The bartender
How Thomas Tuchel rose to the top.
Drawing by Sammy Moody
Thore Haugstad
22 Feb 2022
Just before the turn of the millennium, a man in his mid-20s was popping into bars in Stuttgart looking for a job. He was broke. His dream was crushed. One friend thought he looked depressed. When asked if he had any experience, the man lied and said, “Of course.” After going by more than ten places, he got a gig at Radio Bar fetching beer glasses. As students stumbled home drunk, he wiped beer off the tables until the early hours. He was soon promoted to bartender, an odd role for a guy who hardly ever drank. His signature drink? “Maybe a bad Mojito,” he’d say.
All his life Thomas Tuchel had dreamed of playing in the Bundesliga. A slow but elegant sweeper, he started out at his local side, TSV Krumbach, coached by his dad, Rudolf. Tuchel was alert to tactics early on; playing volleyball at school, he moved his teammates around, and got told off for juggling with the ball. As he hit his teens, he largely stayed sober. On Mondays he’d invite friends to his flat, where he’d dish up vegetable soup and turn on Eurogoals. On weekends he’d go with his parents to church.
This lifestyle paid off for Tuchel. After a stint at Augsburg he joined Stuttgarter Kickers, where he played eight games in the second tier. He also played three times for the German U18 team. “I was living in this kind of bubble,” he’d tell The Independent. “I got a lot of attention, a lot of positive feedback, and a lot of my self-confidence from all that.”
Then the bubble burst. First he was dropped by Stuttgarter Kickers, then he moved to Ulm, in the third tier. They soon hired Ralf Rangnick, an exciting young coach, but by the time he had galvanised the team, Tuchel was out. He was diagnosed with cartilage damage under the kneecap and a scarred patellar tendon. After trying to work away the pain, he had to retire. The blow was so big that he did not even want to watch games in the stadiums, because it felt wrong not to be out there. “It was a dream that crashed,” he’d say. “I did not know what to do.”
But he needed money. The injury had not been covered by his insurance, and though he was doing a degree in business administration, he didn’t enjoy it. “I studied it to make my mum sleep better,” he’s say. Soon he was begging bar managers for a job. “There was quite some pride to swallow for me,” he’d tell The Independent. But at Radio Bar, he was for the first time working with people who had no idea that he’d been a footballer. “And suddenly I really felt more self-confident,” he said. “Because I was sure my friends liked me because of who I was and because of what we did here together behind the bar, cleaning the place until 3am and all that. It taught me a valuable lesson, and let my self-confidence grow in a very positive way.”
Just as Tuchel seemed reconciled with his fate, Rangnick shocked German football by leading Ulm to back-to-back promotions. Suddenly Tuchel had to accept that, had he stayed fit, he’d be playing in the Bundesliga. Was he pleased for his former teammates? “I was really pissed off and offended,” he’d say, “I thought, ‘Now they are living my dream. Bundesliga! Where I always wanted to go!’”
On the day he found out about the final promotion, he was in the bar. He told his colleagues he had to go. As it happened, Rangnick had left Ulm before the end of the season to take charge of Stuttgart. Now Tuchel got in touch and asked if he could join the U23s. Rangnick said yes, and Tuchel worked hard to make the pain go away. Yet two months later it was back. He was forced to retire, this time for good. Though he’d finish his studies, he did not know what to do, until one day Rangnick asked him a question he had never really contemplated. Would Tuchel like to coach?
Tuchel had never seen coaching as a possibility. This was in 2000, before José Mourinho had kicked in the door for students and amateurs. “When I started coaching, I think 100 per cent of coaches in the first division in Germany had played in the first division,” Tuchel would say. “There was no example of someone who had made it through the academy and ended up in a professional coaching position.”
Still, he started out with the Stuttgart U14s. He drove a Saab to training and organised football camps for kids to pay the bills. He did well enough to take charge of the U19s, whom he led to the national championship in his first year. Some of the players he coached were Mário Gómez, Sami Khedira, Ádám Szalai and Holger Badstuber. It was the first time Tuchel had been at a major club. “Losing wasn’t an option here,” he said. “I learned to think big, to not make yourself smaller than you are.”
