England match today puts Thomas Tuchel in a rare position: the 52-year-old is leading England as he bids to become the first foreign manager to win the World Cup. His route there began far from the touchline, in Stuttgart, where football nearly slipped away before Ralf Rangnick pulled him back in.
Rangnick said the turning point came after he learned Tuchel was working in a bar in Stuttgart. “When I found out that he was working in a bar in Stuttgart to earn his living, I could hardly believe it,” he said. Rangnick then called him and asked, “what are you doing?” Tuchel answered, “I have to earn my living there,” before being told, “Thomas, please, why don't you come to us in Stuttgart and work as a youth-team coach?”
Rangnick’s Stuttgart Call
That invitation set Tuchel on the coaching path after he had almost given up on football entirely. Rangnick brought him together with the academy director, and that is where Tuchel’s coaching career started. Tuchel had played under Rangnick at SSV Ulm, where Rangnick was laying the groundwork for a tactical revolution in German football in the early 1990s and was one of the first managers to introduce zonal marking.
Rangnick later said, “He was always interested in why we play the way we play,” while Tuchel said Rangnick “changed the way I watched football on television.” Those are not throwaway lines. They point to the detail-obsessed coach England now rely on in a tournament where no foreign manager has ever won the World Cup.
From Bar Work To England
In the late 1990s, Tuchel was working a student job at a bar in Stuttgart and spending time at wild parties in the city with some of Germany’s biggest hip-hop stars. He was 30 years old in 1998, when Glenn Hoddle’s England started their World Cup campaign in France. That gap between where he was then and where he is now is the story of his career.
It is also the complication inside England’s current campaign. Tuchel is not just managing a major international side; he is trying to do what no foreign coach has done before in this tournament. Rangnick said, “After a couple of weeks when you are a head coach you can always pretty precisely tell which players could become a coach.” He saw it in Tuchel early. England are now asking that same eye for football to deliver on the biggest stage.
Tuchel’s playing career ended because of injury, with damage to the cartilage in his knees causing such severe pain that he could barely walk up and down stairs. That cut short one path and forced another open. Now England’s World Cup campaign begins with a manager whose career was rescued in Stuttgart, and whose next step is chasing a first for a foreign coach at the tournament.
