In the end, Steve, Brian, Gaz or similar, he’s just not done the job he was hired to do. The job? The one he was hired to do? He’s not done it. How can I put this? There are three things here. The job. The being hired. The doing it. And him. Four things. And if you put those things together, there is no clear equation of … no linear semiotic cluster, he’s not, he’s just not, what I’m saying is …
How many times have you heard variations on this statement in the few short, tender weeks since England’s World Cup campaign? Perhaps you strayed too close to a sport-themed radio show, or accidentally ingested a celebrity football pundit podcast. Either way the verdict is pretty much universal, and delivered always with an air of finality, a sad shake of the head.
The non-winning of a World Cup. The failure to make substitutions to nullify big-game full-bore Lionel Messi. The non-doing of a job you were, apparently, hired for. Even if that job, in isolation, was also a pretty stupid idea in the first place.
Tuchel made a decent effort last week at steering attention to the more favourable aspects of England’s World Cup, but it’s clear he’s fighting a losing battle here. Nobody cares about his all-time highest managerial win ratio, or a best-ever England World Cup performance overseas.
Instead the key note is failure. And not just everyday failure, but failure so profound it amounts to outright wage-theft. As England arrive at a vital 20-month period in the national team’s history, Tuchel’s capacities in the job will be defined, until proved otherwise, by those final 20 minutes against Argentina, during which he failed to control the endless variables of a World Cup semi-final and was reduced to looking on helplessly, whirling his arms around like a scurvy-ridden Prussian general on his way to an executive golf weekend, out there not doing the thing he was hired for. Even if – and it is quite an important point – that thing made little actual sense.
This isn’t surprising. All political careers end in failure. All England managerial careers start in failure, continue in failure and implode in failure. One of the most interesting parts of any managerial reign is detecting early on the exact nature of the rage that will inevitably define the job.
Gareth Southgate took England from total dysfunction to the most successful sustained six-year period in their history, but still spent most of his time in the job dismissed as a yes-man, traitor, and basically the sole obstacle to all-consuming world domination on a scale never before seen.
It is hard to remember exactly why now. Not producing a team that played as if haring about the pitch on a jetski. Trying hard to be sensitive about politics. Exuding at all times that beaky, priestly sense of virtue, the suspicion that he may at any moment start talking about cheddar cheese, Spitfires and the traditional family unit.
With Tuchel the cycle was always likely to complete itself more quickly given the transactional nature of his appointment. Plus, the fact he is, and there is no other way of putting this, German. Tuchel has accelerated this with his inability to appear sufficiently penitent when the inevitable fine-margins defeats arrive. Arrogance, hubris, tactical robotism, failing to understand our native-tongued Premier League culture. This was always likely to be the narrative here.
It is also the biggest current obstacle to progress. As England prepare to set off on a run of four pretty decent games, it is the right moment to go back to this once again, if only because the next two years present such an obvious opportunity,
The next European Championship is the best chance England are going to get any time soon to win something. Home advantage. Good players. Plus, of course, a very good manager, or at least the best one they’re going to get at this point. Put it all together and the biggest obstacle to making this work is not the team or the manager, but the energy around them, a reaction to Tuchel that is, in itself, the biggest example of why England fail.
First, nobody really knows where the idea Tuchel was appointed solely to win tournaments came from. But it is clearly absurd. Winning a World Cup is the hardest thing in football, a grail, a history quest, never mind winning it with a nation that comes pre-cooked with hangups and uncertainties.
Winning it as foreign manager of a national team? History suggests this may even be impossible. Here’s a stat. There have been 22 World Cup-winning managers. All 22, from 1930 to 2026, have been the same nationality as their players. But here you go, Thomas. Win or bust.
In the event England lost in the way they always lose these late-stage knockout games, by failing to control the ball and the rhythm in the key period when things become stretched and desperate, when what matters above all is your midfield, when the base-level technique and game intelligence of your footballers are left pinned and wriggling on the wall, when it turns out Luka Modric, Messi and Andrea Pirlo are simply better adapted to this level.
