Thomas Tuchel: a bright day for England

The correct manager for England today

So the FA really have done it and got not just a big name but someone who, at least in my head, could fit the job particularly well.

I don’t know how much they thought about this. We’ve heard that Pep Guardiola was their first choice but, well, he’d probably be first choice for just about every job in football management. It’s not happening. Perhaps, like the United States, they gave Jürgen Klopp a phone call before getting politely turned down. Mauricio Pochettino took the American job instead, which rules him out. Of the “favourites” I wrote of over the summer, that left us with the following names:

Graham Potter, Eddie Howe, Lee Carsley, Thomas Tuchel, Frank Lampard

Thomas Tuchel is clearly the manager on that shortlist who stands out. Did they seriously think about the right fit, or did they just hire the biggest and most successful name available? It probably doesn’t matter either way, because he’s going to do what he does regardless. But I think the things he’ll do could be particularly good.

Let’s start with what would always be a talking point: he’s not English. “Germany would never consider appointing an Englishman as head of their own formidable national team, and rightly so”, wrote Sam Wallace in the Telegraph. “Nationality is literally the point of international football […] the England squad is also currently lacking a viable left-back but none would seriously consider naturalising any promising uncapped spares Spain or France might have available.” Wallace is ignoring that Spain naturalised Diego Costa when they couldn’t find a top striker after David Villa and Fernando Torres, but let’s leave that aside. There are people with a very strict view of what international football should be that doesn’t include foreign managers, and I don’t think I’m going to change any of their minds. But let’s give it a go, anyway.

“I’m not sure it fits the criteria of St. George’s Park and the belief in English coaches”, according to Gary Neville. For those unaware, St. George’s Park is a training complex opened in 2012 to host all of England’s teams across ages and genders. It’s at the centre of a wider project to build a clear identity running throughout the England national team. There has been serious time and money put into trying to build up a national football identity similar to that of Spain or Germany, where players and coaches can comfortably move up the age ranks and slot in naturally to new roles. And yes, this might be read as a betrayal. But I think that’s ok because I’m not sure the FA’s big project here is actually any good.

The vision for England’s coaching strategy was developed by former director of elite development Dan Ashworth (now sporting director at Manchester United). They could’ve just had a normal coaching strategy, but they had to give it a flashy name with lots of PR hype: “England DNA”. It had a whole lot of waffle, but the broad strokes were: England teams will look to press high, dominate possession, and control games. That’s all well and good, but how do we do that? There hasn’t been an awful lot about the underlying tactics of how dominant teams aim to achieve this. In lack of that, what we saw is England’s youth managers just copying what Gareth Southgate did, often going to a back three for no reason other than “because the senior team did it”. If the aim of the project was to build a cohesive style of play throughout English football, similar to Germany’s tactical revolution in the 2000s, then it has completely failed. There is a much bigger story about why England hasn’t developed top-level coaches, but we’ll save that for another day.

It’s been a long time since anyone could say what “English football” actually is. The history of the Premier League has been a parade of foreign coaches showing us how it’s done. The vast majority of managers in the league are from elsewhere and they haven’t particularly adapted their methods. For the most part, they do what they would be doing in their native countries. You can make reasonable assumptions about how a midtable side might play in Spain or Germany, but not in England. Guardiola grew frustrated at Bayern that many around the club and in the media wanted him to do a lot of things in a more traditionally German way. At Manchester City, he’s been allowed to do it his way.

Despite everything happening in politics, English football has built a cosmopolitan and open environment where talented people from around the world are able to contribute and bring in their own ideas without being hamstrung by nationalistic notions of the old ways. That is our identity, and we should embrace it. For some people, the national team stands as a last bastion of pre-1992 English football against the big, bad Premier League. Like it or not, though, the league is part of our identity now. There are still plenty of things we’re getting wrong here, chief among them building serious pathways to develop top managers. But let’s also recognise what we’re getting right here and lean into it.

