How Thomas Tuchel beat 'super-elite' coaches to England job

News

Martin Macdonald | Writer

Content writer covering football, formula 1 and movies

Thomas Tuchel will take charge of a team at a World Cup for the first time this summer when he attempts to guide England to glory.

A Champions League winner with Chelsea and a league champion with Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain, Tuchel had one of the most impressive CVs in Europe when England were looking for a new head coach, following the departure of the popular Gareth Southgate.

When Southgate left, the FA started its recruitment process and hired two external data companies to compile a list of high-calibre coaches.

“I joked with the team afterwards, because it came up with a list you and I could have come up with in the pub in 10 minutes,” FA chief executive Mark Bullingham says, as quoted in the new book Inside England: Behind the Scenes of the Three Lions’ World Cup Dream by Rob Draper and Jonathan Northcroft.

“But actually it was incredibly valuable to see the relative strengths and weaknesses and there are some amazing things you can do with data, like looking at which coaches are good at developing players, which are good in knockout tournaments and so on.

“Playing style was important; tactical flexibility was important. Being a proven winner was important – and a proven winner relative to the resources they had. It’s a bit like xG for managers. With the budget and players available, did they over or underperform? It’s looking at the details and seeing if they added value.”

Crucially, any candidate needed to have experience within the English game. They were put into three groups - up and coming coaches, elite coaches and "super elite" coaches at the very top of the game. The list got narrowed down to five.

Pep Guardiola certainly met that criteria and there were conversations between him and the FA that never materialised into a shock appointment.

“But with the top five [coaches] in the world, we felt it should be more of a ‘rifle shot approach’, where we were going really specific and speaking to them. And, putting it crudely, you’re selling to them as much as they’re selling to you,” Bullingham continues.

“The overwhelming criteria was I wanted someone we could put in front of the players and they would say: ‘Thank you, you’ve given us a chance to win.’”

Tuchel wows the FA

According to the book, Tuchel was the last of the five coaches that the FA reached out to. Initial conversations were casual as the German had, until that point, never considered an appointment as head coach of England.

Between those initial conversations and a meeting scheduled in Munich airport, Tuchel undoubtedly warmed to the idea as by the time he met the FA, he was effervescent in his enthusiasm.

“There was a connection straight away,” John McDermott, the men team technical director, says.

“He loved football. He loved English football. He asked me a million questions about the Euros, about the players.

‘He’d had an incredible experience at Chelsea. A bit like when you speak to Mauricio [Pochettino – whom McDermott worked with at Tottenham], he just loved the Premier League, feels there’s something magnetic about it.

“Thomas is almost Latin in the way he speaks. There’s a warmth and tactileness. He comes alive when he’s speaking about the team, the players, the games. I’m not sure [managing England] was something he was thinking of before our initial call, but he was certainly hooked.”

Bullingham adds: "The meeting? “I think it’s safe to say Thomas blew us away. He had a PowerPoint presentation about how to put a second star on the shirt and it was so well thought through, right down to what the next 18 months would look like in terms of days at St George’s Park and how he would get the best out of players, how he would link with players, how he was going to maintain relationships, what he felt was important going into the World Cup.

“It was the type of presentation you might expect on a third or fourth meeting – and still be impressed by – but this was the first proper meeting. And it wasn’t just the presentation and slides, it was the passion and eloquence with which he was delivering it. It was brilliant.”

Though performances haven't necessarily been a brand of swashbuckling football, Tuchel has a perfect record when it comes to competitive matches for England so far.

In World Cup qualifying, the Three Lions won every match, scoring 22 goals and, remarkably, not conceding a single goal.

Concerns were raised in March when they slumped to a 1-0 defeat against Japan and a 1-1 draw against Uruguay in two international friendlies, but the mood remains upbeat in the country heading into the World Cup, where England will be one of the favourites to lift the trophy.

They have been drawn in a group alongside Croatia, Ghana and Panama.

Written by

Martin Macdonald | Writer

Martin Macdonald. a Content Writer for FootballTransfers and FootballTransfers USA, as well as the Business Operations Manager for RealTimes Network, has worked in football reporting for over 15 years, starting at GOAL and Perform Media before moving to RealTimes. He was formerly the Chief Editor of MovieMeter.com and has also written for FightFans, GPFans and MSN.

View full bio