, you know?
Yes: if the industrial-strength outrage generated by his appointment is any indication, Thomas Tuchel’s press conference after winning the 2026 World Cup is certainly going to be wild. Because of course we must assume that this outrage is in fact a consistent and principled intellectual stance that will be maintained throughout regardless of any victorious campaign, rather than, say, a bile reflex confected and amplified largely for clicks and attention.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and in more ways than one. Not least because there are few guarantees that Tuchel’s and England’s marriage of convenience will even survive the 18 months to the next World Cup. Tuchel wants a high-profile springboard to his next super-club job. The FA wants to win, and win now. Neither party is even really bothering to maintain the pretence that this is the start of a long and beautiful friendship.
Meanwhile, the last 24 hours of news cycle are a reminder that, on some level, every single England coach is set up to fail. Too inexperienced. Too battle-scarred. Too idealistic. Too pragmatic. Too risky. Too safe. Too weak. Too woke. Too Swedish. Too Italian. And now we have the surreal sight of a new England coach who is basically too accomplished, too garlanded with big international prizes, so good he makes our own meagre coaching pool look bad in comparison.
To be fair, this is far from the only objection that has been registered against Tuchel. Danny Mills doesn’t like the fact that he wears a hoodie and cap on the touchline. Gary Neville doesn’t believe he fits the “criteria of St George’s Park”. Scott Minto is disappointed that he’s not Eddie Howe. Dean Ashton is “a little bit underwhelmed”.
This is not really an argument that can be pursued on the basis of reason or logic or facts. You can point at the precedent of Sarina Wiegman or Trevor Bayliss, or the fact that France and Italy and Spain and the Netherlands and Argentina and Portugal have all had foreign coaches in the past, or the fact that Brazil spent years trying to pursue Carlo Ancelotti, that the likes of Greece and South Korea and Senegal all enjoyed their greatest triumphs under foreign coaches, and none of these countries reported feeling any less jubilant or patriotic as a result.
But none of it will ever really cut through, because at its core these are issues of emotion and identity. Not to mention a peculiar and longstanding English obsession with breeding, stock, upbringing, the right sort of chap. The Tuchels from Krumbach? Not familiar with them, old boy. In a world still defined by fluid borders and fractured identities, still negotiating the twisted legacies of war and empire and mass migration, where it is becoming harder than ever to define the “we”, perhaps it is little surprise that so many of us take refuge in the trivial symbolism of obsessing over one passport, held by one man, doing one job, once.
And trivial really is the word here, because there is a legitimate debate to be had over who owns and runs this country, who gets to declare themselves a true patriot and who gets demonised as an outsider. But it is not a debate ever likely to be entertained in the Daily Mail (controlled by the non-domiciled Lord Rothermere) or the Daily Telegraph (owned until last year by a Bermuda-based investment company) or the Sun (owned by an American conglomerate), or any of the other self-styled defenders of our cherished indigenous institutions.
As for unclogging the coaching pipeline, this is the work of decades and not years. Liverpool haven’t had an English manager since 2011, Manchester City since 2007, Manchester United and Arsenal since 1986. So in the last 13 years, your sample size for whether an English coach can take on a big job is basically two: Frank Lampard and Graham Potter. And if Chelsea had entertained any realistic expectation of a title challenge in 2019 or 2022, it’s arguable neither of them would have got their chance either.
What it’s going to take to move the dial on this: serious investment, the dismantling of networks and entrenched prejudices and inferiority complexes that have built up over generations, a big dose of luck. What it’s not going to take: simply handing the England job to Eddie Howe and hoping for the best.
There is of course an irony here. All this bluster over whether Tuchel is too German for the England job rather glosses over the issue of whether Tuchel is actually going to succeed at the England job. There seems to be an assumption that England are getting the Chelsea Tuchel, the tactical genius who took on an ailing rabble in January and led them to the Champions League title in May. Huge if true. But what if England are actually getting the Tuchel of Bayern Munich, who hired him in 2023 expecting a similar result and soon ended up with their first trophyless season in 12 years?
In a way, Tuchel’s challenge at Bayern was more akin to what awaits him with England than anything else he has previously faced in his career. Bayern coaches operate within rigid constraints: outsized expectations, a recruitment policy largely beyond their control, a rolling media circus, a dressing room full of powerful senior players, an organisation riddled with leaks and gossip.
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In Tuchel’s case he encountered another familiar problem: a dearth of midfielders capable of executing the controlled, high-energy style he wanted. Tuchel made no secret of his desire to replace the club stalwarts Leon Goretzka and Joshua Kimmich in the summer of 2023, but when no replacement materialised he was forced to begin the season with the worst of all worlds: a restive dressing room, an undermined authority and a midfield he did not want.
This is a new job, a new situation, a new set of circumstances. But it’s uncanny how many of the same strictures apply here. You will deliver exemplary success on a minimal timescale. You will handle a dressing room of stars, many of whom were there long before you arrived and will still be there long after you have left. You will have Harry Kane, who will score lots of goals but also can’t really run. But you don’t have a world-class midfield, you don’t have a world-class defence, and you can’t sign João Palhinha.
History suggests that when a Tuchel tenure implodes, it tends to implode in a hurry. His boardroom relationships have broken down too often to be coincidental. In a sense this encapsulates the high-stakes gamble the FA have taken. Poor results, terrible vibes, personal differences, tabloid scandal, a lucrative job offer from somewhere else: there are a million ways in which this can go wrong.
But sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider to unload this country’s accumulated emotional baggage, to separate what matters from what does not. Tuchel is a high-quality strategist, a fine communicator, about as technically gifted a coach as any international team can realistically hope to employ these days. There are a million ways this can go wrong. But it’s also possible to glimpse the one way it can go dazzlingly right.
Source: theguardian.com