“I think I would take a lot of pride as well at how many people would do anything to be the England manager”, Mikel Arteta said this week. “That’s related to how we’re treated in this country as foreigners, the passion, the respect, the history and the way that things are done in this country. I can say personally that when you are not from here. I think there are very few countries that could say that”. It doesn’t feel right in the context of Brexit and whoever they find on TalkSport moaning about a foreigner managing England. But it is something perceived by outsiders who come to work in English football. No, Germany or Spain would not have hired a foreigner, but perhaps that’s a weakness on their part to look at the outside world. For all that those footballing cultures get right, they’ve been insular when England has more often looked outward.

England could’ve gone for the opposite approach and hired Lee Carsley because… the pathway? There isn’t a clear tactical identity that runs from the under-21s to the senior side, and certainly not one that the majority of the team right now are used to playing. England won the Under 21 European Championship in 2023 playing a possession-dominant style with Anthony Gordon as the striker. They played some nice stuff at times, but it didn’t look like Southgate’s team at all. Of the side that started the final, one would think Levi Colwill, Curtis Jones, Cole Palmer and Gordon could reasonably be involved in the 2026 World Cup. But I don’t think any would cite Carsley as a huge influence on them. Most of the likely World Cup squad have spent their careers playing for top European coaches who have a lot more in common with Tuchel than Carsley.

This is different to hiring Sven-Göran Eriksson or Fabio Capello. They were complete outsiders to English football. This sort of thing gets overblown, but there was a lot of talk that they wouldn’t be able to connect with English players. That didn’t happen with Eriksson, who had a good bond with the players, but lacked tactical nous. Capello probably did fail to “get” English players, many of whom at that time were more used to relaxed environments and tactics. But this is 2024. Elite English players expect a serious and disciplined training environment. I don’t think Tuchel should have any problems there. He probably understands these sorts of top players better than any of the English candidates for the job.

The strategy has changed. Or perhaps we’ve just reached a different point in the strategy. Southgate, along with St. George’s Park and England DNA, was part of a long-term project to rebuild the national side. There’s no question the vibes were terrible when he took over. England had become defined by embarrassing defeats with overhyped players who looked absolutely frozen at major tournaments, playing totally within themselves. Southgate changed the atmosphere among the players and fans, right in time for a genuinely exciting generation of players to emerge.

And there really were tactical successes. England were impressively disciplined in 2018 and 2021, then actually played some good stuff in the 2022 World Cup (which no one will remember). But, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, the team totally regressed tactically and looked a mess in 2024. I think Southgate wanted to give the players more freedom to dominate games and express themselves, but current English players don’t exist in that environment anymore. Jude Bellingham is maybe the only key England player in a club side that offers that freedom. Everyone else is used to playing with more structure in possession, and Southgate never quite figured out how to coach that.

Tuchel is different. He will have a clear idea of how to structure his side both with and without the ball. We’re not going to see Phil Foden drifting inside to an already congested area while marauding left-back Roberto Trippier tries to fill the space on the overlap. Crucially, though, he will not overload the players with tactical instructions they can’t implement at short notice. In the second half of his career, he’s shown a really impressive ability to understand exactly how much new information players can take in and thus have a quick impact. “A general rule is that the more tension is on, the more decisive character a game has, the less new information we give”, he explained a few years ago. He’s obsessed with studying different theories of how humans best learn new information, and will really think about how to tailor that approach to international football.

The international game might also mitigate his weaknesses. He does have a tendency to fall out with players, but he’ll only be seeing them for brief spells throughout the year. Some tend to get frustrated when he leaves them out of the team, but this is international football, so he can simply not select players. He can’t make demands to sign certain individuals because, hey, you can’t sign any players here. More than some of the other big names linked to the job, I think Tuchel is particularly well suited to international football.

There will be certain sections of the media who won’t tolerate him. That might become an issue, though I think that’s more of a problem for him personally than something that will hurt results on the pitch. I’m really excited here. Tuchel feels like the perfect fit for the job, and I think we can be optimistic heading into the 2026 World Cup. Now to watch it all fall apart.