Thomas Tuchel had many influences and mentors through the fledgling years of his coaching career, most notably Ralf Rangnick and Jurgen Klopp. But perhaps the most intriguing was a German scientist, Professor Wolfgang Schollhorn.
Schollhorn advocated the benefits of ‘differential learning’, in which the student’s environment is constantly disturbed and disrupted, forcing them to come up with new solutions rather than simply repeating the same motions.
“If we want to have extraordinary performance, we need to train extraordinarily!” went Schollhorn’s maxim.
Tuchel adopted this approach in his second managerial job, in charge of Bundesliga club Mainz 05, in the same city where Schollhorn was based. They had numerous detailed conversations which, Tuchel said, “totally changed my role as a coach. I started to orientate myself more and more towards the fact that training provides the players with much more complex tasks than a match does. The problems the opponent creates in the game should seem as easy as possible to them.”
Tuchel would force his players to train on small, narrow pitches with constant pressure on the ball-carrier. He would randomly make up rules to confuse and confound, like banning passes through the centre circle or forbidding players from using the left wing. “You need A-levels for some of these exercises,” midfielder Eugen Polanski complained.
The day before a match against Stuttgart, he turned his training pitch into an hourglass shape with the intention of forcing play through his opponents’ weak centre, a point taken to extremes. He made his training sessions so mentally exhausting that the weekend’s match felt simple by comparison.
It is an example of the often eccentric lengths he would go to prepare his team. To Tuchel, psychology was as important as technical skill. Mainz midfielder Andreas Ivanschitz described his coach as a “genius” and teammate Nikolce Noveski called him a “perfectionist”, though Tuchel has also been described by former players as “intense” and “confrontational”, deliberately pushing buttons and getting inside heads. Gareth Southgate, he is not.
His methods have at times gone too far. Dortmund players complained about the humiliating punishments doled out by Tuchel and his staff, which are alleged to have included making young Turkish player Emre Mor crawl on all fours across the pitch for failing to work hard enough.
And yet what cannot be denied is the sheer quantity of trophies on his CV. In a six-year spell between 2017 and 2023, Tuchel won nine major titles in all: three leagues, three domestic cups, the Champions League, the Super Cup and the Club World Cup. Only Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti won more in a period when Tuchel could rightly be considered among the most talented coaches in Europe.
He holds a tactical versatility that makes him hard to pin down, succeeding with back fives and back fours, with front-foot high pressing tactics and more conservative strategies. He tended to use a 4-2-3-1 formation at Dortmund, but shifted to a controlling 4-3-3 at PSG which delivered the domestic treble in his first season. He flipped Chelsea to wing-backs when he arrived in January 2021 and transformed the team from mid-table strugglers into the champions of Europe in five months.
Tuchel bristles at the notion that he is “defensive” or “cautious”, but there is no doubt that his football is more pragmatic than the coach he is most often compared with, Klopp, whom Tuchel replaced at Mainz and again at Dortmund. Each club has seen something a little different, and it means England fans must wait to find out exactly what they will get from the man Chelsea fans dubbed “Tommy Tactics” for his sophisticated ploys.
Alongside the trophies, what is also impossible to ignore is the sheer quantity of clubs on his resume over the past decade. Tuchel spent no more than two seasons at Borussia Dortmund, Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and Bayern Munich. He arrives with a smile, full of charm and charisma, but inevitably departs amid another high-profile fallout. At each club, form tends to plummet in his final months.
“Thomas is a difficult person, but a fantastic coach,” said Borussia Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke recently.
Bayern Munich great Lothar Matthaus was withering in his assessment of Tuchel following the coach’s acrimonious departure from the club last season. Tuchel delivered the Bundesliga in his first season but went trophyless in his second as Bayern failed to win the league title for the first time in over a decade. England can be encouraged by Harry Kane’s record of 44 goals in 45 games, but Matthaus pointed to “the problems” that come with the coach.
“The players did not feel free under Thomas Tuchel,” Matthaus told Bild. “I have nothing against Tuchel … but that didn’t work out with Bayern Munich. We knew that beforehand. It’s not as if Bayern didn’t see what problems he had in Dortmund, in Paris, and what problems he had in Chelsea, despite winning the Champions League. Something must have happened. PSG President Nasser Al-Khelaifi said to me, ‘Lothar, I don’t understand why Bayern signed Thomas Tuchel’. That’s a clear statement.”
Now the Football Association is taking that same risk, offering Tuchel his first international job. There is bound to be friction along the way – with the FA, with clubs, with players. But Tuchel also brings an intensity and a winning mentality that few coaches in world football can match. He will be a shock to the system. And after several years of oh-so-near misses, the FA has decided that is exactly what England need.