In 2005 he returned to Augsburg to coach the U19s. He still wasn’t paid much, and he did not have his full UEFA licence, so he poured what money he had into getting it. His teacher, Erich Rutemöller, said he was smart and quiet. “He was not the big guy in the lectures.” After a stint as academy boss, Tuchel took charge of the second team. He was running a football school on the side to make ends meet, and yet when his Audi broke down he couldn’t afford a new car. He began commuting to Augsburg from his Munich home by train. Whenever he had to watch a game in the Augsburg region, he was driven by Sissi, his future wife. So passionate was Tuchel that he got a series of fines for shouting at referees and, if his players disobeyed him, he took them off. Yet even his detractors had to admire his work rate. One member of his staff joked that Tuchel went to bed in his club tracksuit just to save time in the morning.
At Ulm, Tuchel had learned from Rangnick. At Augsburg, another great was about to learn from him. Julian Nagelsmann was a defender who was studying on the side. So mentally demanding were the sessions under Tuchel that Nagelsmann would fall asleep on the train back home. He too damaged his knee and had to retire, at 20, at which point Tuchel asked him if he’d like to scout their future opponents. Nagelsmann said yes, and was soon in the car to watch a team called Gersthofen. As he took notes, his wife filmed the game. When beckoned to Tuchel’s office to present his findings, he didn’t know that Tuchel had already watched the match. While Nagelsmann was analysing their next rival, Tuchel was analysing him.
After a few assignments, Tuchel convinced him to go into coaching. A career in business would have to wait. “I knew I wanted to sell something,” Nagelsmann told Daniel Meuren and Tobias Schächter in their Tuchel biography. “But I didn’t think it would end up being an idea.”
Tuchel did not stay at Augsburg much longer. In 2008 he was made coach of the U19 team at Mainz, a small club west of Frankfurt. He took them on a pre-season camp to Austria, just south of the border, where they rode bikes up a mountain 2,096 metres tall. At the top, Tuchel vowed to win the U19 national championship. Then he produced a pin with a Mainz logo on it, wrapped it in Snickers paper and buried it. “If we get to the final of the German championship,” he declared, “I’ll ride my bike back up here and dig it up.”
Ten months later the players had forgotten his promise. But when Mainz beat Werder Bremen in the semifinal, the staff feared the worst. Sure enough, Tuchel summoned two of his coaches for a secret trip back to Austria. They drove for five hours, stayed at a hotel by the foot of the mountain and climbed up the next morning. At the summit, they filmed Tuchel as he unearthed the pin. On the way back they got stuck in traffic, forcing Tuchel to delay training by an hour. Yet by the time they were preparing to face Dortmund in the final, none of the players knew about the expedition.
A few minutes before kick-off, the dressing room was calm. Suddenly the lights went out. A video began to play on a projector screen. Soon the players are watching Tuchel back on the mountain. He digs up the pin, holds it up before the camera and says, “Here is our treasure! We have kept our promise! We have retrieved the pin for you! And now we’re fulfilling our dream of the title.” Back in the dressing room, the video shuts off, Tuchel raises the pin, smashes it down on the table and screams, “And now you go and play!”
Mainz beat Dortmund 2–1. In the stands were Jürgen Klopp, who had just left Mainz for Dortmund, and Christian Heidel, the Mainz chief executive. “There were 10 better players at Dortmund,” Klopp told Heidel. “But they lost against a better team.”
That summer, the Mainz first team were preparing for the Bundesliga. They had gone up under Jørn Andersen, the Norwegian who would later coach North Korea, but now the club grew concerned with him. The mood had soured when he cleared the dressing room of all photos of past achievements and family members, saying the players had to keep order. When Mainz opened the season by crashing out of the cup to fourth-tier VfB Lübeck, Andersen was sacked.
There were five days until Mainz began the league season at home to Leverkusen. Heidel had little time and even fewer options, but he had watched the U19s play. He asked Tuchel if he fancied the first team. Tuchel asked for a week to think about it. He didn’t get it. Shortly after, the 35-year-old was presented as the new coach of Mainz.
Tuchel took charge of the team on Monday. The league opener was on Saturday. Mainz had been stuck in the second tier for years until Klopp went from player to coach in 2001. Four years later they climbed out, and the next three years they were living it up in the big time. When they slid back down, Klopp failed to win another promotion—and left for Dortmund—only for Andersen to pull it off. Now Andersen had been replaced by a guy from the U19s. If people had expected Mainz to go down before the change, they definitely did now.
