Thomas Tuchel will be the England football team’s next manager. A German manager will lead England to the 2026 World Cup – as the team seek to mark the 60th anniversary of England’s famous 1966 victory over West Germany by finally winning a major trophy again.
The 2026 World Cup also falls exactly 30 years from the ‘Three Lions’ declaration that ‘thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming’ became a new English football anthem during Euro ’96.
‘At some point, we have to free ourselves from history,’ Tuchel said at Wembley. He is right to see no reason why this ‘amazing generation’ of England players cannot make that dream come true – yet it is surely that history which makes this quest mean so much.
Tuchel is the third foreign coach to manage the men’s team – after Swede Sven Göran-Eriksson and Italian Fabio Capello.
The Football Association have chosen Tuchel because they believe he can maximise England’s chances of winning the World Cup. They are trying to emulate the success of appointing Dutch coach Sarina Wiegman – who took on the England women’s job in September 2021 before winning the European Championship in her first summer. It was because Wiegman had won the European trophy with the Dutch that the FA believed she could add the final touch to an England team which had the potential to win their first ever trophy, but needed to beat habitual champions, like Germany, to prove it.
It was a magical day for so many people across England when the Lionesses became legends. I was there in the rafters of Wembley with my family. Over 17 million were watching their triumph on the BBC. Very few people were debating the nationality of the coach – though she was hailed the following day as ‘the humble hero from the Hague who is now an honorary Englishwoman’, by the Daily Mail.
The same newspaper yesterday declared Thomas Tuchel’s appointment ‘a Dark Day for England’ – yet he can be confident of being hailed a hero too if England really did win the World Cup. The Daily Mail coverage declared that it is making an objection of principle – ‘international football should be the best of ours against the best of theirs’ – but only up to a point. ‘We may have made an exception for the mighty Pep Guardiola’, it added.
Mail sportswriter Jeff Powell responded to the appointment of Sven Göran-Eriksson back in 2000 with a xenophobic rant about ‘selling our birthright down the fjord’ to a nation that ‘lives in darkness’ – and that the public would not want ‘Gianni Foreigner’ managing England.
There are reasonable as well as unreasonable arguments to prefer an English coach. International sport is different to club football. The philosophical case can be made that the Fifa rules ought to have similar rules for managers as for players – ruling out Jack Charlton going to Ireland, Roy Hodgson in Switzerland or Sven Göran-Eriksson in England.
The idea that the England team should constrain itself by applying such a self-denying ordinance, despite the current rules, may be more contested. The FA spoke to around ten candidates – and would have been happiest had the best contender been English. Newcastle manager Eddie Howe would have been an appointable choice, though he lacks Tuchel’s trophy-winning track-record, but it is harder to identify a great many credible contenders. England’s domestic coaching pipeline is not as strong as those in Germany or Spain. Fixing that should be a priority for the future.
Now that the decision has been made, supporters will want to wish Tuchel and the team well – and would hope that the media will give him a fair hearing too. Once the principle of an international coach is accepted, the idea that there is a specific problem in Tuchel being German will be confined to a narrow fringe.
Sport did a tremendous amount to forge new Anglo-German relationships across the post-war decades. Bert Trautmann signing for Manchester City just four years after the Second World War was deeply controversial at first – yet Trautmann became a much-loved legend in Manchester. Kevin Keegan going to Hamburg in the 1970s and even Jürgen Klinsmann coming to Tottenham in the early 1990s were so memorable because that type of international exchange was still rare. In this century – the era of Jürgen Klopp and Thomas Tuchel – the presence of Germany’s footballing Anglophiles has become a familiar feature.
For most fans, England and Germany today have a great footballing rivalry, rather than an enmity played out in the shadow of the Second World War. For many decades, the three most important matches in English international football history were the 1966 World Cup final and agonising defeats to the Germans on penalties in 1990 and 1996 – before England’s men and women began to make playing semi-finals and cup finals a new habit over the last five years.
While Tuchel now carries the footballing hopes of a nation, he is unlikely to try to emulate Gareth Southgate’s role, in becoming not just a national team manager but the voice of a modern England.
In my lifetime, no sphere of our national life has contributed more than football to championing an inclusive English pride and patriotism. Euro ‘96, Gareth Southgate and the Lionesses have all been part of that. ‘I have never thought we should just stick to football’, Gareth Southgate wrote in his Dear England letter.
But an inclusive England should not be the work of sport alone. England should be more than a ’90-minute nation’, where those values are reflected in our football, rugby and cricket teams but with too few national institutions engaging confidently with a civic English national identity.
So this is a good moment to reshuffle roles and responsibilities between sport and wider society. Let us all get behind Thomas Tuchel as he organises the talents of a young England team in defence, midfield and attack to inspire a nation wanting to see football come home.
We cannot also expect Thomas Tuchel to speak for England. It is time for others in politics, civic life and culture to find their voice too.
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