How Thomas Tuchel reached the top by learning to manage his temper

Thomas Tuchel was 10 years old when he first realised he had an anger problem. “I insulted a goalkeeper on my own team so badly that he refused to continue playing,” recalled the England manager. Tuchel’s father, Rudolf, also the coach of the town’s lower-league football team, TSV Krumbach, took matters in hand. “My father said: ‘That’s not acceptable, Thomas, even if you’re right.’

“I had to apologise to our goalkeeper. I wanted to impose my own standards on others and when that didn’t work, I became unpleasant. I was probably also angry at myself because I wasn’t meeting my own expectations,” he revealed in Zeit Magazin.

Tuchel is no longer that 10-year-old unschooled in reading the room. And yet, as Jude Bellingham would testify, he still has an uncanny ability to speak plainly before overthinking consequences, such as when he revealed that his mother found the England midfielder’s behaviour “repulsive”. Ten-year-old Tuchel does, in some ways, get to the heart of the man England has entrusted to win the World Cup. He always calls it as he sees it and sometimes that causes offence: ask Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and Trent Alexander-Arnold.

Tuchel was unwittingly born into this. Not the England job specifically. An idyllic rural Bavarian town in the Swabian mountains might be green and pleasant but does not immediately scream “It’s coming home”. But he was made for elite football. He happened to be at the epicentre of a German football revolution that would change the game, centred on a small area of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. Jürgen Klopp and Germany coach Julian Nagelsmann hail from the same region surrounding Stuttgart, but it is former Manchester United coach and current Austria manager Ralf Rangnick who is the founding father of what became known as the Stuttgarter Schule: the high-pressing game now taken for granted in the Premier League.

And it was Rangnick, more idiosyncratic outsider than mainstream manager, who was Tuchel’s footballing father. Under his guidance as a player at third-tier SSV Ulm, Tuchel saw how football could be played, with an attacking intensity and back-four structure that challenged the shibboleths of German football. It might have changed his life, for Rangnick set humble SSV Ulm on their way to the Bundesliga. Yet Tuchel did not get to enjoy the ride, forced to quit because of knee cartilage problems at the age of 25, just before the club began their meteoric rise.

He ended up working as a waiter in a cocktail bar in Stuttgart, although it was not all bad. It was the coolest nightspot in town, Radio Bar. “That’s where I learned how to carry a tray over your head: bend your wrist back, lock your elbow, and lift!” He was promoted to bartender and his Tom Cruise skills will surely come into play in the England camp should celebrations be in order.

Tuchel was in a dark place when Rangnick rescued him from Radio Bar. “I saw my teammates getting better and better under Ralf and making it to the Bundesliga, which was always my dream,” he said. “I was angry. I felt betrayed by the situation.” He completed a university course to prove to his mum that he could stick at something but Rangnick, by now head coach at VfB Stuttgart, persuaded him to work as a coaching intern in the youth team and that was life-changing. The coaches’ staff room was a petri dish for the new ideas transforming football, which Tuchel compares to Ajax in the 1970s. “I found the passion again and instantly found the joy to be on the pitch out there,” he recalled. His ambitions remained limited by low expectations, however. “One hundred per cent of coaches had played in the Bundesliga. There was no example [of anyone] who made it through the academy and ended up in a professional [Bundesliga] coaching position.”

He was an assistant in the coaching team that won the under-19 title at VfB Stuttgart, which got him a job at Augsburg youth team in 2005, where his most famous graduate was another failed pro with a knee injury, Nagelsmann, who he added to his scouting team. Money was short. He had no car and commuted by train from his Munich home, which he shared with girlfriend Sissi, who he would marry in 2009. But it got him a move to Mainz’s under-19 team, a club made famous by their charismatic coach, Klopp. When the club struggled to fill the chasm left by Klopp’s departure, managing director Christian Heidel, a proven risk taker when it came to appointing managers, turned to his under-19s coach. The club was midway through pre-season, with just five days before the opening Bundesliga fixture of the season, when Tuchel was offered the job.

“Can I think about it?” Tuchel asked. His eldest daughter Emma had only just been born. Heidel made it clear he couldn’t. And so followed an extraordinary five years at Mainz, surpassing even Klopp’s time there, with the small-town club finishing regularly in the top 10 and qualifying for Europe. He was everyone’s favourite new young coach, earning praise from Pep Guardiola for counterintuitively attacking Bayern Munich and was being lauded by German industry chiefs as a role-model iconoclastic genius. Yet the toll was greater than the public face suggested. Halfway through his highly-successful first season, he had a crisis of confidence. With baby Emma not sleeping, his then-wife Sissi was up in the small hours and found her husband sitting alone in a dark room, wide awake. “Would it be terrible for you if I went back to coaching the under-19s?” Tuchel asked her, as they debated his future. “I said to Sissi: ‘If I can’t sleep because of football, if that’s the price, sorry, then I don’t want to pay it. Then I’ll go back to the youth team and give my best there.’”

He battled on, became Germany’s best young coach, moved to Borussia Dortmund, Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and now England. In the meantime his marriage to Sissi broke down while at Chelsea but professionally he won the Champions League, the Club World Cup, three league titles and three domestic cups. Yet part of him is still that 10-year-old dreamer. When England finally qualified for the World Cup finals in Latvia last October, it was noticeable how much it connected to Tuchel’s inner child. “Brilliant, guys! Brilliant,” enthused Tuchel to a delighted Riga dressing room. “We are there! My childhood dream – to go to the World Cup! I could not be more proud than to go with you guys. We will rock this thing in America next year!” On Wednesday, the boy from Krumbach will finally face the World Cup music with England.

Photograph by Eddie Keogh – The FA via Getty Images