Tuchel sweated during his first press conference. He was more at home on the training ground, yet even there he had to fight for authority. When the squad was gathered he wasn’t even the oldest guy in the room. For the first session he turned up with a stopwatch and a whistle, and told his players to split into groups of two and stand seven metres apart. He told them to pass the ball back and forth, calling out each other’s names. And that was it. If the players asked why, Tuchel would have said that they were too quiet and their passing too sloppy. The apparent genius from the youth teams began his reign with a drill taken out of a football school for kids.
After that Tuchel hatched a plan for Leverkusen. Mainz set out in a 4-2-3-1 with academy youngster André Schürrle up top, though there was no place for Marco Rose, the injury-hit left-back. In any case, Mainz got a 2–2 draw. When they proceeded to draw at Hannover and beat Bayern Munich at home, it was clear that Mainz were better than anticipated.
Tuchel put in place more rules. At breakfast the players had to stay together for at least 20 minutes so that everyone had to talk. All use of second names was banned. When saying ‘good morning’, the players had to look each other in the eyes. On the training ground, Tuchel also noticed that the players kept hitting long passes. This was in line with the old German way, but Tuchel had grown up falling in love with Ajax and Barcelona, and wanted his team to play the long passes diagonally. Yet instead of telling the players off, he came up with rules that led the players to change. “So what we tried to do from then on is create exercises that forced a certain behaviour,” he told The Independent. “From there we can encourage the guys to find solutions within this exercise.”
Tuchel had two obsessions in training: the drills had to be varied, and hard for the brain. He used small balls that challenged their technique. He forced the defenders to hold tennis balls, so that they would not grab anyone's shirt. He set out pitches that were either very wide or very narrow, and sometimes he’d cut off the corners. He’d make two players face seven players, so as to learn how to defend when outnumbered. Every variation created a new set of complex demands that the players had to solve.
About the only thing Tuchel didn’t do was eleven versus eleven, as he felt they’d never be able to replicate a full game anyway. He also described set pieces as a waste of time. He worried that the players would catch colds from standing around, especially in winter, and resolved to avoid goals against by limiting fouls to eight per game. As new as these measures were to the players, they worked. Mainz climbed into the top half and finished ninth.
In summer 2010, Tuchel worked hard to improve on that achievement. He secured the Germany U21 playmaker Lewis Holtby on loan from Schalke, pluss Eugen Polanski and another loanee, Christian Fuchs. Szalai arrived from Real Madrid Castilla. Rose had retired and stepped up as his assistant. In pre-season Tuchel took the squad to Austria, where his obsession grew. When he came across a particularly well-kept grass pitch, he begged Heidel to hire the groundsman. The Mainz president, Harald Strutz, said he was afraid to greet Tuchel in the mornings because he feared he'd break his concentration.
On the opening of the league season, Mainz went out in a 4-4-2 diamond and beat Stuttgart 2–0. Rather than attacking down the flanks, as most big teams did, Mainz went down the centre, where Holtby was to get the ball quickly. The second game was at Wolfsburg, who led 3–0 after thirty minutes, only for Mainz to strike back and win 4–3. Tuchel kept the diamond for the third game and sank Kaiserslautern 2–1. He switched to a 4-3-1-2 to see off Werder Bremen, then went over to a 4-2-3-1 for a win against Köln. By the time Mainz travelled to Bayern, they had five wins in five and topped the table.
The game took place on 25 September, during Oktoberfest. Mainz did not arrive in Munich until match day, because there were no free rooms in the city. On their way to the stadium they got stuck in traffic and turned up forty-five minutes before kick-off. Yet Tuchel did not arrive unprepared. Reverting to a 4-3-1-2, Mainz struck Bayern on the break and won 2–1 with a stunning goal from Szalai. After the game, Louis van Gaal declared that Mainz could win the league.
Suddenly everyone was talking about Mainz. What had largely been an ignored club was on the front cover of Kicker. Tuchel was widely discussed, as were his tactics. Mainz did not only change their system in between games; during games they could change shape up to six times. This was the opposite to strategic stability. “We didn’t want to break rules for the sake of it,” Tuchel would say. “We had to come up with ideas because we knew we were inferior as a team.” Yet Tuchel had no time for the title talk. When an Italian TV channel turned up at the training ground to hand him a cardboard cutout of the league trophy, he refused to accept it.
