The Athletic FC: England hire Tuchel – a good call? Plus: USMNT’s wake-up call, Messi treble

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Guten Tag! England are going German. Thomas Tuchel has entered the Three Lions’ den. Let’s hope they don’t devour him.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Tuchel lands England job

🤬 Cantona’s scathing Man Utd attack

🇺🇸 Tough loss for Poch, Messi treble

🤔 Should football scrap offsides?

Tuchel thunderbolt: England hire elite club coach in shock move

England! Abandon dreams of Pep Guardiola. Your new national manager is Bayern Munich alumni — but it’s not the man from Santpedor.

This morning, the Football Association confirmed Thomas Tuchel as the 21st England boss. He’ll be unveiled at a press conference at 1.30pm UK time (8.30am ET). Hiring Gareth Southgate’s successor appeared to go from 0-60 overnight — but little did we know.

Here’s what today’s FA’s announcement revealed:

• Tuchel actually signed his contract on October 8. That’s fully eight days ago. He and the FA did extraordinarily well to keep the news under wraps.
• He’ll begin work on January 1, assisted by Anthony Barry who was with him at Chelsea and Bayern.
• Lee Carsley will continue as caretaker in the interim, before reverting to the under-21s.

The deal with Tuchel and the chatter — short-lived, admittedly — about the FA courting Guardiola indicates a certain vision: of the job passing to a candidate from coaching’s top shelf. Southgate was a federation man. Tuchel is the pursuit of something sexier, a governing body breaking out of its comfort zone.

How much more sexy the football proves to be remains to be seen but his CV dispels any doubt about big-time experience: Borussia Dortmund, Paris Saint-Germain, Chelsea and Bayern across a nine-year period. England can reasonably class him as elite.

Which, frankly, Carsley wasn’t. When last week he a) rashly tried to field a Harlem Globetrotters-style team and b) tied himself in knots attempting to clarify whether he wanted the role full time, promoting from within lost its credibility. It now turns out that the deed of appointing Tuchel was already done. Looking back at Carsley’s comments, it seems to explain a lot.

Part of a trend?

Tuchel with the Champions League trophy (Susan Vera – Pool/Getty Images)

With Mauricio Pochettino managing the USMNT, and the possibility that Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp will be sucked into international posts at some point, we’re about to find out how those at the top of the European club game slot into a different code of management.

Tuchel has deep reserves of confidence and flexibility in his tactics: three at the back at Chelsea, 4-2-3-1 more regularly at Bayern, and up to six formation changes in a match at Mainz. He turned Chelsea into Champions League winners in a near-implausible timeframe — but there were conflicts at his clubs and he failed to absolutely kill it with any of them; not like, say, Guardiola at City.

Manchester United spoke with him in the summer, when they were considering putting Erik ten Hag out of his misery, but Tuchel wasn’t keen. His enthusiasm for handling England makes me think: is international work the in-vogue opportunity? Does it appeal to someone who has done a tour of the elite club scene, where patience is thin and standards are through the roof? Does a change of scene reset and renew?

Foreign Focus

England have employed two foreign managers before: Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello. There are people out there — The Athletic’s Jack Pitt-Brooke among them — who think the England boss should be English. Jack’s thoughtful column focused on Guardiola, but his opinion applies to Tuchel too.

Tuchel is German, and the rivalry between England and Germany is one of international football’s great faultlines, infused with history and politics. Time was when this would not have happened but football has never been more cosmopolitan, or more focused on the prize.

Which, ultimately, is where the FA stands on Tuchel. His deal includes a bonus for lifting the 2026 World Cup. Winning is the only consideration here. And as with every one of his previous employers, Tuchel will be fine if he does.

News round-up

• Reports in Sweden have linked Kylian Mbappe to an alleged rape in a Stockholm hotel. A lawyer for the Real Madrid forward said Mbappe, who described the claims as “fake news” on X, had “nothing to be reproached for”. Police are investigating.
• FIFA’s Club World Cup cannot catch a break. La Liga president Javier Tebas — an outspoken character at the best of times — has urged the governing body to scrap the tournament, insisting it is “not needed by the players, the clubs or FIFA“. FIFA has still not sold broadcast rights for next summer’s tournament. Perhaps it should take the hint.
• The Spanish Football Federation recently punished Atletico Madrid with a partial stadium closure and a hefty fine following the controversy at last month’s city derby with Real Madrid. Now a government body is recommending their ground be closed completely for 15 days. We didn’t think they’d heard the end of it.
• Liverpool’s 17-year-old midfielder Trey Nyoni has signed his first professional deal at Anfield. He’s training regularly with Arne Slot’s senior squad and made the bench for their Champions League win over Bologna on October 2. Remember the name, etc.

USMNT’s reality check: Defeat to Mexico shows Pochettino how much work remains 

Just in case Tuchel thinks life in the international lane is more serene than the whirlwind of club land, here’s Pochettino to tell him otherwise.

