Of his three previous experiences there remains a glass to the third empty and a glass to the two-thirds full: dismissals of Dortmund in May 2017, Paris SG at the end of December 2020 and Chelsea at the beginning of September 2022, but also a list that begins to expand nicely.
There is especially this ability to bounce back in prestigious clubs just a few months after getting angry with its leaders. The arrival at Bayern made official on Friday is the latest sign that Tuchel's attraction does not suffer in any way from these repeated jolts of the past.
"Tuchel is not interested in marketing, in his image. He is interested in his work, he wants to be judged for his work and only that," says Daniel Meuren, author of a biography on German.
His skills as a technician are clearly not in question at the time of his dismissals: wherever Tuchel (49) has coached, he has achieved convincing results and made his teams play an attractive game.
He has among others a Champions League, a European Super Cup and a Club World Cup with Chelsea (2021), two France league titles (2019 and 2020) with Paris SG and a German Cup with Dortmund (2017).
Thomas Tuchel and the Champions League, won on May 29, 2021 with Chelsea club in Porto © SUSANA VERA / POOL / AFP / Archives
Thomas Tuchel, whose career as a defender was quickly interrupted by injuries, is a fan of blackboard and cuddle therapy with his players. He learned his trade on the job, starting with the youth teams in Stuttgart.
Revealed in the Bundesliga at Mainz (2009-2014), then at Dortmund, his stellar trajectory recalls that of Jürgen Klopp, who spent time with the same clubs before landing at Liverpool and winning, too, the Champions League in 2019.
Talented German generation
The German with the filiform figure, balding head and broad smile seduces with his disarming frankness and biting irony.
But Tuchel's disenchantment with his past managers has also become a constant among the Swabian, one of the figures of the talented generation of German coaches, the latest example of which is... Julian Nagelsmann, the one he replaces on the side of Säbener Strasse on the bench of Bayern.
In Dortmund, after the attack on the team bus before a Champions League quarter-final against Monaco in April 2017, he did not appreciate at all that his leaders agreed to reschedule the match the day after the attack.
Thomas Tuchel (left) and Julian Nagelsmann, in May 2017 when the former was coach of Dortmund and Nagelsmann of Hoffenheim © SASCHA SCHUERMANN / AFP/Archives
At PSG, his relationship with Leonardo, then sporting director, had become conflictual, especially about the transfer window, despite the trophies won and the Champions League final reached in 2020, the best result in the history of the Parisian club in the competition.
A few months later, Tuchel arrived unceremoniously from PSG after a 4-0 win against Strasbourg on December 24, 2020. "I had a Christmas," he summed up.
Tuchel had believed that his trophies accumulated in Paris would protect him, but in the capital, management and supporters blamed him for increasingly frequent rants that threatened the balance of the club.
At Bayern, his relationship with charismatic and omnipresent leaders such as Oliver Kahn (chairman of the board) or Hasan Salihamidzic (sporting director) will be closely scrutinized. It was the latent quarrel between Salihamidzic and Hansi Flick, the man of Bayern's 2020 sextuplet that pushed the coach to leave for the German selection in the summer of 2021.
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