The winning streak could not last forever. Mainz lost four of their next five, although they never slipped too far down the table. Before the penultimate game of the season they had a chance to seal fifth spot, which would be their highest position ever. Tuchel was hellbent on getting it. They were about to play Schalke away, and for the entire week Tuchel went to war against any sense of complacency. The most prone was Holtby, who had just played a good game and who’d face his parent club. “So he literally stood next to me and gave me stick the whole week, which was to keep me on my toes, to not be satisfied with the great game I'd had,” Holtby told BBC Radio 5 Live. “At that point I was like, ‘Why is he on me? I can’t believe it, I just had a good game.’ But thinking about it in the aftermath, I understand why he did it.” Mainz beat Schalke 3–1.
The next summer Tuchel was working on the idea of getting a bad team to play good football. Given the pressure not to go down, he had been happy to play on the counter from the start, but his love for the game was based on higher ideals. “I’m something of a football romanticist,” he said. “What I think is important is the atmosphere, a good game on the pitch and maybe a sausage when I’m watching a match. I’m more interested in what makes me passionate, a perfect game or a perfect week of practice, rather than putting myself in the limelight.”
Tuchel’s ideal was Pep Guardiola’s Barça. “Their outstanding quality is their devotion and passion when it comes to winning the ball back in the opposition’s half once they lose it,” he said, according to The Guardian. “That’s only possible with a huge amount of humility. It’s not a given that stars at this high level are collectively committed to an idea and that no one takes the liberty of doing a little less of the hard work.” Their build-up play fascinated Tuchel as well. Once on the team bus, the Mainz staff were watching a Guardiola documentary. A passing map from his time at Barça appeared, at which point Tuchel froze the screen and studied it for two hours.
Tuchel shares many Guardiola traits. He switches systems often, relishes analysing the next opponent, and looks for ideas in other sports. At Mainz he had his players try archery and kickboxing. They spent three weeks training with a handball team, and Tuchel even considered training with wrestlers. He also zoomed in on the technique used to receive the ball, much like Johan Cruyff had done with Guardiola at Barça in the late 1980s. “The principles have to be clear,” Tuchel has said. “Which foot is used to receive the ball? Which foot do I play the ball into? Is it possible to move the other player into an open position or is it a closed situation? If it’s a closed situation, how do I offer myself to the defenders to restart the attack? When the player turns, where does a running path start on the other side, and where doesn’t it?”
Mainz struggled to build on the fifth place. They had lost Schürrle to Leverkusen and Fuchs to Schalke, while Holtby had returned to Schalke as well. They opened the season by crashing out of the Europa League against Romanian side Gaz Metan Mediaș. After two opening wins in the Bundesliga, they went nine games without a victory. In December they lost in the cup against Holstein Kiel, from the fourth tier.
Yet even as the season fizzled out, Tuchel worked hard to learn more. One day he discovered Spielverlagerung, a German tactics site run by René Marić, Martin Rafelt and a couple of other guys in their early 20s. He invited them to a meeting and asked Rafelt about a story that explained how Swansea, a newly promoted side led by Brendan Rodgers, had beaten Manchester City—not by parking the bus, but by keeping the ball. So much respect did Tuchel have for the group that he assigned them to scout Mainz’s next opponents.
Mainz finished 13th in 2012. By the time they prepared for their fourth season under Tuchel, some of the players were exhausted. The intensity was wearing them down. Even as a player Tuchel had made enemies in his teams; one source told Meuren and Schächter that he merely ignored the players he found too stupid. They got tired of him at Stuttgart. Yet Tuchel could also be compassionate. Meuren and Schächter tell of a training camp to Lanzarote with Ulm in 1996, where one of his teammates, Oliver Wölki, got a call from his parents saying that his girlfriend had had a miscarriage. When the Ulm coach was unable to book a flight home, Tuchel called up the airline and shouted that this was an emergency. The airline relented and Wölki got a flight for 1,200 Deutsch-marks. Since Tuchel got everyone to chip in, Wölki didn't pay a cent.
Still, while some players were on his good side, others were not. Heinz Müller, who fell out with him over a contract dispute, called him a “dictator”. A source told Meuren and Schächter that Tuchel was mostly a guy you could laugh with at Mainz. “But twenty percent of the time he was the psychopath who overdid it, who was over-ambitious. Then he’d get personal, take the wrong tone and be abusive. Year by year the ratio would get closer and closer to 50-50. He’d become more and more impatient when players didn’t make the progress he had hoped for. I do think he broke a lot of players that way.”
