Thomas Tuchel Is the First German Tasked With Ending England’s Sixty Years of Hurt

There is a particular kind of history between England and Germany that every English football fan carries somewhere in the back of their mind. The 1966 final. The 1970 quarter-final. The shootouts at Italia 90 and Euro 96 that ended in tears and penalties and decades of jokes. So there is something almost provocative about the fact that the man asked to end England’s 60-year wait for a major men’s trophy, at a World Cup in the summer of 2026, is a German from the small town of Krumbach in Bavaria. Thomas Tuchel is the first German ever to lead England into a World Cup, and he knows exactly how strange that sentence sounds.

When England open their tournament against Croatia on 17 June, Tuchel will stand on the touchline as the third foreign-born manager in the team’s history and the first from the country that has caused English supporters more heartbreak than any other. He was handed an 18-month contract that runs only to the end of this World Cup, a deal designed around a single objective. Win the thing England have not won since 1966, or go home. Few jobs in world football come with a brief that blunt.

The Outsider Asked to Solve an English Problem

England’s failure to win tournaments has never been a failure of talent. For most of the past decade they have arrived at major finals with one of the deepest squads in the world, full of players from the biggest clubs in Europe, and they have still found ways to fall short. They reached the Euro 2020 final and lost on penalties at Wembley. They reached the Euro 2024 final and lost again. The pattern has become almost folkloric, a sense that something in the English footballing psyche tightens at the decisive moment.

That is the puzzle the Football Association hired Tuchel to solve, and the choice of an outsider was deliberate. Tuchel has no emotional scar tissue from England’s near-misses. He did not grow up with the weight of 1966 or the agony of successive penalty defeats. He has won the Champions League with Chelsea, league titles in Germany and France, and he has done it by walking into dressing rooms full of stars and getting them to play without fear. The theory behind his appointment is that a manager carrying none of England’s psychological baggage might be the one able to lift it off the players.

Fear, Joy and the Tuchel Method

Tuchel diagnosed the problem almost immediately. Before his first game in charge in March 2025, he said England had been too full of “fear” to win Euro 2024, and that his mission was to strip that fear out. “We play with the hunger and the joy to win, not with the fear to lose,” he said, and the phrase has become something close to a mission statement for his entire tenure.

It sounds simple. It is not. Generations of England managers have tried to talk their players out of the tension that grips them in knockout games, and most have watched it return the moment a tournament reaches its sharp end. Tuchel’s bet is that the difference is in the detail, in how training is structured, in how expectation is managed, in giving players such clarity about their roles that there is no mental space left for dread. He is a famously meticulous coach, the kind who scripts patterns of play down to individual steps, and he believes that certainty on the pitch is the antidote to anxiety in the mind.

Talking England Down on Purpose

Some of his methods have surprised English observers used to managers who talk a big game. In the build-up to the tournament, Tuchel has gone out of his way to play down England’s chances, openly stating that they are not among the favourites to end 60 years of hurt. To a fanbase raised on bullish pre-tournament promises, it can sound defeatist. It is the opposite. It is a calculated attempt to take the target off his players’ backs, to lower the temperature before it can rise, to make a squad of superstars feel like challengers rather than men expected to deliver a nation’s destiny.

He has spoken before about England’s “Everest,” the mountain they have to climb to deliver a first men’s major trophy in six decades, in a speech from more than a year ago that has circulated widely among supporters. The imagery is honest. He is not pretending the task is small. But by naming the size of it plainly, and then refusing to let it sit on his players, he is trying to do something English football has rarely managed, which is to treat the pressure as a problem to be engineered away rather than a burden to be carried bravely until it breaks you.

The Squad He Has Built

Tuchel’s England are not short of options. Harry Kane captains the side as the country’s all-time leading scorer, chasing the one prize that has eluded him across a glittering career. Jude Bellingham brings the ability to win a match on his own, even if his exact role under Tuchel has been the subject of constant debate, with some pundits suggesting Aston Villa’s Morgan Rogers could be preferred in the number ten position. The group blends the experience of players competing in their third World Cup with a wave of younger talent that Tuchel has carefully folded in.

One of the most striking selections is Eberechi Eze, whose path to the squad we have covered in detail, a player released by six clubs before he became an England creator. The presence of players like Eze hints at what Tuchel values, footballers with the technical courage to keep wanting the ball when a tournament gets tight. That is precisely the quality England have so often lacked at the decisive moment, and it is no accident that the German has built his squad around it.

A Manager Who Wins Things Quickly

The case for Tuchel rests on a simple piece of evidence. He wins, and he tends to win fast. At Chelsea he took over a struggling, expensively assembled squad in January 2021 and lifted the Champions League five months later, beating Manchester City in the final. He has won the German title with Bayern Munich and the French league with Paris Saint-Germain. He is a coach who walks into existing groups of players and quickly extracts more from them than the previous manager could, which is precisely the task England have handed him. He does not have years to build a project. He has a squad of established stars and a single tournament to make them more than the sum of their parts.

That track record is why the Football Association was willing to absorb the symbolism of appointing a German. The decision was criticised in some quarters as an admission that England could not produce its own elite coach, and there is a debate to be had there about the state of English management. Supporters of the appointment would argue the opposite, that hiring the best available manager regardless of passport is exactly the kind of unsentimental, results-first thinking that English football has too often avoided. Tuchel’s job is to prove the pragmatists right, and he has been handed the resources to do it.

A Group With a Familiar Foe

The draw has handed England an opening test loaded with memory. Croatia, their first opponents, are the same nation that knocked them out of the 2018 World Cup semi-final in Moscow, coming from behind to break English hearts in extra time. This Croatia side is older now, built around the evergreen Luka Modric, whose own remarkable story we have told from a refugee hotel to a fifth World Cup at forty. Ghana and Panama complete the group, a pairing England should expect to beat but cannot take lightly in a format where momentum is everything.

Starting against Croatia carries an emotional charge Tuchel will try to neutralise. For the players who were there in 2018, it is a chance for revenge. For Tuchel, it is simply the first of what he hopes will be seven matches, a game to be approached with the same clarity as any other. The question is whether his determinedly unsentimental approach can hold when the history in the stands is anything but.

The German Who Could Rewrite English History

There is a version of this summer that ends with one of the great ironies in English sport. A German manager, from a footballing culture England has spent sixty years measuring itself against and falling short of, lifting the trophy that has defined the country’s sense of failure. If Tuchel pulls it off, the man who caused no English heartbreak of his own would become the one to finally end it, and the old rivalry would acquire a strange and unforgettable new chapter.

If he does not, his 18-month contract simply expires and English football resumes its long argument with itself about why the talent never translates. Either way, the appointment is a fascinating admission from the Football Association, an acceptance that the problem might not be the players at all, but the weight of expectation around them, and that it might take an outsider with no scars to lift it. Tuchel has spent his whole career convincing gifted footballers to play without fear. He has six weeks to do it one more time, for a country that has waited six decades to feel it.

WRITTEN BY

Jarrod

Jarrod Partridge is the Founder of Futbol Chronicle and an accredited journalist with over 30 years of experience following international football. A member of the AIPS International Sports Press Association, Jarrod has covered matches at stadiums around the world, bringing first-hand insight to every match report, player profile, and tactical analysis he writes.

More articles by Jarrod →