Thomas Tuchel’s coaching playbook: Tennis balls, training ‘problems’ – and lots of conflict

This article is a new version of a piece originally published by The Athletic in January 2021 from Raphael Honigstein. It has been updated after Tuchel agreed to become the new England manager.

Thomas Tuchel doesn’t do daunted.

Throughout his professional life, Tuchel has backed himself to defy circumstances — whether that be the knee injury that ended his playing career at 25, taking on a Bundesliga team despite having no senior managerial experience, or tackling some of the biggest, and most politically fraught, clubs football has to offer. And while there have been missteps along the way, his record suggests he has been right to do so.

Now comes a bigger challenge still.

Being in charge of the England men’s national team is never a straightforward mission, but for Tuchel it is doubly so. This is a country that now expects to challenge for major honours, having reached two tournament finals in the last three years. And he has a squad that boasts some of Europe’s most coveted talents in Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, Declan Rice, Harry Kane, Cole Palmer and Bukayo Saka. The fact that he is German — England’s historic rivals — may not make his task any easier.

So why have England invested so much in him? And why does Tuchel believe he is the man to deliver what so many have not and take England to World Cup success?

Thomas Tuchel looked a little different as the assistant coach of Stuttgart Under-19s in 2004-05.

The 31-year-old had not yet gone vegan and no-carbs, nor donned the predominantly dark, trademark knitwear that gives him today’s air of a particularly lanky professor of cultural anthropology or perhaps that of a famous architect. The former central defender turned economics graduate was into combat fatigues, mod parkas and Brit Pop haircuts then, but such superficialities aside, he was already the fully formed, deeply contradictory genius of a coach that England have hired this week: a superb developer of talent and a football scientist, delving deep into the game’s microscopic details, as well as a combustible character who frequently pushed co-workers to their limits, and beyond.

Tuchel, who had been nudged towards youth coaching by his Ulm manager Ralf Rangnick after a knee injury had put paid to his professional playing career, won the under-19s championship with Stuttgart. “He was able to dissect an opponent, he had X-ray vision,” his former superior Hansi Kleitsch recalls in Tuchel’s unauthorised biography by Daniel Meuren and Tobias Schachter. “His match plans always worked out.”

But his abrasive style had the club refusing to extend his contract. Tuchel moved on to Augsburg and then Mainz, where he won the under-19s championship once more as head coach. When Mainz general manager Christian Heidel needed someone to step in at short notice at the beginning of the 2009-10 Bundesliga season — Jorn Andersen had been fired after a first-round elimination by lower-league side Lubeck in the DFB Pokal (Germany’s FA Cup) — he sensationally opted for the 35-year-old youth-team boss.

Tuchel quickly made a name for himself with sophisticated, attacking football, taking one of the smallest and poorest top-flight sides — annual budget €15million (£12.5m, $16.3m) — into the Europa League twice. During his five years at Mainz, only the big four — Bayern Munich, Schalke, Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen — amassed more points than him. Tuchel had even bettered the record of club icon Jurgen Klopp.

Unlike Klopp, who had succeeded with a clearly defined pressing game that harnessed the energy of the Mainz crowd, Tuchel had taken inspiration from Bruce Lee’s “my style is no style” mantra: his Mainz side would be so adaptable in their approach, changing each game to pre-emptively negate the particular strengths of their opponents’ formations “without the need to think,” Tuchel told a group of maverick economists in a mesmerising talk titled ‘Rule Breaker’ years later. “We broke all the rules (such as having a fixed system and regular starting XI), not for the sake of it, but because we were inferior in all aspects and were forced to.”

By the end of his tenure in summer 2014, his perfectly drilled Mainz side could switch formations six times per game to give even Pep Guardiola’s untouchable Bayern a run for their money. He resigned and went on a year’s sabbatical, having realised there were no more worlds to conquer at the club.

Mainz have been looking for a successor who can take them anywhere near those heights since. But continuing with him would not have been viable either.

“Tuchel had been so demanding of the players that quite a few couldn’t take it anymore,” a source close to the dressing room, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect their relationships, remembers. “He was very unforgiving and bore personal grudges.”

Mainz’s reserve goalkeeper Heinz Muller called him “a dictator”.

