Jude Bellingham scored both of England’s goals in a 2–1 extra time win over Norway. It sent the team into the World Cup semi-finals, despite Norwegian opposition as the first goal hit an overhead camera cable in the build-up. Thomas Tuchel (pronounced: Toe-mazs Too-kh-uhl) in a post-match interview, called the win “lucky” and the performance “sloppy”. What his manager said, Bellingham didn’t make it. “Maybe he doesn’t know what it’s like to play in that kind of situation against Erling Haaland, Odegaard, Noosa, Saarloth,” he said.
This was not the first time. Tuchel has previously apologized for describing Bellingham’s on-field behavior as “abhorrent”. “If he smiles, he wins everyone over,” he said. “But sometimes you see the anger, the hunger and the fire, and it comes out in a way that seems a little repulsive, for example, when my mother sits in front of the TV,” calls him in the same breath, “a special boy.”
The German coach later said he had “inadvertently” used the word in his second language. A few months later, transferred while visibly angry, Bellingham got the answer before him: “It’s a decision and he has to accept it,” Tuchel said. “We’re not going to change our decision just because someone waves their hands.”
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Borussia Dortmund’s chief executive, Hans-Joachim Watzke, who worked with Tuchel for two years, summed him up in eight words: “A fantastic coach but a difficult person.”
England head coach Thomas Tuchel talks with Jude Bellingham during the World Cup Round of 16 soccer match between Mexico and England, Sunday, July 5, 2026, in Mexico City. (AP Photo)
At Dortmund, winger Emre More protested during a penalty run; Tuchel told him to shut up, three times, then made him crawl onto the pitch on his hands and knees. The peacock was sold within months.
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Tuchel was sacked just days after Dortmund won the German Cup in 2017, once captains Marcel Schmelzer and Marco Reus distanced themselves from the decision to leave out veteran Nuri Sahin. The trophy didn’t save him. Neither would later win the Champions League at Chelsea, where, according to journalist Simon Phillips, about 70 percent of the squad wanted out when he was sacked fifteen months later.
Both halves of Watzke’s sentence are true, and England appointed him for the former.
Tuchel was in his twenties when a knee injury at SSV Ulm ended his playing career in 1998, having already been released by Stuttgart kickers and Augsburg’s academy before that. Out of football and in need of money, he got an MBA and took a job in a Stuttgart bar, collecting glasses and then mixing cocktails. He would have stayed there if his old Ulm coach, Ralf Rangnick, by then in Stuttgart, hadn’t tracked down where he ended up and offered him a youth-coaching job instead. Tuchel was reluctant until, mid-shift in a bar, he heard that Ulm had been promoted to the Bundesliga without him. “I’ve always wanted to go to the Bundesliga and now I’m living my dream,” he told Die Zeit. He quit shortly after.
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He coached Stuttgart’s youth teams until 2000. In 2004, his under-19 team defeated VFL Bochum in the German Championship. Nothing has changed. Even after Stuttgart did not renew Tuchel’s contract, the academy’s youth chief had already decided against him, reportedly telling a teammate, “I always knew he was a flop.”
He moved on to Augsburg’s under-19 team and by 2009, Mainz 05 had appointed him as head coach, sticking around once as a player and once as a title-winning coach.
England head coach Thomas Tuchel is in action. (file photo)
followed by Dortmund, PSG, Chelsea, Bayern Munich; In his first season at Chelsea, he won the Champions League, defeating Manchester City.
England signed him in October 2024 on an 18-month contract that ran only until this World Cup, then extended until Euro 2028. Philipp Lahm, who captained Bayern Munich under him, wrote in The Athletic that wherever Tuchel has worked, “there always seems to be tension at some point. It’s not about relationships, it’s about tactics.”
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Tuchel has said that England is better for him than at home. “I think we criticize each other a lot in Germany,” he said, “especially with players and coaches.”
In this World Cup he played Cole Palmer, Phil Foden, Harry Maguire and again Trent Alexander-Arnold, preferring tactical size to prestige. Maguire called himself “shocked and gutted” on social media. Tuchel’s explanation was unrealistic: “We are trying to select and build the best possible team, not necessarily the 26 most talented players. Teams win championships.”
There is also a gentler account. Late at PSG, Tuchel found out his cleaner was working extra hours to pay for her son’s heart surgery and paid for it himself. Marcus Bettinelli, who played under him at Chelsea, says that whether you’re a “chef, a bin man or a gardener”, Tuchel asks how your family is doing, small things that sit awkwardly next to Watzke’s “difficult person”, until you admit they’re both seeing the same person.
Bellingham went into Saturday’s exchange saying “all the players have made a very difficult transition.” England are in the semi-finals regardless. Whether the tension between the two men resolves or recurs, as Lahm suggests, the contest will actually answer the question.