The recent failures have left their mark. It is still unclear who will succeed Tuchel – but the name of an old acquaintance keeps coming up.
Thomas Tuchel’s time at FC Bayern is coming to an end.
David Inderlied / DPA
After days of speculation, it is now official: FC Bayern Munich and Thomas Tuchel will go their separate ways at the end of the season. This brings to an end a short interlude that began in March last year when Tuchel succeeded Julian Nagelsmann as Bayern coach.
What seemed like the best possible solution for Bayern at the time – an internationally successful top coach, and a German at that – increasingly turned out to be a collaboration marked by difficulties. Tuchel was able to win the championship, but he was unable to give the team the decisive impetus. The recent series of three lost games confirmed once again that a Bayern coach can afford anything but defeats. What was particularly surprising was the way in which the team’s games slipped away. The lack of ideas in the face of such high-class players was irritating.
Will Tuchel really stay until the end of the season?
Now the club is aiming for a realignment. Officially, Bayern speak of an amicable separation, and Tuchel is quoted as saying that he will give everything to be successful with the team until the end of the season. However, it is also not out of the question that he will vacate his position beforehand and that an interim coach will run the business until the last match day. There is currently no discussion without the name Hansi Flick, once unsuccessful as a German national coach, but winner of the treble as Bayern coach.
So was Thomas Tuchel’s commitment the misunderstanding that critics made it out to be? Blaming the misery solely on the coach is not enough; in some analyses, the players’ contribution to it is hardly taken into account. One can actually ask whether Tuchel, an ascetic character, fits into hedonistic Munich. Or whether he would be better off in a Premier League football laboratory, where he can test out tactical variants such as chemical reactions, isolated from the outside world. He has proven that he is masterful at this very thing at Chelsea FC, the prototype of a football group that has been gutted in terms of its history, with which he won the Champions League in 2021.
The Tuchel lederhosen pics are here and they’re beautiful! pic.twitter.com/c9kgHuFRJP
— Tuchel Cam (@TuchelCam) August 23, 2023
In fact, the photos of Tuchel in traditional Bavarian clothing and with a wheat beer in his hand have an unintentionally comic character. But such criteria quickly turned out to be folklore. The Westphalian Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, for a long time the highly successful CEO of Bayern, who was previously awarded the honorary title of “Loden-Kalle” by the Berlin “TAZ”, was not born wearing lederhosen. Especially since Tuchel initially did not lack the necessary sensitivity when it came to where he ended up. He reported on a conversation with the still influential former president Uli Hoeness, in which he assured him that he would do everything to get the club on track.
The board has also already been replaced
Hoeness would have been happy to hear this. But he did not publicly contribute to Tuchel’s strengthening when he stated on a Bavarian Radio talk show that the dismissal of Tuchel’s predecessor Julian Nagelsmann was obviously a mistake.
It was precisely the elders Hoeness and Rummenigge who intervened when events got out of hand last year. Nagelsmann lacked the necessary seriousness when he went on a skiing holiday immediately after a defeat in Leverkusen. At the end of the season, Bayern also parted ways with CEO Oliver Kahn and sports director Hasan Salihamidzic. At the time, Tuchel’s initial reaction was to be irritated by the separation from the leadership duo. He shouldn’t have been surprised for the first time.
In any case, Tuchel gave the impression that the club was denying the coach the reinforcement in the defensive midfield that he so urgently demanded. When they were able to bring themselves to sign the Portuguese João Palhinha from Fulham FC in the Premier League, the move failed due to the veto of the old employer. Tuchel therefore had to improvise in this key position.
Joshua Kimmich, who likes to take on this role, rarely does it justice at a high level; the same applies to Leon Goretzka. It is therefore hardly surprising that Tuchel got into a conflict with Kimmich; The tensions were evident in the 3-2 defeat in Bochum at the weekend, when Kimmich left the pitch in a state of distress and clashed with Tuchel’s assistant Zsolt Löw.
Tuchel therefore refused to extend the duo’s protection. However, things were completely different with the return of goalkeeper Manuel Neuer, who Tuchel always supported. He did this for good reason: Even with a lot of money, it would not have been possible to get a successor of a similar class internationally, as the previously failed experiment with the Swiss national goalie Yann Sommer, who was not up to Munich’s demands, showed. The fact that Tuchel’s predecessor Julian Nagelsmann can now count on a resurgent Neuer in his new job as German national coach (if he wants to) is not without a certain irony: Nagelsmann had done everything possible to weaken the position of the then injured Neuer.
Tuchel communicates in an idiosyncratic way
Now Tuchel has a special way of communicating his displeasure, and this can be quite irritating. In Dortmund he used measures from the repertoire of black pedagogy when he let the worthy midfielder Nuri Sahin sit in the stands in the 2016 DFB Cup final.
In the 3-0 defeat in Leverkusen, he recently entrusted the 19-year-old Aleksandar Pavlovic with the key position in defensive midfield and ordered Joshua Kimmich to the bench. Although the young man doesn’t make any serious mistakes, a game like this would have needed a professional with experience and charisma. In this way, Tuchel showed the management what he thinks of their personnel policy, even if he recently said that given Pavlovic’s good development, he does not see any need at the moment.
Now his days are numbered. And it is not unlikely that he will vacate his place sooner. But the problems that plague FC Bayern will not disappear overnight even under a successor.