What’s going on with Mauricio Pochettino, Thomas Tuchel, and Julian Nagelsman all coaching national teams?

On Wednesday, October 23, the English Football Association introduced Thomas Tuchel as the next manager of the England men’s national team. This was big news, partly because freaking out over the England men’s national team is one of the traditional profit centers of the British media economy,¹Typical of this level-headed approach, The Daily Mail went with “A DARK DAY FOR ENGLAND: Three Lions gamble on A GERMAN” to headline its coverage of the Tuchel news. and partly because England are quite good and a new coach for them is a big deal. 

Tuchel will coach his first England game against Greece Thursday in the UEFA Nations League, and when he does he will also become the latest in what is officially a trend of highly accomplished club managers to taking charge of a men’s national teams.²Rule of threes in journalism. The Tuchel era in England follows Mauricio Pochettino’s hiring as the United States men’s national team coach and Julian Nagelsman’s short-term gig with the Germany becoming a long-term appointment earlier this year.

What’s noteworthy about three big-name club managers taking on national team jobs is the contrast to the profile of a coach that is currently dominating international tournaments. In slightly ungenerous terms, the most successful international coaches of the past half-decade or so have been competent nice guys who happened to be around at the right time.

At England, Tuchel will be replacing Gareth Southgate, who spent three years coaching the Under-21 team before being promoted to take charge of the senior team in 2016 when Sam Allardyce fell victim to one of the stupidest corruption stings ever recorded. Despite his only senior management experience coming from a relatively brief stint in charge of Middlesbrough, Southgate oversaw England’s most successful period since the invention of the color television, reaching two European Championship finals and a World Cup semifinal.

Earlier this summer, Southgate’s last action as England manager was losing one of those two European Championship finals to Spain — who in turn are currently coached by someone who spent most of his career managing the federation’s youth programs. Luis de la Fuente spent nearly a full decade coaching Spanish youth national teams until 2022 when in the wake of Spain’s World Cup round of 16 exit to Morocco, the federation decided it was sick of Luis Enrique’s whole deal.

Meanwhile in South America, Lionel Messi’s Argentina finally achieved their seemingly never ending quest for international glory with Lionel Scaloni as manager. Scaloni had quite literally never coached an adult professional soccer game before taking charge of La Albiceleste in 2018. But despite Diego Maradona complaining that Scaloni “couldn’t direct traffic” upon his hiring,³Although with all due respect to the legend, Diego Maradona calling someone unqualified to take charge of the Argentinian men’s national team is very much a “takes one to know one” type of situation. he managed Argentina to back-to-back Copas America titles and a World Cup in the past six years — three consecutive major international trophies after a 28-year drought.

In total, four of the five major international competitions this decade have been won by managers with very short resumes. Plus managers like Southgate or Colombia’s Néstor Lorenzo⁴Lorenzo made a career by following legendary South American journeyman manager José Pékerman around for most of the 2010s before taking charge of Colombia as just his second head coaching role and leading them on a 28-match unbeaten run.  have been broadly successful without quite lifting a trophy. 

After a period where international soccer has largely been defined by distinctly smaller-than-life managers, Tuchel’s England will kick off what firmly feels like a new era for international coaching. So what’s going on?

From the perspective of the federations, the decision to hire a prestigious manager is relatively straightforward. Unlike every other team in the world, an international team can’t go to the transfer market to fill a position of need. England had a lot of issues at last summer’s European Championships, but a significant one was the fact that there were no healthy left-footed English left backs. If you can’t buy better players, and you are a relatively rich federation,⁵The United States Soccer Federation is actually kind of broke, but the United States is a rich country, with a growing number of rich people who care about soccer. Some of those rich people donated $60 million to the USSF, which reportedly was a significant reason it had the funding to hire Pochettino you might be tempted to make the bet that paying more for a better coach can push you past more talented teams.