In fairness, nobody told Pochettino that coaching the USMNT was going to be easy and it got a little more real last night in a comprehensive 2-0 defeat to Mexico.

There was mitigation for the loss. Mexico are better opposition than Panama, the team the U.S. beat in Poch’s first game on Saturday. They’ve got Raul Jimenez, who doesn’t only do sensual backheel assists but can also pull banging free kicks from his sleeve (above). A word, too, for Andres Guardado, whose final Mexico appearance took him to 182 caps. Some shift.

Pochettino was short of bodies, with Christian Pulisic and other big names missing. Toulouse’s Mark McKenzie succumbed to a groin strain in the warm-up too. The stats weren’t pretty: five shots on goal to Mexico’s 17, and only one on target. There’s a mountain to climb and it’s going to be gradual. Reminding people of that might not be a bad thing.

Cool runnings, meanwhile, for Poch’s home nation. Lionel Messi drilled in a hat-trick as Argentina beat Bolivia 6-0 in World Cup qualifying. That’s 112 international goals for him now (check out the archetypal jinking run and power on his third finish, below). “I feel like a kid,” Messi, 37, said. Stop making us all feel old, pal.

Fergie fallout: Ending role at United is ‘scandalous’, says Cantona

I’m not for one moment doubting, as Adam Crafton reported, that Manchester United ending Sir Alex Ferguson’s paid ambassadorial role at Old Trafford was amicable. Ferguson seems like the philosophical sort.

All the same, my guess was that he’d be mildly disappointed. And I did wonder if others who worship him might be put out by the news, or worse.

Lo and behold, along came wordsmith Eric Cantona with a two-footed lunge. The singular Frenchman — he of seagulls and trawlers fame — fired up Instagram and posted: “Sir Alex Ferguson should be able to do anything he wants at the club until the day he dies. Such a lack of respect. It’s totally scandalous.”

He added that he would “throw them all in a big bag of s***”, which, in terms of the Cantona brand, was a bit more like it. And therein lay the risk for part-owner INEOS. It might need to make cuts. It might have questioned if Ferguson’s multi-million-pound package was value for money. But ditching him is dangerously close to shooting Bambi — a grievance for fans and critics to dredge up anytime INEOS is under the cosh.

• Adam’s given the lowdown on how he broke the Ferguson story and why INEOS took this step on The Athletic FC podcast.

Show Viz

Heads up for another cool Mark Carey graphic. If you want to know where your Premier League side is creating chances from, this grid tells you, with the darkest squares denoting the highest levels of productivity.

The instinctive reaction to the Arsenal graphic? Bukayo Saka must be doing what he does by delivering passes from the right half-space, an area Arsenal target. But Mark picked up on two other player-specific conclusions too:

• Chelsea’s effectiveness in central positions is indicative of Cole Palmer (five assists and 39 shot-creating actions) running the show at No 10.
• And an even spread at Liverpool points to the fact that, in Mark’s words, “their creativity comes from all angles”. Slot is onto something.

Around The Athletic FC

• Sipke Hulshoff is Liverpool’s assistant coach. He keeps out of the spotlight at Anfield — so much so that I had to find a picture of him to see what he looked like. Andy Jones has put together a profile of Slot’s sidekick.
• Premier League teams have less than two years before they are banned from using bookmakers as front-of-shirt sponsors. Betting companies have been the go-to option for a long time — so how will clubs adapt and where will they find comparative money?
• My takeaway from Jordan Campbell’s read on Kai Havertz is that the Arsenal forward has succeeded in doing something difficult: turning attitudes around when people initially class you as a waste of money. These days I can’t imagine Arsenal without him.
• Ali Ahmed helped Canada beat Panama with a first-half assist yesterday. Under Jesse Marsch, they’re becoming tough to beat. You might have missed this interview with Vancouver Whitecaps’ Ahmed. Europe might be beckoning him. Lock up your training grounds.
• Most clicked in yesterday’s TAFC: my old article on Marcelo Bielsa’s ‘murderball’ routine. Gracias. His Uruguay side drew 0-0 with Ecuador last night. They cannot buy a goal at the moment.

Ask Phil

For those who don’t know much about field hockey (and I must confess…), the sport has no offside rule. It gave up on it in 1998.

The consequence, reader Simon R tells me, was more entertaining and addictive action — and on that basis, he called for a serious discussion about abolishing the offside rule in football.

My immediate thought is I can see the appeal. Offside is the cause of dispute after dispute. The Premier League’s latest ruse for avoiding duff decisions is the introduction of a semi-automated offside system (although its plan to introduce it this season is stuck in the long grass, helpfully).

And I agree, as Simon R says, that over time, teams would adapt to goal-hanging and so on. The game coped with the arrival of the backpass rule in the 1990s. More than that, it’s better for it.

But here’s the issue: offside can’t be phased out in stages. You either have it or you don’t. Try telling highly strung, overworked coaches that they have to adapt established tactics to embrace a fairly seismic change to the laws. Offside calls can drive them mad but I see no appetite for abolition.

(Top picture: Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)