During his year off, inspired by his idol Guardiola, with whom he struck up a friendship based on their mutual obsessions with tactics, Tuchel visited Brentford owner Matthew Benham to learn about statistical models. He also read the work of tactics bloggers including Rene Maric of Spielverlagerung and commissioned him to compile scouting reports when he was eventually recruited to succeed Klopp at Borussia Dortmund in April 2015.

Sessions will often see players doing things that are unusual. Here, players slap each others’ hands in a game (Thomas Lohnes/DDP/AFP via Getty Images)

Tuchel changed the players’ diet, replacing well-loved pasta dishes with wholemeal products. More importantly, he introduced them to “differential learning”, a theory of sport scientist Wolfgang Schollhorn that Guardiola’s mentor Paco Seirul-Lo had started to teach at Barcelona 15 years earlier. Schollhorn’s main supposition was that players’ skills were not best honed by repetition but by confronting them with an ever-changing set of problems that demanded constant adjustments.

Tuchel had his men play on pitches with no width or no depth. He made them take extra touches with their knees or had defenders carry tennis balls to stop them grappling with defenders. Once, when he wanted them to play more vertically in attack, he cut off the corners to turn the final third of the training pitch into a triangle. It was all done to make training so difficult and mentally exhausting that the actual games felt easy in comparison.

The team played wonderful free-flowing, possession-based football in his first season, coming closer to anyone to threaten Guardiola’s Bundesliga dominance. Tuchel had raised a side that had looked tired after seven years under Klopp to new heights. “My role is that of a service provider: I’m here to help and support the players,” he explained, adding that football was a player’s game. He saw himself, to use an Arsene Wengerism, as a facilitator of talent.

But that success already contained the seed of future strife. Mats Hummels, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Ilkay Gundogan had all performed so well under Tuchel’s innovative guidance that they were lured away by bigger, wealthier clubs. Dortmund replaced the trio with half a dozen promising youngsters, including teenage sensation Ousmane Dembele but Tuchel was upset that the club had not fought harder to keep the trio of key players and disagreed with some of their choices for new additions.

Things took an ugly turn in the 2016-17 pre-season. Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, a former ultra who now works as a consultant to the Dortmund board, revealed in February 2020 that Tuchel mistakenly sent an angry text message about sporting director Michael Zorc that was meant to go to his agent Oliver Meinking to Zorc himself. “Their relationship was over at that point,” Gruszecki told Le Parisien.

There were suggestions Tuchel had earlier shown himself uninterested in striking up a relationship with the fanbase and also missed a big club event, the 50th anniversary of the club’s 1966 European Cup Winners’ Cup final win. “He never wanted to be part of the history of the club,” Gruszecki felt.

Meuren and Schachter quote plenty of players in their book who found him superb as a coach but hard to deal with on a human level. Things went from being pushy and demanding to personal and unhappy. “In a sporting sense, Tuchel is untouchable,” former Dortmund goalkeeper Roman Weidenfeller said. “His training sessions were outstanding, he was a visionary. But on a human level, it didn’t work in some areas.”

Tuchel fell out with the highly-respected chief scout Sven Mislintat and banned him from the training ground. Club employees lived in fear of his outbursts, which came in the wake of the smallest digressions. Dortmund continued to perform well on the pitch but relations with the board and some sections of the dressing room became more and more strained in the course of the season.

Then a bomb went off.

On April 11 2017, a man named Sergej Wenergold tried to murder the entire Dortmund squad by blowing up the team bus outside their hotel on their way to a Champions League home match against Monaco. Defender Marc Bartra sustained a fractured arm but the rest of the party were miraculously spared injury. Wenergold, it turned out, had a financial motivation, betting on the club’s share price to crash in the wake of the assassination attempt. He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

The Dortmund bus attack ended up souring the relationship between Tuchel and the club (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

The game, the first leg of a quarter-final, was postponed — but only to the following evening. Dortmund, still in shock, lost 3-2 (they were subsequently beaten 3-1 away).

Tuchel complained he had been put under pressure by the club to play the game but Dortmund maintained he had agreed to re-staging the match 24 hours later. The breakdown in trust was now complete. Tuchel saw out the season and won the DFB Pokal, the club’s only trophy in the post-Klopp era, but was then let go.

Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke has never gone into the full details of his departure. He has repeatedly stated, however, that Tuchel was “a fantastic coach but a difficult person.” Agent Meinking has admitted as such. “Thomas’ energy has the greatest impact, but there’s also a problematic side to it,” he said. “It’s often all or nothing with him: Julian Nagelsmann, who was encouraged to start scouting as a player under Tuchel at Augsburg, described him as the type of coach who either ‘gets on super-well with people or not at all’.”

In his next job, a year later at Paris Saint-Germain, there were signs that Tuchel had found a stronger emotional connection with his players. An incredibly smart and self-aware man, he would have worked hard to behave differently in line with his vow to keep learning from mistakes. “It’s more important to forget and move on from the greatest, most unexpected success you might have than to forget and move on from the failures,” he had said in his Rule Breaker lecture.

After his first competitive win, in the Community Shield-style Super Cup against Monaco in August 2018, he was soaked with champagne by members of the squad and sang Pharrell’s Happy with them in front of the media. The togetherness felt remarkable, considering the relatively short space of time he had worked with the club.

Getting the various supersized egos at PSG to play a collective, cohesive game was not easy but, apart from the odd skirmish with a dejected substitute and a press he perceived as unduly negative, Tuchel managed remarkably well to stay in control in the French capital, guiding the Qatari-owned club to the Ligue 1 title in both his full seasons. Crucially, he also came closer than anyone to winning them the Champions League. His well-balanced side edged their 1-0 final loss to Bayern Munich in Lisbon in 2020 in terms of chances created, and could have easily emerged victorious on another night.

Tuchel got on well with superstars such as Neymar at PSG and was a success before leaving this season (Jean Catuffe/Getty Images)

And yet, he was not granted a third season. This time, the fall-out was with PSG sporting director Leonardo. Transfer dealings were one bone of contention: Tuchel’s associates said Leonardo was trying to influence Tuchel’s team selection and training regime, something the former AC Milan and Brazil midfielder denies. Tuchel was fired on Christmas Eve but fully paid for the remaining six months on his contract, freeing him up for a new job immediately.

Chelsea were well aware of his irascibility when they hired him in January 2021, having canvassed the opinion of plenty of agents and club officials who have experienced working with him. Yet even at Dortmund, where he had made few friends, officials could not deny his outstanding ability to get a team playing superb, fluid, attacking football. “He will always get a top job because he’s just amazing in what he does with a team,” a source close to that club — speaking anonymously to protect their position — tells The Athletic.

Chelsea were persuaded that his capacity to raise players and teams to new levels was worth the risk; charming, erudite and speaking perfect English, he had already made a good impression in an earlier interview with Marina Granovskaia, then a Chelsea director, before Antonio Conte’s appointment as manager in summer 2016.

One of the most intriguing questions over his suitability for this particular job was raised by Tuchel himself, however, citing reasons more concerned with his tactical approach than his fiery temperament. In 2017, just a few weeks before that bomb attack on the Dortmund team coach, he told London-based writer Ben Lyttleton why a cut-throat environment like the one routinely experienced by coaches at Chelsea might not work for him.

“Every club has a spirit,” he says in Lyttleton’s book, Edge: What Business Can Learn From Football. “There are certain clubs, like Ajax, Arsenal, Barcelona, AC Milan, who like an aesthetic game: it’s not only about winning but how you win and how you play. Others, like Chelsea now, or Atletico Madrid, are more win-at-all-costs. My philosophy is an aesthetic one: aesthetic means control the ball, the rhythm, to attack in every minute and to try to score as many goals as possible.”

Asked by Lyttleton whether he would ever take a job at one of those win-at-all-costs club, Tuchel replied that he wanted to win, of course, but added he might harbour doubts over such an engagement if his employers’ uncompromising demands stood in conflict with his footballing convictions. “I have to be honest with myself and ask if I’m the right person with the right character and the right approach for this (kind of) club to make the people happy.”

His words proved prophetic, although not before some remarkable success.

Tuchel devised the tactical plan that propelled Chelsea to their second Champions League triumph in the time it took for his plane to fly from Paris to London on January 26, 2021.

One day and one training session later, the principles of his 3-4-2-1 system were clearly identifiable in a goalless draw with Wolves at Stamford Bridge. His pledge in a TV interview after the game was unequivocal: “We will build a team that nobody wants to play against.”