It’s a slightly more awkward fit from the coach’s perspective. Modern soccer coaches are obsessive control freaks, tending to use systems that require hours of repetition on the training field over the course of months. That kind of thing is largely impossible in international soccer, where players fly into camp every two months or so for maybe three practice sessions and a couple of games. International soccer feels incongruous with how Tuchel, Pochetino and Nagelsmann operate. 

However, club soccer might be a little less of a clean fit for a particular brand of obsessiveness than it once was. The very biggest clubs in Europe are now major content creators, for lack of a better term. As a manager for Bayern Munich or Paris Saint-Germain or Manchester United, you are responsible not only for winning soccer games but also being the main face of the ever-growing swarm of press conference-generated outrage cycles and transfer rumors and general internet yelling that grow the club’s global brand and support the bottom line. 

If what you really care about is coaching a soccer team and meticulously detailing gameplans for the next opponent, the more extracurricular parts of modern club management might be a little grating. And if your most recent experience in club management ended with your firing for largely political reasons,⁶Nagelsmann was fired while having an okay-to-pretty-good first season at Bayern Munich, allegedly because upper management thought it was unprofessional he skateboarded to training. Tuchel was basically miserable for the entire time he was Bayern coach. Pochettino’s last two bosses were Todd Boehly, a slightly insane private equity guy, and a literal monarch. you might be interested in a job that is purely coaching. You might even be intrigued by the challenge of assembling a roster under the constraints of international football. 

As with almost everything in modern soccer, it can be helpful to think about Marcello Bielsa here, who is both illustrative of this trend and a little bit his own thing. Bielsa is now coaching Uruguay, which is his third international gig after taking charge of his native Argentina in the early 2000s and Chile at the end of that decade. 

So Bielsa is maybe a little more open to international coaching in general, but the fact that he continues to return to national team jobs does illustrate why this younger generation of elite European managers are following in his footsteps. 

Bielsa is notoriously focussed in his training and preparation methods. His training sessions involve something called “Murder Ball,” which is basically a particularly intense form of practice game designed to instill the nonstop tactical alertness and physical fitness he wants from his teams. 

He’s also a big time opposition research freak. He once famously responded to allegations that he was spying on Frank Lampard’s Derby County training sessions by holding a presentation in which he demonstrated the extent to which he had detailed everything about every single opposing team in the Championship. When he was coaching in Argentina, he didn’t speak to his team for two days after a game because he was watching hour upon hour of their next matchup to prepare a gameplan. 

Marcello Bielsa teams tend to be very, very good — for a couple of years. Then everyone becomes physically and emotionally exhausted, results drop off, and he either resigns or is fired. 

In international soccer, the whole experience is more spread out, and Bielsa has tended to hold onto jobs for longer. Bielsa’s dedication to preparing a bespoke gameplan for each opponent is also much more manageable in the context where he is responsible for preparing for two teams at a time with a long lead-up, rather than managing up to three games a week in an increasingly crowded European club calendar.

Bielsa is in many ways the godfather of modern soccer. So if he’s always been open to applying his methods to a national team, why shouldn’t everyone else be? 

The big question, of course, is if any of this will work. England are desperate for a men’s international trophy, something they haven’t managed since before color TV. Germany embarrassed themselves to varying degrees at the last two World Cups. The United States has an opportunity to alter the course of the sport in the country if they are somewhere between competent and exciting when they host the 2026 World Cup.

Distilling managerial success in the international game can feel a bit alchemical, in that achievement as an international manager is largely defined by a sequence of the three⁷Worst case to seven⁸Best case — until the 2026 World Cup where it might be up to eight! games you manage at a given major international tournament. Trying to figure out what styles or tactics work from that small a set of games is more or less guessing. 

Maybe it is true that with limited time together, what modern international teams really need is a de la Fuente or a Scaloni: a tactically sound nice guy who will make everyone happy and motivated.

But it’s also possible that in the randomness that is international soccer, the margins are slim enough that coaching really does matter, and that the kind of coach who can lead a successful Champions League campaign can be the difference between a pretty good national team and a great one.