Tuchel did not always read the room. That season Mainz worked their way up to the top half, only to lose their penultimate game before Christmas 2–0 to Borussia Mönchengladbach. At the Christmas party Tuchel hit out at the players—and ruined the mood. “Everybody is lucky that he usually wins more games than he loses,” Heidel has told The Guardian. “If there is a loss, it’s almost like physical pain. He’s very emotional. He can blow up at players because he’s so eager to win. But he’s also someone who will hug them afterwards.” Perhaps the most accurate portrayal has come from Nagelsmann, who says that Tuchel is someone you either get on very well with or not at all.
Mainz came 13th once more in 2013. They had been fifth in early February, but slid down the table after failing to win any of their last nine. When the players met up again for pre-season, Tuchel took them on two training camps to the Swiss mountains. They went on long hikes. They plunged into waterfalls. They slept in chalets. One night they set out to scale the 3,000-metre Sparrhorn. They got to the top at 7am under bright skies and sun. The fresh air and sense of adventure seemed to be just what the squad needed. For their second camp, though, they went to Evian, where Tuchel decided he had taken Mainz as far as he could.
Still, he stuck around for now, and a revitalised Mainz won their first three. But then came four defeats on the spin and, with the team drifting near mid-table around Christmas, Tuchel sought a move away. Come January he told Heidel that he wanted to go. Secretly, he began talking with Schalke and Leverkusen. Heidel found out about it, and was disappointed that Tuchel was not open about these talks, as Klopp had been when he was close to leaving. Heidel even gave Tuchel chances to bring it up and save face, but he never did.
When Leverkusen enquired about Tuchel, Heidel said he wanted €6m. Tuchel was not happy. “He reacted very emotionally,” Heidel told Meuren and Schächter. “He said he’d done everything for us and that we weren’t letting him go. When I mentioned the word money at some point—oh my God! That’s when he completely lost it. He yelled at me, asking why I wanted to continue working with him if he was no longer a good coach. He was in his own world at that moment.”
Mainz came seventh that season, and Tuchel quit. As he left the stadium for the last time, a stunned fan said, “Are you going on holiday for a year now?”
Tuchel replied, “Yes, exactly!”
Out of work, Tuchel went on a sabbatical. He admired how Guardiola had gone on holiday to New York after leaving Barça, with no job lined up. Yet he was never going to spend it just sightseeing. One day he turned up at Brentford, owned by the pro gambler Matthew Benham, who had risen to the Championship through stats-driven scouting and specialists on throw-ins and sleep. Tuchel also read Wolfgang Schöllhorn, the professor and sports scientist, who says that players do not learn by repetition, but by adapting to a series of different problems.
At some point, Tuchel met up with Guardiola, who had been at Bayern for a year. The rendezvous came about when Guardiola asked Michael Reschke, the Bayern sporting director, who he thought was the most interesting young German coach.
Reschke said, “Tuchel.”
Guardiola said, “Yes!”
“We played against Mainz last season and they actually wanted to win against us!” Guardiola went on, according to The Athletic. “Many teams park the bus and are happy if they don’t lose too big. But he really put us under pressure. With Mainz!”
One day Reschke said he was having drinks with Tuchel. Guardiola decided to join. On a legendary evening, the three sat down by a corner table at Schumann’s Bar in Munich. They opened up about their tactics, their beliefs, their discoveries, their doubts. Reschke hardly got a word in, and even if he had he’d be lost for what to say.
“They could recall dozens and dozens of specific situations from ages ago and talked through how things might have panned out differently if there had been any changes,” Reschke told The Athletic. “It was all about actions and reactions. They were so wrapped up in their discussions that other people in the bar and even the waiters didn’t dare approach them. They were in a bubble, for nearly four hours.”
A few weeks later the three met up again at the Munich restaurant Brenner. They were joined by Peter Hermann, a former Bayern assistant coach, who showed up thinking he knew a lot about football. When the dinner was over, Hermann told his wife he was going to quit the game.
As Tuchel was studying up, Dortmund were falling under Klopp. They were last after nineteen games, badly missing Robert Lewandowski. Though they ended up seventh, Klopp resigned.
In April, Dortmund hired Tuchel on a three-year deal. “I’m overjoyed,” he said.
