In May 2021, Thomas Tuchel and Chelsea won the Champions League.
Just four months after taking over the stuttering side, he led them to the biggest trophy in European club football.
"It´s a huge step to arrive in the final. It´s a bigger one to bite your way through.”
In just four months, he had made everyone forget about his predecessor, Chelsea legend Frank Lampard.
“Why Chelsea?" - "Why not! ”
Four months in which Chelsea beat a string of top teams in England and beyond.
And they did it without conceding a single goal against any of them.
"He´s an outstanding coach."
Thomas Tuchel never had Klopp’s charisma, Guardiola’s intellectual aura or Simeone’s raw energy.
But he learned from all of them, and now stands at the top of the coaching pyramid.
What makes Tuchel tick, and ...
To understand Thomas Tuchel we have to go back to 2009.
Michael Jackson had just died, Barack Obama was the new President…
“Yes - we can! Thank you.”
And a 35 year old inexperienced youth coach took over at Bundesliga side Mainz.
A club where another exciting young coach, Jürgen Klopp, had started his own career.
“We know each other for a long, long time. We have kind of a common history. He worked for Mainz like I did. ”
Back then we met the unknown Tuchel at little Mainz. From an early stage, he had his eye on the biggest coaches in the game.
Even as he made his first steps in the Bundesliga, he was learning from the very best.
Tuchel's playing career had ended at 25 due to a knee injury, so he studied economics and worked at a bar, before returning to football as a youth coach.
Soon he arrived at Mainz.
The experiment was a resounding success. The unknown led Mainz to 9th place, at that time their best ever finish.
His second season was even better - as Mainz qualified for the Europa League.
Soon enough Tuchel resembled a coach of a top team, rather than a club that’s used to battling relegation.
Training has always been at the heart of Tuchel’s success, and his methods were revolutionary.
For example, to stop his players relying on long balls out wide, he cut off the corners of the pitch.
Tuchel forced his players to find solutions in tight spaces. That meant when they took to a full pitch for games, they played with greater freedom.
His approach: practice makes perfect.
Another part of Tuchel’s strategy is to set up to counteract each opponent.
Klopp favours Gegenpressing, Pep has tiki-taka, but Tuchel can beat them both by anticipating their every move and finding new tactical innovations.
That’s why at Mainz he never played the same formation with the same players twice in a row.
But this is also one of Tuchel’s biggest problems.
To him, players have always been a means to an end — pawns in his 4D chess game, who he can move around at will.
And that means sometimes the human touch is missing.
Tuchel is a driven personality, a perfectionist. His expectation of consistent excellence creates friction with some players.
One former player says...
You’d never hear a player say that about Klopp, who has always worked hard to get the whole squad on board with his ideas.
Tuchel has the edge on Klopp tactically, but not when it comes to the personal side of the job.
Tuchel has never escaped the Klopp comparisons. In fact, he encouraged them.
For example in 2015 when he moved to Dortmund and, just like in Mainz, succeeded Klopp.
The cerebral, meticulous perfectionist Tuchel took over one of the most emotional clubs in the world.
This was just before his first training session. He was happy to get his hands dirty and set things up himself, a job usually passed off to an assistant.
Tuchel planned every session in exact detail, right down to the centimetre.
And it worked. Tuchel won more points per game than any other Dortmund coach ever.
And in each of his two years with the team, he led them to the Cup final, winning it once.
He also achieved the best points total of any second placed team in Bundesliga history.
Unfortunately for him, Pep and Bayern were even better.
These were Tuchel’s first battles with Guardiola.
The two tactical masterminds met on the sidelines in the Bundesliga, and often after games for dinner, too.
Another situation where Tuchel could learn from the very best.
Tuchel also improved his players: the likes of Mats Hummels, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Henrikh Mkhitaryan and Marco Reus were at their best in his reign.
Tuchel moved Dortmund away from Klopp’s heavy metal football to a flexible possession based game, where the man with the ball always has multiple options.
But players are people too, and football doesn’t always make sense.
Tuchel learned that lesson on the 14th of April 2016.
It was the Europa League quarterfinal second leg.
Tuchel’s Dortmund met Klopp’s Liverpool.
With an hour played, Dortmund led 3-1. Liverpool needed 3 goals to progress.
And then it happened — after the Reds pulled one back, Jürgen Klopp ignited the whole stadium.
“It was just like that everybody believed here in this lucky punch.”
With the fans roaring them on, Liverpool pulled off a miracle, scoring the winner in the 91st minute.
The game was to be a turning point in Tuchel’s career.
“If you expect an explanation I probably have to disappoint you. An explanation would mean that things are kind of logical and tactical.”
But that’s football. Sometimes logic counts for nothing, and belief, desire, and team spirit decide games.
5 years on, Tuchel tied all the necessary components together to win the Champions League.
Klopp had showed him the way.
But in between, there was another defining episode for Tuchel.
“Continuing with our breaking news it´s coming out of Germany. Police in Dortmund have confirmed that at least three explosions have occurred.”
On the way to a Champions League quarterfinal game, Dortmund’s team bus was bombed. One player, Marc Bartra, was badly injured.
The team was in shock, but after discussions between club bosses and UEFA, the game was only delayed by one day.
Dortmund lost, and afterwards Tuchel leapt to the players’ defence.
Was this Tuchel’s human side on show? Or was he putting on an act?
There were rumours that Tuchel was happy for the game to go ahead when it did.
He also allegedly criticised his players, saying “I’m supposed to beat Bayern with these wimps?”
His relationship with the club bosses broke down.
Even before these events, it seemed like his my way or the highway approach didn’t fit.
Dortmund CEO Aki Watzke emphasised that leading the club was about not just results...
All things that made Jürgen Klopp a perfect fit, but Thomas Tuchel? Not so much.
So Watzke decided to let one of the best coaches in the world go.
But he wasn't out of work for long.
At Paris Saint Germain a different challenge altogether awaited Tuchel.
How do you turn a collection of world class players into a team?
But Tuchel showed he was the right man to lead the superstars.
Tuchel had a successful stint in Paris, winning his first 14 games in a row for a league record.
In his first two seasons he won two league titles and the French Cup, and finished runners up to Bayern in the Champions League.
But losing that final went down badly in Paris.
And after the team started the following season poorly, Tuchel’s relationship with the media became more and more strained.
The club’s owners wanted more, and a falling out with Sporting Director Leonardo led to Tuchel’s dismissal.
His old employers didn’t seem surprised, with Dortmund's Watzke saying…
The numbers back that up. At all of his clubs, Tuchel has been a success.
At PSG he won three of every four games.
In his first half season at Chelsea he won 2 points per game, in the toughest league in the world.
And his old sparring partner knew what to expect.
“I saw already some routines, some fundamental process which I remember when I faced him, in Borussia Dortmund.”
Thomas Tuchel learned from the best, until he became the best.
“Will be tricky to face him, because it always was tricky. Because he´s a good one.”
That Tuchel is good should be clear to every football fan by now.
But his obsessive, demanding nature means he’s never satisfied
even within minutes of victory.
“I don´t want to rest. I want the next one. The next success. And I want the next title."
"And I want the next process on the same level of quality, of consistency and I want to be a part of it.
And I demand to be a part of it.”
Thomas Tuchel’s personality has brought him success, but also tripped him up.
The big question is: Can he rein it in and become THE coaching superstar?