Sometimes Thomas Tuchel would drive home from training in Paris and ask himself this question: what if Neymar is right? What if it’s true that the superstars have their own rules? What if someone like Neymar is allowed to stand at the front and not have to work and press along so that he can gasp for the last, perhaps decisive blow?
Probably nobody knows the answer to this question, except of course Neymar, but he must be considered biased. But the mere fact that Tuchel asks such a question points right into the concrete competitive events of European football. At least with astonishment, maybe even with horror, the continent is looking at this European record – four coaches from the same country in the quarter-finals of the lordly Champions League, that has never happened before.
Hansi Flick (FC Bayern), Thomas Tuchel (now FC Chelsea), Jürgen Klopp (FC Liverpool) and Edin Terzic (Borussia Dortmund) all come from the country of the current Champions League winner. And it would be a serious coaching mistake to take that as a coincidence.
The top coaching job in the country will soon be available. Its cast should set a rapidly rotating carousel in motion
Football can be a funny fellow, sometimes he feels like a weird volte, and he is happy when everyone falls for it. A trend !, a trend !, the experts call out when there are only draws on two match days and the goals are all counterattacked. This kind of trend usually lasts until two weeks later there are only home wins where the goals are almost all due to dominant play. But European football should get used to the German coaching trend, because it was only a good six months ago that an almost identical phenomenon was discussed. At the Champions League tournament in Lisbon you met three German coaches on the benches of the four best teams: Flick, Tuchel (then Paris) and Julian Nagelsmann from Leipzig.
The success of the German coaches falls precisely at the time when the top coaching job in the country will soon be vacant, that of the national coach, and if this job should be filled by the top club coach in the country (Flick), a coaching carousel would get underway in this country would have nothing more in common with this historic vehicle, which twitched across the country for years and made Ewald Lienen and Friedhelm Funkel jump up and down everywhere.
In German football, a new type of top-class coach has developed, who started out as nerdy idealists in the niches and / or in the junior segment, and then over the years became crisp pragmatists, but still retained their spirit of innovation. Tuchel would not allow Neymar to stay in front today either – but he would give him a lot more freedom than a coach from Mainz 05, which he, like Jürgen Klopp, was once.
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