Tuchel knew he could never match Klopp’s charisma, or his emotional bond with the Yellow Wall. “If you have a full stadium and put Jürgen in it, he could arrive without a team and it would still be full with people laughing for two hours,” Tuchel would say. “That’s his gift, that’s what makes him special. I cannot do it. I will never try.” Tuchel had his own gifts. Though Dortmund were a pressing machine, he knew they had been running out of ideas against deep-lying defences. So Tuchel brought in Julian Weigl, Gonzalo Castro and Roman Bürki. He also convinced Mats Hummels to stay, and banked on Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to hit top form.
Tuchel helped the players in any way possible. He asked them to cut down on wheat and suger. He gave out books to read, such as The Inner Game of Tennis, a classic from the 70s about silencing your inner voice and letting your subconsciousness take control. The book has helped countless tennis players as well as other athletes, and Henrikh Mkhitaryan remarked that it was as if it had been written especially for him.
On the training ground, Tuchel was tactically “untouchable”, according to Roman Weidenfeller. He put in place a 4-1-4-1 with Aubameyang backed by Marco Reus, Shinji Kagawa, İlkay Gündoğan and Mkhitaryan. Behind that quartet, Weigl pulled the strings. Dortmund won their first five league games, bombarding their rivals from all angles. Like at Mainz, Tuchel mixed it up, going 4-4-2, 4-2-3-1 and 3-4-2-1. They had more solutions, better ideas and more variation. Almost overnight, Tuchel had found the answers that Klopp had been looking for.
Dortmund got seventy-eight points that season, a total Klopp bettered only once. They scored more goals than anyone in the division. But Bayern had ten points more. No runners-up had ever done better than Dortmund. Harsh defeats also came in the Europa League, where they had been 4–1 up on aggregate in the semi-finals at Anfield, only for Liverpool to storm back; and in the cup final, where they’d lost to Bayern on penalties. As the players split up for their summer breaks, they were left exhausted and empty-handed.
Some seeds of discord had also been sown. Hummels, playing his last game before his move to Bayern, was taken off in the cup final. “Mats can do better,” Tuchel told the press. Hummels then said he was “extremely bitter” about being subbed, to which Tuchel replied that he had asked to be taken off.
More tension came that summer, as Tuchel fought to hold the band together. As Hummels left, Gündoğan joined Guardiola at City. As if that wasn't enough to worry Tuchel, Manchester United came in for Mkhitaryan. Tuchel said no, and was apparently promised by the board that he wouldn’t be sold. But when United bid £30m, Dortmund relented. Annoyed, Tuchel demanded Schürrle from Leverkusen—and got him. He was also given Sebastian Rode, Raphaël Guerreiro, Ousmane Dembélé, Marc Bartra and Emre Mor, but the turnover of players worried him. Hans-Joachim Watzke called the changes “ambitious”. Tuchel said they were “risky”.
The team, clearly, was not the same. By the winter break they were sixth, twelve points behind Bayern. At the training camp in Marbella, Watzke demanded a top-three finish if Tuchel were to get a new deal. At that point their relationship was already strained. A year earlier, Dortmund had chased Óliver Torres from Atlético Madrid. In charge of the deal was Sven Mislintat, the scout who had brought in Kagawa, Aubameyang and Lewandowski—and who was close to Michael Zorc, the sporting director. Just as the Torres deal was ready, Tuchel pulled the plug. That led to a falling-out between Tuchel and Mislintat, whom Tuchel banned from the training ground.
At that time Tuchel had survived, in part because he was doing so well. A year later, his hand was weaker. That winter Dortmund also bought Alexander Isak, only for Tuchel to say he had never heard of him. While he insisted that he backed the transfer, organised by Mislintat and Zork, it was not an ideal comment at a time when Bild was running a front-page story about the ‘power struggle’ between Tuchel on one side, and Watzke and Zork on the other.
Worse was to come. Le Parisien soon published an interview with Jan-Henrik Gruszecki, a lifelong fan and a Dortmund historian, who said that whenever he thought of Tuchel, he got angry. When Tuchel had been hired, Gruszecki had apparently been asked to tell him the story of Dortmund. Gruszecki had offered him a book he had written about the stadium, and a film about the club. But Tuchel had turned it down. “I’m not interested in these kinds of things,” Tuchel had reportedly said. “I’m just responsible for what’s going on in the field. The Yellow Wall, all that, doesn’t interest me. I’m a football coach.”
In February, Dortmund got a €100,000 fine and a partial stadium closure after a group of supporters had attacked Leipzig fans outside the ground with firework, stones, bottles and eggs. Ten Leipzig fans and four police officers were injured. It hardly helped that Watzke had called Leipzig a club with “no historic roots” that was founded “to play football in order to promote a canned drink”. After that, Dortmund went on to lose to rock-bottom Darmstadt. In March, a cup game against Lotte was called off due to snow.
