Thomas Tuchel: Chelseas combustible genius who made defenders train holding tennis balls

April 29, 2024

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 britpop haircuts then, but such superficialities aside, he was already the fully formed, deeply contradictory genius of a coach that Chelsea 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 is innovative and passionate in training but that has led to clashes, even in early days at Mainz (Photo: Thorsten Wagner/Bongarts/Getty Images)

Tuchel quickly made a name for himself with sophisticated, attacking football, taking one of the smallest and poorest top-flight sides — annual budget €15 million — 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 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 (Photo: 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 last February 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 said. 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 was left with 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 (Photo: 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 last August 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 (Photo: 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 but sources close to the German say 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 are well aware of his irascibility, 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 cannot 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 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 before Antonio Conte’s appointment as manager in summer 2016.

One of the most intriguing questions over his suitability for this particular job has in fact been raised by 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 excellent 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. Each club has a charisma and an aura: Tottenham Hotspur, for example, is like Borussia Dortmund; they take risks, they like excitement. 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 too 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. Or is it so much against me that I’d better say, ‘Guys, we will have a misunderstanding here’? But the clubs themselves should be aware of what they stand for.”

Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea tend to want results and entertainment, naturally, as well as a super-charismatic, big-name coach who ideally behaves more like a docile department manager, in full acceptance that he will never be fully in charge, happy not to kick up too much of a fuss.

By picking Tuchel, one of European football’s more volatile and complex characters to reconcile all those inherent contradictions in west London, they couldn’t have made a more fascinating choice.

(Photos: Getty images; design; Sam Richardson)

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