‘We’re not angry Tuchel took the job, we love the football enemy’: Germany reacts to big appointment
In my home town of Mainz, the city where Thomas Tuchel first became a Bundesliga coach, they had two big news events in less than a week.
Last Wednesday, Jurgen Klopp, the most famous son of Mainz 05, became Red Bull’s head of global soccer. Supporters did not really appreciate the move from their beloved “Kloppo”, the all-time hero of the Mainz managerial school that has produced so many high-level coaches. They felt Klopp had betrayed the romance of the game.
Now the second world-famous coach with Mainz origins has got a new job. And it is a one the football romantics probably would have wished for Klopp, the “normal one” who seemed to be destined to become England manager.
If it had been Klopp, all the people in Mainz would be proud. Only the German national coach’s job is seen as a higher calling. Now the people react with a “wow”.
Tuchel has one of the most prestigious jobs in world football. The belief in Germany is that England are much better off with him at the helm, and certainly prefer his decision to take on England compared to Klopp’s corporate choice.
But there is also a shrug of the shoulders here – which is commonplace whenever Tuchel takes his next steps. When he became Chelsea manager and won the Champions League in 2021, Mainz supporters did not really care. When he went to Bayern Munich, the same. They respect Tuchel for his knowledge and for his coaching ability, but they do not love him.
Tuchel himself is still full of love for the Mainz academy, where Volker Kersting, who brought him to the club as a youth coach in 2008, is still academy director. But Tuchel does not talk about his feelings for Mainz as he does not particularly care for the thoughts of the media or the public. The Mainz years were the most important for him as he could develop in a system where he was allowed to fail and to learn.
In his five years as Mainz coach, I was able to watch Tuchel very closely as a reporter for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, as there were still open training sessions a minimum of twice a week. You could see him developing into one of the biggest coaching talents. While Klopp in the years before was the great hero who pushed the club, the city and the supporters, Tuchel focused on the pitch, where he took Mainz to the next level with a finish in the top fivr of the Bundesliga. And as with Klopp, it was very clear that this young guy would one day work for the biggest clubs.
Today, the media in Germany is not really over-hyping the Tuchel becomes England manager story. Scour social media and you will see fans are taking notice, but not much more. It is big news but not the sensation that everybody was talking about when Klopp joined Red Bull last week.
Football experts here think that Tuchel could be the perfect for the England job. England supporters know of him because he was a successful manager at Chelsea but he clearly does not have a past as a genuine English footballing hero, like Gareth Southgate or others.
The situation could easily be compared with Germany coach Julian Nagelsmann, who nearly two decades ago was a young player like Tuchel at Augsburg and was inspired by him to become a manager. Nagelsmann became coach of the Mannschaft last year even though many thought that he could only manage a club and was not experienced to take on a “boring“ national-team job where you are only working with players every other month. But Nagelsmann has succeeded.
Tuchel is cut from similar cloth. He is a competitor who loves three matches a week. But he is also a specialist in producing teams with limited preparation time, which will be perfect for national camps before qualifiers or tournaments.
So why should there not be the final joke that this is a marriage made in heaven as a German coach makes the final step for England to fulfil their dream of a second major trophy after the 1966 World Cup final win against West Germany?
Germans would not be angry if Tuchel led our big rivals to success, as almost everybody loves the football enemy. People would shrug their shoulders again and let out an even bigger “Wow!”