Yet Tuchel rallied the troops. Dortmund climbed up to third, progressed in the cup and knocked out Benfica in the Champions League. Aubameyang was getting even better, and Dembélé was dancing down the flanks. Come April they were about to play Monaco at home in the quarter-finals. While the players were on the bus outside their hotel, en route to the game, three bombs exploded near it. Bartra broke his wrist and needed surgery. The rest, somehow, escaped unharmed.
For Tuchel, the shock was so great that he struggled to comprehend it. When he came home after the attack, he sat down and watched Barça vs Juventus. His wife was freaking out, but he felt like normal. “I came home a little bit like a robot,” he told The Independent.
It later turned out that a man named Sergej Wenergold had tried to kill the squad, having bet on the club share price to crash. “Still until today, I do not feel the danger that we’ve been in,” Tuchel told The Independent last year. “I can still see the nails sticking in the bus, where even I sat, and I heard that the nails went over fifty metres and into other windows of houses. It was absolutely surreal. Once I was in court later to meet the guy who admitted doing it. I was even feeling sorry for him a little bit. I could not even feel anger, like, ‘Wow, what could you have done?’”
Shortly after the attack, Watzke said the team was in shock. But when UEFA wanted the game to be played the next day, he agreed. The players had no say, and Tuchel only found out via a text message. Dortmund lost 3–2, after which the players hit out at the decision. Matthias Ginter said that nobody had wanted to play. Sokratis Papastathopoulos called it the hardest day of his life, and said he was just happy to be alive. He felt treated like an animal. Weidenfeller would start seeing a psychologist, saying the bombing had changed his life. Tuchel took their side, saying, “We had the feeling we were being treated as if our bus had been hit by a can of beer.”
Somehow, Dortmund kept going. Just two weeks later they beat Bayern in the cup semi-final, and they went six games unbeaten to seal third place in the Bundesliga. They signed off by beating Frankfurt in the cup final, securing Tuchel’s first trophy at senior level and their first title in five years.
Still, Tuchel could never survive. One issue was the dressing room. In the cup final Nuri Şahin, one of the leaders, was left out of the squad, even though Weigl was injured. The two club captains, Reus and Marcel Schmelzer, called it a “shock” and backed their teammate. Another problem was Watzke and Zorc. They still disagreed over the bus bombing, and Watzke said he was “worn out” with having to deal with Tuchel. When Tuchel had written a critical text message about Zorc to his agent—only to mistakenly send it to Zorc—it was all over. Three days after the final, Tuchel was fired. There never was much warmth between him and the club. Tuchel, it was said, was never seduced by the Yellow Wall. He simply just wanted to coach.
Tuchel took another year-long sabbatical. He began to meditate. He took his family to Bilbao. When he was contacted by PSG, he took a crash course in French. Before long he was holding his first press conference—in French.
PSG har won all four domestic titles under Unai Emery, but crashed out of the Champions League round of 16 with a 5–2 defeat to Real Madrid. At none of his clubs had the dressing room been harder to manage. Tuchel had many Latin players, with a different temperament to the German and Slavic ones. The star culture ran counter to his ideal for high pressing and teamwork. Yet he did as best he could. “I try to treat Neymar the same way as everyone else,” he told The Independent. “But maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe I try to treat the young guy the same way I treat Neymar.”
Mbappé, Tuchel discovered, was so driven that he hardly needed any management. One day he awarded himself with a T-shirt that marked his hundredth goal in training. “He actually counted them,” said Tuchel.
The league was a cakewalk. PSG won their first fourteen games and finished top with a margin of sixteen points. But they lost the cup final, and the collapse against Manchester United in the Champions League went down badly. Tuchel was frustrated by all the scrutiny. “Put simply, I enjoy football,” he said. “And at a club like this, it is not always about football. Some days you think why it has to be so complicated if for example it’s just a substitution that I made. Why is this still a topic two weeks later? I think to myself, ‘I just want to be a coach.’ I think what has turned me into a coach can be found anywhere. A patch of grass for training and a DVD player is all I need.”