The construction phase was completed with startling speed. Tuchel transformed Chelsea virtually overnight into a defensive behemoth, beginning his tenure with a 14-match unbeaten run across all competitions that saw just two goals conceded in 1,260 minutes. His stout back line and smothering press provided a foundation for Premier League wins over Tottenham and Liverpool and home and away victories against Atletico Madrid in the Champions League.

A freak 5-2 home loss against West Brom in April was the only time in Tuchel’s first 30 games in charge that Chelsea conceded twice or more. Their newfound resilient identity carried them from ninth to fourth in the Premier League, past Real Madrid in the Champions League and into two cup finals: the first a dispiriting FA Cup final defeat against Leicester City and the second a surprise Champions League triumph in Porto, secured with a deserved third win over Manchester City in the space of two months.

Tuchel’s career highlight, a Champions League win over Manchester City (Susan Vera – Pool/Getty Images)

Tuchel celebrated one of the most impressive high-end coaching jobs in recent memory with a gin and tonic at Chelsea’s party in Alfandega Congress Centre on the banks of the Douro River, before rising early the next morning for a meeting with Roman Abramovich. His reward was a new contract, and a promise of significant funds to sign a striker.

Romelu Lukaku was that striker, and quickly became the symbol of the issues that derailed Tuchel’s only full season at Stamford Bridge.

After a strong start punctuated by UEFA Super Cup glory against Villarreal, Chelsea trailed a relentless City at the top of the Premier League at the end of December 2021 — their pedestrian attacking output failing to mask a slip in defensive standards — when the Belgian torched his relationship with his new club and his head coach in an explosive interview with Sky Italia.

Tuchel garnered further public credit for navigating the UK government’s decision to sanction Abramovich following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with good grace and humour, joking that he was ready to drive the team bus, as the club struggled to maintain daily operations amid a gruelling season and expedited sale process. He won the Club World Cup and even led Chelsea to two more finals in the League Cup and FA Cup, losing both to Liverpool in agonising penalty shootouts.

But it was a very different story behind the scenes. Lukaku was far from the only player disillusioned with Tuchel’s management style; many of Chelsea’s attackers disliked the way he used and treated them in matches and in training, while others felt the open communication culture he established on arrival disappeared when performances and results began to dip.

Tuchel’s Chelsea reign ended after a defeat at Dinamo Zagreb in September 2022 (Jurij Kodrun/Getty Images)

New owners Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly inherited a Chelsea squad that included a significant number of players who wanted to leave in part to get away from their head coach — a head coach who swiftly sank in their own estimations during a tense pre-season tour of the United States in the summer of 2022.

Tuchel, who had enjoyed frictionless working relationships with Granovskaia and Petr Cech, quickly grew frustrated with being approached by interim sporting director Boehly and Behdad Eghbali about transfer options and delegated meetings to his agent. Chelsea’s failure to secure some of his preferred targets worsened his mood but he also pushed for the ill-advised signings of Raheem Sterling, Kalidou Koulibaly and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

Among players and senior figures at Chelsea, a perception also took hold that Tuchel was not quite as focused and engaged in the job as he had once been. This was partly fuelled by the broad knowledge of the breakdown of his 13-year marriage and new relationship, both of which were covered by the UK tabloid media.

Within this context, three wins in the first seven matches of the 2022-23 season inspired little patience. Clearlake and Boehly compared his first 50 matches with his last 50 matches and saw only negative trends. They acted decisively to make sure his 100th match in charge of Chelsea, a limp 1-0 away defeat against Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League in September 2022, was his last.

Tuchel departed only 16 months after making Chelsea the kings of Europe for the second time, his rollercoaster tenure showcasing both his tactical genius and his struggles to manage people.

GO DEEPER

Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea sacking – told from both sides

History should be forgiving of Tuchel’s time at Bayern Munich. It was not a success and it is remembered as a fractious, destructive time, from which nobody benefited. It was the wrong personality, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

In the first instance, Tuchel would acknowledge now that he should not have taken the job mid-season. Julian Nagelsmann’s sacking in March 2023 was unexpected and presented him with an opportunity he felt might not present itself again, but he inherited a team with significant issues.

