Nationality takes backseat as German steers English football ship
The latest head coach of the England national men's team, Thomas Tuchel, speaks at a media briefing at Wembley Stadium, London, U.K., Oct. 16, 2024. (EPA Photo)


The question was bound to arise at Thomas Tuchel's first news conference as England's newly appointed head coach.

When asked on Wednesday about fans who might have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team, the German replied with a laugh, "I’m sorry, I just have a German passport." He went on to express his admiration for English football and the country itself, assuring, "I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country."

The intense rivalry between England and Germany looms large, and Tuchel's nationality may become a point of contention if he fails to deliver for a nation that hasn’t celebrated a men’s trophy since 1966.

However, his appointment as England’s third foreign coach reflects a growing trend among top football nations – abandoning the traditional belief that national teams must be led by one of their own.

Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA World Rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner that has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s football federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.

"The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply," said German football researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book, Crossing the Line?, historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. "It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to understand your methods."

Not everyone agrees.

English football author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was "an admission of failure" for a major football nation to have a coach from a different country.

"Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players," said Wilson, whose books include Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.

"To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players," he said, "I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that."

That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel's appointment with the provocative headline, "A Dark Day for England."

While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they remain a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France has had only Frenchmen since 1975.

Every World Cup-winning team since the first tournament in 1930 has been coached by a native of that country. The same is true for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, although Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.

Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerback, 76, coached his native Sweden from 2000 to 2009 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland, and Norway.

"I couldn’t say I felt any big difference," Lagerback told The Associated Press (AP). "I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams."

For Lagerback, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country included language difficulties and the need to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African nation at the World Cup.

Otherwise, he said, "it depends on the results" – and Lagerback is remembered fondly in Iceland after leading the country to Euro 2016, its first international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.

Lagerback pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in football powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy, and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.

Portugal, for the first time, looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried – and ultimately failed – to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian Football Federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying, "It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian; there’s no prejudice about nationality."

The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.

The English Football Association had no qualms about making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), believing he was simply the best available coach on the market.

Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least has previous experience working in English football – he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea – and he also speaks better English.

That won’t satisfy all the naysayers, though.

"Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager," Tuchel said.