The next season PSG walked league again and, though it was stopped before the end due to the pandemic, they were awarded the trophy. The big goal was still the Champions League, even if it didn’t always seem like the players understood it. Two days after PSG lost to Dortmund in the round of 16, some of the players held a birthday party for Edinson Cavani, Mauro Icardi and Ángel Di María. Mbappé was the DJ. Neymar and Cavani ended up shirtless. Their wives and girlfriends uploaded the videos to social media, sparking uproar. Tuchel was alarmed. But Leonardo held a meeting that cleared the air, and when PSG hosted Dortmund in Paris they won 2–0. That sparked a run of form that sent PSG to the final, where Bayern denied Tuchel once more.
After the defeat, Tuchel was not happy. “We were one game away from winning the Champions League and yet we never had the sensation that we had won people over and that our work was being recognised,” he said. That summer, he was disappointed to see Cavani and Thiago Silva leave for nothing. Come October, PSG had stumbled out of the blocks, and Tuchel went public. “We lose too many players on free transfers,” he said. “It’s too much. We can’t ask this squad the same thing as we did last season.”
“We didn’t like the statement,” Leonardo shot back. “If he decides to stay, he needs to respect the sporting policy and the internal rules.”
Come the winter break, PSG were third, one point off the top. On 23 December, after a 4–0 win against Strasbourg, Tuchel and Leonardo had a brief chat. The next day, Tuchel was fired.
Tuchel could not have thought he’d be back at work so soon. He joined Chelsea just ahead of their home game against Wolves, and had so little time that he sketched out the tactics on the plane. After the 0–0, he raved about the times they had won the ball in the final third. “We had a very good training session yesterday, twenty-one guys who were totally awake to try to do what we are doing—tactically, structure, where to accelerate the game, how to defend,” he said. “I didn’t expect it to be on this level from one training and two meetings. It gives me a good feeling for the future.”
Chelsea went the first fourteen games unbeaten. Tuchel seemed relieved to be done with the politics at PSG. Off the pitch, he was settling into his habits, which involved an early morning run. “It's about discipline,” he told Sky Sports. “It’s what you demand from yourself. It’s quite a challenge for me because I can get lazy and be a person that finds a lot of excuses not to go for a run and not to get out of bed early! But it also helps me find my sleep after matches. When everybody was asleep after a late game, and I was sure I could not sleep until 3am because of the emotions, I had to run to sweat it out and then it was easier for me to sleep. I try to build routines to get up early and do it every day, to sweat and to demand it from yourself. It’s a certain type of discipline that helps you be more reliable, live more healthy and also be able to recover faster.”
At the start, there were none of the internal feuds that marked his time at Mainz and Dortmund. When Chelsea lost 5–2 to West Brom, there was merely a video debrief the next day. “He is a people person,” the reserve goalkeeper Marcus Bettinelli told The Athletic. “He likes to ask how your family are, how you’re doing. It’s small things like that, especially when you’re a new guy, that helps you feel comfortable.”
Still, the discipline remained. “If you want to live together in harmony, everybody needs to accept certain values about how the family is run …” Tuchel said in March. “It is absolutely clear that when we do training at eleven, then it starts at eleven. Not two past eleven … Everybody has been on time at the moment. This is what concerns me. If a player arrives at 10.01, 9.59, or whatever, I am not the police here. I am not hanging around the window, checking the time. I have a job to do and I expect my players to take care of that. To live and guide as an example how you live at Chelsea.”
In late May, Tuchel had taken Chelsea to the Champions League final, where they met Guardiola’s City. He was yet to have a proper talk with Abramovich, though the owner was present in Porto. After the 1–0 win, Chelsea celebrated near the Douro River, where they arrived in the early hours. According to The Times, Marcos Alonso got hold of one of Tuchel’s lucky trainers, filled it with beer and used it as a flute. Tuchel was on the gin and tonic. When the director Marina Granovskaia told him — at 4.30am — that he would be meeting Abramovich at a downtown hotel in three hours, Tuchel switched to Coke.
The meeting must have gone well. Five days later, Tuchel extended his deal to 2024.
Though Chelsea have not mounted a title challenge this season, Tuchel has said he has never been happier in his career. In October, as the season got underway, he spoke to Chelsea's official website about how coaches such as him, who had not been pro footballers, were getting the chance to work at the top level. The question might have evoked certain memories in Tuchel, who has lever lost sight of his time in the bar in Stuttgart, when his future was bleak and his dream seemed to be crushed. “It is nice that it is possible,” he said. “I’m just grateful to have the chance to do this as a job.”
***