In hindsight, what followed feels inevitable. Confronted by flaws that he was unable to solve, Tuchel pursued a level of control at Bayern which was never achievable. The way he responded to those challenges became the source of tremendous acrimony.

And the issues were real. Whereas the Chelsea with whom he won the Champions League were authoritative with the ball and smart in how they used it, 2022-23 Bayern were imbalanced and vulnerable.

In Leon Goretzka and Joshua Kimmich, Tuchel felt he had neither the stable footballing base nor the defensive resilience in midfield to support his tactical approach. It did not help that neither player had been in favour of Nagelsmann’s dismissal or that, over time, it became public that Tuchel would support selling either one to fund a rebuild.

There were other issues to confront. Bayern were into their first year without Robert Lewandowski, their prolific Polish striker who had joined Barcelona, and midway through their costly and unsuccessful experiment with Sadio Mane, signed from Liverpool.

There was no pre-season, either, during which to properly remodel the side, and the rather accidental nature of their title win — which depended on Borussia Dortmund’s last-day failure to beat Mainz — meant the deficiencies of that squad, many of which are still being addressed, were underestimated.

Tuchel won the 2023 Bundesliga after a late collapse by Dortmund (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

But the bigger issues came later.

In the summer of 2023, Bayern’s organisational focus was trained entirely on signing Harry Kane, at the expense of other, equally pressing issues. Tuchel was public with his desire for (what he called) a holding No 6 and then not shy in expressing his dissatisfaction when Bayern failed to sign Joao Palhinha on the final day of that transfer window.

It was clumsy politics — on several levels.

Kimmich believed that he could play the role. Tuchel disagreed, saying in a press conference during pre-season that while Kimmich “brought a lot of quality to the team, he did not have the DNA of a defensive 6”.

Tuchel’s relationship with Kimmich suffered, as it did with other Bayern players. He is an intense, driven figure rather than a conciliatory personality, and several players reacted poorly to either being dropped without explanation or to being publicly criticised.

Ultimately though, the true legacy of that summer — of the myriad complaints over squad composition — was the affront it caused the club’s elders, in particular former club president Uli Hoeness. Tuchel’s criticism of the club rankled Hoeness and the story bubbled through the season, rumbling on in the shadow of Bayer Leverkusen’s unbeaten league and cup double.

Uli Hoeness fell out with Tuchel at Bayern (Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images)

In April 2024, by which time it had already been agreed that he would leave the club at the end of the season, it came to an ugly head. Hoeness was part of a panel discussion hosted by the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, when he accused Tuchel of failing to improve the club’s young players and of being too quick to demand new signings. “(Tuchel) doesn’t think he can improve a Davies, Pavlovic or Musiala,” he said. “If it doesn’t work, you should buy someone else.”

Tuchel, in response, told Sky TV that “his honour as a coach” had been insulted.

Few Bayern coaches truly exert power over recruitment at the club’s Sabener Strasse base. The big fees spent in the summer of 2024 suggest, too: that Tuchel was right about the squad needing drastic improvement. Palhinha finally joined, as did Michael Olise and Hiroki Ito for a combined €130million.

But Hoeness is an unimpeachable presence at Bayern, and Tuchel was naive in believing that questioning club business would end well, or that challenging the egos of players who had been successful would help to create a unified dressing room.

Or perhaps Bayern were at fault for exposing Tuchel to a situation that always seemed likely to be provocative and to result in the kind of clashes that have been a feature of his career. Either way, they brought out the worst in each other.

Tuchel was asked earlier this year, in an interview with ESPN, whether he felt more appreciated in England than Germany.

“I feel that we’re very critical with each other in Germany, especially with players or with coaches — not only with me,” he said. “It’s very hard to escape. I felt more appreciation in England, yes. It’s just a fact”

Now, that appreciation will be put to the test. Tuchel’s temperament is undoubtedly a source of contention in what has, for the most part, been a stellar coaching career. But England are clearly confident his personality quirks are worth the success he usually brings.

Now he faces up to arguably his greatest managerial challenge: ending a winless streak that will have extended to 60 years by the time of the next World Cup. It is an onerous task. But removed from club football’s politics and transfer dynamics, it might just be one he’s suited to.

Additional reporting: Raphael Honigstein

(Top photo: Ivan Romano/Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)