Thomas Tuchel has drawn a line around one small but revealing part of the job: he will not sing the national anthem when England face Croatia in their opening game in Group L in Dallas on Thursday. He says he knows the words. He says they are not so difficult. But when the music starts, he still feels too shy to join in.
That matters because Tuchel is stepping into one of the most loaded jobs in football at a time when every gesture is read for meaning. England supporters are not only watching for the result against Croatia; they are watching the man leading them, a coach who is not from England and who does not approach the role in the same way Gareth Southgate did.
Southgate almost treated the England job as a higher calling. He spoke about politics. He behaved like a man trying to heal the nation. He wrote an open letter about society’s divisions, and that mood followed him so closely that Joseph Fiennes played him in the stage and television versions of Dear England. Tuchel, by contrast, is England’s head coach rather than manager, and he is not interested in talking about politics.
That difference is not cosmetic. Southgate’s England was built around a public language of unity, reflection and national feeling. Tuchel comes out of the German pressing school as a young coach, where the emphasis was on structure, pressure and detail. In practical terms, that usually means less talk about meaning and more talk about mechanisms: where the team closes space, how it moves the ball, and how the game is controlled. It is a different grammar for the same shirt.
John McDermott has tried to explain why Tuchel still fits the job. He said Tuchel is almost Latin in the way he speaks, with warmth and tactileness, and that he comes alive when he is speaking about the team, the players and the games. That picture sits alongside a more complicated record. Tuchel did not click with the French media when he managed Paris Saint-Germain, has a reputation for being a hothead in Germany and fell out with Joshua Kimmich at Bayern Munich.
Even so, the immediate point is not his history but his purpose. Tuchel wants to bring an end to England’s 60 years of hurt this summer, and he will try to do it without pretending to be someone else. He is leading England without an English background, without the anthem ritual and without Southgate’s political tone, which leaves a simple test in place before Croatia arrive on Thursday: whether his distance from the old script becomes a weakness, or the very reason England can finally move past it.
