Germans don’t really do irony, it is often said. But reactions to the news that Thomas Tuchel has been appointed England manager have been so steeped in caustic ribaldry to suggest they understand it very well.
“No other football nation has caused England more pain in recent decades than Germany,” Sven Haist, the London-based sports correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, pointed out. Now the nation’s longing for the ultimate crown of the sport “is supposed to be fulfilled by – of all people – a German coach”.
Bild went in even harder. “The motherland of football is getting a German Papa. Astounding!” wrote the tabloid’s leading football commentator, Matthias Brügelmann, appearing to rub salt into the wounds of the Daily Mail’s anguish, expressed on its back page on Wednesday, as: “A dark day for England [as] Three Lions gamble on a GERMAN.” Such a mean, even xenophobic tone should act as the only warning signal Tuchel needs as to the kind of ferocious treatment he can expect from the UK tabloids, wrote Der Spiegel, pointing out that they had “unloaded all their anger on him even before his first game”.
But the facts are on the table. And there’s really not much Germans like more than to call a spade a spade. “Since 1966 – since 1966!!! – the proud football nation has been waiting for a title, and sorry, even the World Cup victory was only possible because the referee made a mistake about the Wembley goal,” Brügelmann needled further. “Soon it will have been 60 years that they’ve been without a title. In that time we’ve been World Cup holders three times, and European Cup holders three times. Ouch.” The Football Association’s “sense of despair”, Brügelmann surmised, “must be massive if they are admitting that now it’s only a German who is able to come to their aid.”
If England managed to win the World Cup under Tuchel he would become invincible. It is one of the main reasons, Bild suggested, that “this job is immensely appealing to him”, and is maybe the reason why he’s prepared to take a wage that’s less than half of what he earned during his brief, unhappy spell as head coach of Bayern Munich.
There has been smirking over some of the more generous English newspaper takes: the Daily Star’s “A German in charge of the England team? At least we’ll be sure to win the penalties”; or the Sun welcoming a “Tuch of class” and stating: “Fußball kommt nach Hause.” But German commentators have not hidden how bemused they are by the sense of cultural betrayal that some English fans clearly feel is being carried out against them. In short, those unhappy lot, wrote Spiegel, perceive Tuchel to be a “mercenary, with no connection to the fans and players” who’ll “make England the laughing stock of the world”.
Then again, “a World Cup triumph, 60 years after the victory at Wembley, would probably be enough to change even the Daily Mail’s opinion”, the Süddeutsche Zeitung believes. A scenario that even the most maliciously gleeful Germans might find too kitschy to handle is posed by Bild’s mischievous Brügelmann. “Tuchel leads England into its first World Cup final since 1966 – and [Julian] Nagelsmann’s Germany wins the title on penalties because the last England kick bounces off the bottom of the crossbar on to the line and out. Deal?” he wrote.
Brügelmann perhaps expresses the sentiments of the entire German nation by wishing his compatriot “Good luck … just not too much of it,” as he looks to ready England for 2026. As the Süddeutsche’s Haist puts it: “The punchline would be if the German Thomas Tuchel actually led the English to the throne”.
