The transcendence of Thomas Tuchel

Hooliganism was the thesis, Southgatism was the antithesis – have we reached a glorious maturity?

Photo by Michael Regan – The FA/The FA via Getty Images

In the years between 2016 and 2024, England, and its pseudo-colonies of southern Spain, the Algarve and Pattaya City in Thailand, were embroiled in a toxic romance with a 40-something man from Crawley. He had a croaky voice, a permanently distressed brow, and a fondness for Marks and Spencer Autograph Collection pieces and reconciliatory liberalism. Looking back on it today, even with the revisionist light of Dear England fresh in our minds, Gareth Southgate appears as a never-quite-was; a Kinnockian, Al-Gorian figure. Yet it would be highly unfair to paint him as a bureaucrat who never quite had “the touch” because, when he wanted to, Southgate had the capacity to bring England to its knees – to the edge of sanity, and beyond.

Under Southgate’s prudent “let’s-remember-why-we’re-here-lads” stewardship, England became a rudderless republic of tongue-in-cheek ecstasy. A place where, every couple of years, the collective conscientiousness collapsed in a blaze of froth, flares, flags, improvised transportation methods, and arguments about Jack Grealish. For most of this time it felt like Southgate could not control what he had created, his pleas for calm ignored like an Ikea regional manager on Black Friday.

During tournament time the national mood swung between anarchic, ironic, sentimental, degraded, pig-headed and nostalgic. Emotions fluttered like a pigeon trapped in the back of a lorry. It was a time when England fans lost perspective, lost a grip of the football itself, fell in love with just being “up there”, and inserted parachute rocket flares up their own backsides. Afterwards, they sobered up and demanded a “proper” manager, only to fall in love with Southgate all over again at the next tournament.

And then, he left. Four tournaments, zero trophies, so many memories and so many questions. Brexit was never overturned (as Gareth so clearly wished it might be) but English football was somewhat “back”.

Today, we are in the midst of a rather different English football reality. The team are five games into the World Cup, and only now is the mood beginning to pick up. For the early days of Tuchel’s tournament, the atmosphere was a marked departure from the earnest theology of Southgatism; poised, intent, secular, sober. The beery, Benidorm karaoke madness of “Sweet Caroline” replaced by the wishful, anthemic “Wonderwall”. A chant about Harry Maguire drinking high-strength spirits and having a “massive head” usurped by a TikTok remix of a Sting song. You could level some of this at the tournament itself: the late kick-off times, the uncertainty as to what a Maga World Cup would look like, the sheer scale and size of it all. But you could also look at a relatively unfamiliar defence, the shunning of Cole Palmer, and Tuchel’s cold, clenched-jaw pragmatism. Going into this competition, it felt like we were being asked to suffer.

But then, the Mexico game. It took a punishing, edgy, broken seesaw of a game against a host nation who really believed this was their moment to show English fans what Tuchel does best. Which is pushing, barking, clawing, rolling the dice and never giving in. In the wake of that victory appeared a release of sorts – one which was no doubt exacerbated by tens of millions of giddy, zero-REM hangovers. Within hours, we had our first memes, our first real memories of the tournament: John Stones’ Ocean Beach bicep dancing, Jordan Henderson breaking his wrist in ecstatic ignominy, AI slop videos with Jordan Pickford and Dan Burn as Crusaders, Harry Kane turning into a frog. It is as if a shared mood, an aesthetic, a sound, a glimmer has arrived at last.

The Mexico result hasn’t quite inspired chaos on the Southgate scale, but it does appear to have given the public more license to express their England-ism, their Englishry. Strolling back from the pub through south London in the blue dawn of Monday morning, I heard bus drivers honking their fans in the interminable “dun-dun-dundundundun” beat, and a young man standing aloft through the sunroof of a speeding hatchback on Kennington Lane.

There is a suggestion that now, it might be time to commit to the chaos. The nation’s presence among the big boys in the quarter finals looks suddenly very real. Harry Kane looks very much like a contender in this tournament, Jude Bellingham is quashing the Talksport wars, and Anthony Gordon’s Roadrunner routine is starting to make sense.

The next game against Norway is perhaps when it will really go off, when the lampposts will start to bend, when the shorts will begin to lower in anticipation of the first flare. But standing in front of England is one of its most potent adopted sons, Erling “Braut” Haaland, a player born in the leafy suburbs of Cheshire (during his father’s time at pre-oil money Manchester City), reared on Match of the Day and the George Graham tactics his Dad brought home to the garden, now returning a marauding king.

Overcoming Haaland is as important as overcoming Norway themselves. In front of him lies Mbappe, Yamal, Messi. But somehow they appear less formidable, less imposing, less contextual than a man who would simply find knocking his second home out of the World Cup very funny. Tuchel’s greatest achievement so far has been to knock irony and inferiority out of the England equation. But he is lucky in the way he’s not had to fight some of the same battles his predecessor did.

Southgate, whether he wanted to or not, had to tackle a lot of questions about England, about Englishness; about race and class and hate. He offered strong, yet nuanced statements on a lot of these – becoming the kind of spokesman for a Better Britain that the writers of Dear England wanted to remember him by. Yet it also left him with a lot of detractors both right and left. He was a political manager, and that could often get in the way of footballing matters.

Tuchel does not have to entertain such questions. Part of this is because he’s laid out his stall as a German who doesn’t need to sing the anthem to do his job. But it’s also because English football feels more confident in itself. Some of this can be attributed to the complete decline of tabloid pressure, the lack of a potential “Turniphead” or “dentist’s chair” moment. Beyond that, though, there is something potentially far more profound. The far right have given up on football.

Although the extreme British right wing is highly visible and highly mobile (as evidenced by the chilling “White Man March” in Liverpool last week) they aren’t using football as a recruiting ground so much. Today, British bile now arrives downstream of American culture rather than terrace culture. The Football Lads Alliance has been outflanked by the gaudy, church-infused Unite the Kingdom movement. Goodbye Charlie Bright has become “Remember Charlie Kirk”. The modern football fan bemoans Michael Olise not identifying as English, rather than being English. That’s not to say there aren’t football shirts at Tommy Robinson’s marches, and there aren’t Tommy Robinson fans watching England matches, but the two now seem disjointed at the hip. Indeed, many right-wing X accounts are prone to dropping lines like, “Grown men should be out fighting for their country rather than supporting millionaires kicking a ball around” rather than arguing about who is and isn’t English.

Perhaps this is the final evolution of the “embourgeoisement” of the game, one that started with the hooligans being priced out of the Premier League in the early 1990s. But today, as well as being priced out, they are being drowned out by a loud, all-encompassing, hyper-globalised football culture where every abuse incident is quickly turned into an inspiring Nike campaign and/or a custodial sentence. Today, England can even hire a German manager, and the detractors are confined to the darkest margins of talk radio.

Likely this will change, grimly, if England go out, but it does seem that this England team has transcended the discourse and is now able to express itself as a footballing unit, and not some extension of a troubled identity. If football extremism was the thesis, and Southgatism was the antithesis, the synthesis seems to be that very rare thing in English public life – maturity. Tuchel could well be embarrassed by Haaland on Saturday, he could still end up with a record far inferior to Southgate’s, but there is a sense that many of the battles beyond football have been won. That the team can probably get on with things. That it isn’t the tattoo on a forward’s leg that is the issue, but the forward’s legs themselves. And you’d imagine, that’s exactly the kind of progress Southgate wanted all along.

[Further reading: Football is a losing game]