The key misunderstanding is that Tuchel somehow caused this to happen, rather than failing to reverse it once it had begun. To appreciate this properly it is worth breaking down that sorrowful 18-minute spell in Miami, if only because this wasn’t actually an 18-minute spell, but a 40-minute spell.
The standard analysis asks: why didn’t England go forward, unleash, get on the front foot from about the 72nd minute, when Tuchel instead began to make defensive substitutions? The key point is that this was already happening. England had played well right up until the point Anthony Gordon scored the opening goal on 55 minutes. At which point the players just stopped. Watch it back and it’s startling. Suddenly the entire method is hacked clearances, deep defence, desperation measures.
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Tuchel reacts the right way to this. In the stadium you could see him jump up and urge his players forward, saying: “Wait, why are you doing this?” skinny arms whirling, like a man very angrily shepherding an elderly swarm of bees towards a distant hive.
For 17 minutes England’s players didn’t do what Tuchel wanted, trapped instead in their own vertigo, swamped by opponents playing “surge football” and backed by the conviction of having a genius in their ranks. At which point Tuchel had a choice to make. “We’re 18 minutes from the World Cup final. These blokes are in bits. Do we try to rewire this on the hoof, say: ‘Hey, everyone, we really need to change our outlook, run forward, reboot the mainframe?’ Or just take a breath and lean into what you have?”
In that moment Tuchel chose the latter, probably based on winning that way in the previous two games. Football reasoning is always outcome-based. Hold out and this is an act of icy Germanic cool. Lose and it’s downright fraudery. But there was at least logic in the process.
England got to within five normal-time minutes of a World Cup final in a game where they had long since begun to panic. And the failure was one of omission. Tuchel didn’t cause it. He also didn’t stop it happening. And this is a vital point not just in judging his choices, but in understanding what international football is for.
A World Cup is an examination of an entire sporting culture. Victory rewards decisions made at structural and economic levels. This is how we understand what works, which style of development succeeds. You win by creating a functioning culture, not by bolting one on. There has to be patience, intellectual weight, judgment calls made years in advance. This is why nations with coaching cultures win things. This is why England being able to shortcut this, to game the system, to buy a world-class coach and therefore win would be contrary to the basic beauty of the whole, but of no real use to the national sporting culture.
The real issue here is not Tuchel’s choices, but the fact elite English football can’t produce a Tuchel of its own with which to bend a little more and to learn as it goes along. Sack Tuchel, go English, and you’re basically looking at Graham Potter, Eddie Howe, Gary O’Neil, Frank Lampard, Michael Carrick, Liam Rosenior and Will Still.
There is no identifiable English way of playing, no English coaching school. It’s no good saying “Premier League”. What is that? A portmanteau culture of borrowed influences. Tuchel was polite and evasive when he was asked why he didn’t just make the players better at keeping and passing the ball. What he wants to say is: “You don’t understand how football works. Give me a Vinícius, a Rodri, an Antoine Griezmann, and then we’ll talk.”
There are other elements to the summer that have been quietly packed away in the past few weeks. Why didn’t he pick a squad that could have played in a more adaptive fashion, you might ask? Why didn’t he take Cole Palmer? Well, where’s Cole Palmer now? How’s the load management going? How about Phil Foden, now up to 37 games without a goal? Perhaps Adam Wharton of Crystal Palace might have changed everything. Maybe. Does it seem as if anyone else in elite football thinks this could be the case?
In the end England were good in parts. They showed spirit to get to that semi. They beat the hosts in Mexico City with 10 men, because the manager reorganised on the hoof. They got the best out of Jude Bellingham, Harry Kane faded, as he does, but his most likely replacement is now playing in Saudi Arabia.
They got to five minutes from beating the holders and reaching a first final outside England. This is something to learn from, for Tuchel as much as anyone else. To see it as an act of managerial fraudulism is to lean into the reasons why England fail, not to progress any further towards success.
Tuchel has no space to breathe from here, no real margin for error. But England do have a pretty good chance of winning something two years from now. As ever, the task will be to separate the job from its expectations, something that shows no signs of becoming any easier with time.
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