Tuchel is the anti-Southgate – England should stick with him

He barely made any Bundesliga appearances, his career ended aged 26 in the second team of a club named Greuther Fürth, but wake any German football fan in the middle of the night and they will tell you exactly who Shawn Parker is. Parker was one of those promising young players that runs through every national youth team but falls off as soon as they have to compete with the grown-ups. He played not only for Fürth, but following the quest of completing the most uninteresting football career possible, also wore the shirts of Bundesliga sides Augsburg and Mainz. Oh, right, and he played under Thomas Tuchel. And thus, an integral part of modern German football folklore was created.

“Shawn, Shawn, what is your idea of playing football? You come to practice and you do only what you want. There is not a single ball for our game, it’s just for your own game,” a young head coach yells in a video shot by local journalists from Mainz. Tuchel, for it is he, jumps around, frantically waves his arms, only to continue with the most iconic sentence of an angry bunch: “Here a trick, there a trick, and another idea, and none of them work. I’m fed up, really.” He storms off, kicking a ball. “Here, go chase the ball, have fun.”

Virality would be an understatement for this masterpiece – infamy better describes its status among football fans. Typing Tuchel’s quotes, I did not even have to look them up. It’s the Bundesliga equivalent to Gennaro Gattuso’s “Sometimes may be good, sometimes maybe shit” or José Mourinho’s “I prefer not to speak”, except it’s much better. Parker’s German Wikipedia page, which is not very long, dedicates a significant passage to this clip. Legend says that he is still chasing the ball Tuchel kicked away. (Parker recently said that, while the outburst caused him distress at the time, he can laugh about it today.)

Now, why is this important 12 years later, in an era of football that Tuchel has taken part in shaping? When England, who have gone 60 agonising years without a major title, have failed again, this time in the semi-finals? Well, because, of all people, this German hothead might still be the one to bring it home for them. Eventually. And his extroverted nature may be exactly why. 

Yes, Tuchel lost the plot against Argentina. He got nervous in the latter third, focused on defence and gave away all control, which meant the unavoidable. Mere minutes after the game, English media tore into him. Which is how the business works: memory doesn’t last long, the last game is always the defining one and if you bottled it, you’re toast. Plus: Tuchel isn’t English. It’s easy to point fingers now: of course a German would fail. What were they thinking? Hiring a loon, who, days before the semi-final publicly got in a tiff with one of his star players? 

It’s a natural reflex, retroactively reinterpreting England’s run and Tuchel’s handling of the tournament. It’s also misguided. This is the strongest an England side have looked in a long time. Tuchel is getting flack for giving away this narrow lead in a Gareth Southgate-adjacent fashion, when much of his 2026 run was quite anti-Southgate. Southgate’s subdued communication style mirrored his anxious in-game coaching. 

Tuchel’s eccentric style will now be picked apart even more than last week. It might still be an asset. 

The debate that ensued in England and the international press after Jude Bellingham and Tuchel had a difference in opinion about the Three Lions’s performance against Norway was nothing new for a manager used to and thriving in agitation. While journalists, fans and pundits alike could not seem to get over the nerve that Tuchel had criticising the winning team or the audacity of Bellingham disagreeing with him – or both – Tuchel himself, at least I picture this, must have scoffed. What a nothingburger! He has had much more memorable public feather-rufflings.

At Bayern Munich, the defining attribute of his whirlwind tenure were strange, almost dadaistic public appearances. After losing 3-0 to Manchester City, he claimed to have fallen “head over heels in love” with his team. He regularly traded insults with pundits Lothar Matthäus and Didi Hamann. When asked why his team wasn’t winning as many games, Tuchel once simply said: “I have no idea” and trotted off. You think Tuchel was overly harsh after the quarter-final? He once absolutely trashed his Dortmund team, famously labelling one performance “technically, tactically, mentally, nothing but a deficit”. 

It is this unwillingness to conform to the industry standard of vapid, dull and trite phrases that makes Tuchel fun. Among the sea of football personalities, he stands out, not just because he sometimes loses his cool, but also because of his weird charm, that – long before English papers published op-eds about his attractiveness – catapulted him onto the covers of German style magazines, sporting sleek wool coats and loafers without socks. 

And it’s not just charisma. If you were wondering whether Tuchel could learn from his mistakes, fret not. Before his career skyrocketed, German football magazine 11FREUNDE photographed him in a costume reminiscent of fellow spitfire John McEnroe. Astonishingly, Tuchel went along with this. You can’t accuse him of a lack of humour.

All this, of course, can make for controversies. At Bayern, Dortmund and Chelsea, he lost his job over internal squabbles. When Germany sought to replace Joachim Löw and Hansi Flick respectively, of course Tuchel’s name came up, given that there are only a handful of German managers who have won the Champions League (and Julian Nagelsmann isn’t even one of them). Except the hypernervous DFB always feared Tuchel’s brashness. England didn’t. And now, after Tuchel gave a squad that was always talented, but lacked the guts to win it all, a necessary kick in the arse, Germans may have never been more jealous (which, of course, we would never admit in a German paper). 

So congratulations, England, you were braver than us. Not the first time. You should stick with it! Getting on Thomas Tuchel’s bad side is a bad idea. Just ask Shawn Parker.

Photographs by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images; Alex Grimm/Bongarts/Getty Images