Thomas Tuchel's short tenure as England manager is by design – but is it starting to become a problem?

New York Times

a day ago

So what has Thomas Tuchel learned from England's two exhilarating June fixtures against Andorra and Senegal?
That, as England manager, you're liable to get booed whether you win or lose? That, ultimately, it's really hard to get even the most motivated footballers up for a couple of extremely low wattage games at the end of a long, tiring season? That he's got a whole heap of work to do before the World Cup in exactly a year?
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Or maybe that he would have been better off not taking the job in the first place? There were plenty in the City Ground stands for the broadly dreadful 3-1 defeat to Senegal on Tuesday that would have agreed with him there.
At the end, there was a pretty sad, understandably perfunctory tour around the pitch by the England players to applaud the few fans that had remained. The manager had already been booed down the tunnel, one disgruntled attendee bellowing 'TUCHEL OUT'.
Was he regretting the whole thing? Are the FA regretting the whole thing? Or, perhaps a more nuanced question would be: are they all regretting how they have gone about the whole thing?
Tuchel signed an 18 month contract when he took the job, starting in January this year. At the time, he explained the relatively short-term deal by saying it was 'important for me to have a frame around it because it's a little bit of a step into the unknown for me', and 'to understand that this is something that can really excite me to the fullest.' Aside from deciding whether he fancied it or not, he also said it would help the team to 'focus.'
It's also worth remembering, without wishing to re-litigate one of autumn 2024's more irritating strains of discourse, that Tuchel himself contracted the time he'd have by electing not to start his job until January.
There is a certain logic to the length of the contract. International coaches tend to work in cycles around international tournaments, and this one takes him to the end of the World Cup.
But usually those cycles are at least two years, and a tenure this fleeting is starting to look like more of a problem. The manager will inevitably favour short-term solutions.
Teething problems become outsized because they comprise a bigger proportion of the whole. There's less time to fix things. If it's a longer term project, there's more scope to get away with poor performances like this one, or the one against Andorra.
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If you want to think of it another way, Tuchel has taken charge of four games so far. There are five more World Cup qualifiers. One friendly is already inked in, and let's say there will be another four before the World Cup, assuming England qualify. So that's probably 14 games, for him to go from never managing an international side before, taking on the weight of expectation and nonsense that comes with the England job and succeeding a manager that reached two European Championship finals and a World Cup semi-final, to his own World Cup.
Would you expect a club manager to have things sorted after 14 games? There are different rules, different timescales for international managers, but unless you're Massimo Cellino, it would be absurd to expect results after such a small amount of games.
So England were bad against Senegal. Really bad, in fact. Timid and incoherent in spells, defensively open, lacking in creativity, particularly in the first half.
2 – This was only the second time ever that England had opened the scoring in a home game and then gone on to lose by 2+ goals, after another 1-3 defeat in June 1995 versus Brazil. Collapse. pic.twitter.com/EeOJyuAD0q
— OptaJoe (@OptaJoe) June 10, 2025
It clearly shouldn't be ignored that while England were bad, Senegal were excellent. They were more dynamic, more certain in their movements, more creative, more clinical. The FIFA world rankings put them in 19th place. They are, most definitely, a good team.
After the game, Tuchel asked everyone not to panic. 'We lost a test match,' he told the media. 'We have played three qualification games, we have nine points and and not conceded. We don't go next week to the World Cup. We go in one year.'
He's right. A lot can happen in a year. But the implication there is that those things are going to be good things, and furthermore that things will change.
A year to go then. What things need to change?
One is, it seems pretty clear that it's time to say goodbye, farewell, and thanks for all the caps to some of England's old dependables.
Jordan Henderson started against Andorra, and while you can't draw too many conclusions based on just that game, a broader view tells you that there isn't really any need for him anymore. England's best midfielders are Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham. If you need someone else to do their running, there's Conor Gallagher. If you need someone else to sit, allow them to roam free and pass them the ball, there's Adam Wharton.
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He was phased out by Gareth Southgate and didn't go to Euro 2024, but Tuchel brought him back. Aside from the intangibles of experience, leadership and so forth, which aren't insignificant things — but also not enough on their own — it's hard to see why.
Then there's Kyle Walker. It would be harsh to pick on any one individual from the performance against Senegal, because most of them were bad, but Walker took the spotlight in terms of moments of badness.
He was responsible for Senegal's first goal, slow off the mark to allow Ismaila Sarr to force home. On TV, Roy Keane said Walker was lazy, but that feels slightly unfair: it wasn't so much a case of Walker being able to do something but not wanting to, more wanting to do something and not being able to.
He has clearly declined over the last year, sent out on loan to Milan by Manchester City, who will not be taking him to the Club World Cup. He's not the same player, which isn't a moral failing or even really his fault: he's a 35-year-old full-back whose pace has been one of his key assets. It happens.
There was a harsh contrast with the player he faced most directly, Walker given a fierce chasing for the first hour of the game by Senegal's thrilling young left-back El-Hadji Malick Diouf, who did to him what he did to ageing opponents, once upon a time.
The frustrating thing is that there are plenty of alternatives to Walker, admittedly with question marks over many of them. Reece James has spent a lot of this season — a lot of his career, really — injured. Trent Alexander-Arnold has rarely been especially convincing for England. Tino Livramento is inexperienced. Ben White has made himself unavailable for the national team, although that could change.
But the point remains that Walker is not there because he has to be, because otherwise the cupboard is bare. Tuchel defended Walker after the game, but perhaps in the coming months he will quietly realise that Walker's time has gone, too.
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There are three months before England's next games, a qualifying double header against Andorra and Serbia. Five months before the end of the qualifying campaign, against Albania in November. A year before the World Cup.
It's not a lot of time to fix things. But it is worth remembering that this was by Tuchel and the FA's design.
(Header photo:)