Early termination
The Tuchel experiment may finally fail today
On call: Thomas Tuchel, FC Bayern coach since March 2023
© Tom Weller / DPA
At FC Bayern Munich they hope that an insecure coach can drive an insecure team to peak performance. If the Champions League round of 16 is lost against Rome, this bold plan will have finally failed.
The outcome of this game will decide how quickly the unfinished future becomes a completed one and Tuchel has to vacate his place in the dugout. If we fail against Lazio, Tuchel will be unstoppable – even if he himself assures that he doesn’t see the game as a personal final (“not from my side”). His employer, FC Bayern, on the other hand, will be watching the round of 16 very closely. The fundamental question is whether the coaching model with Tuchel as the soon-to-be Bayern coach isn’t too bold an idea. Whether it can really work that an insecure team can be driven to peak performance by an insecure coach.
FC Bayern’s coach and team pull each other down
Anyone who saw Bayern play in a 2-2 draw against Freiburg on Friday can only answer the question like this: It doesn’t work. Coach and team are currently dragging each other down, to ever deeper lows, as Rudi Völler would say. This can be observed in players like Kane, Kimmich and Goretzka. Kane seems like a black and white copy of himself these days. Yet it all started so sparklingly in August last year. Kane scored and scored, and it seemed only a matter of time before he replaced Gerd Müller and Robert Lewandowski as the top scorers in the club’s history. And now, in winter 2024? Kane runs around somewhere in the opponent’s penalty area, with no connection to the rest of the team. He, the instinctive footballer, has lost his feel for the game, for the right moment to look for the goal. But there is no one there at the moment who would lift Kane up, everyone is busy with themselves these days at FC Bayern. And that is not a good signal for German football.
Julian Nagelsmann, Tuchel’s predecessor in Munich and now the German national coach, will be concerned to see how his old team drags itself from game to game. Nagelsmann had actually planned Joshua Kimmich and Leon Goretzka as managers for the national team, which has to contest a European Championship in the summer. But in this form? With those shaking knees? Kimmich, who would love to direct the game from defensive midfield, even wobbled as a full-back against Freiburg. A job with a manageable level of complexity, line up, line down, it’s actually nothing more. But too much for Kimmich at the moment.
Who still believes in the blood, sweat and tears speeches?
At Bayern they hope that the Lazio game will be a kind of big bang. That everyone focuses on their strengths, beats Rome and then, with the help of a self-created rush, wins again in the Bundesliga. Thomas Müller has already announced that they will start against Lazio “like the fire department”.
These are sentences that we know from the relegation battle. Appeals to so-called morality, assurances that people will plow the lawn, eat grass and so on. Such words will hurt Thomas Tuchel. Tuchel football was always sophisticated football, tactics at the highest level, not even decoded by Pep Guardiola, who lost the 2021 Champions League final with Manchester City against Tuchel’s Chelsea.
And now these blood, sweat and tears speeches. How sad for someone like Tuchel. However, he probably won’t have to hear the speeches often anymore and the future tense two will soon save him.