Gareth Southgate brought in the Marines, Thomas Tuchel prefers Pilates

Times

a day ago

What hits you — well, what gently brushes your cheek — about La Camiral Golf & Wellness is its stillness. When sounds come they are just mild departures from the quiet.
A whirr of a golf buggy, the twitter of birds, chirruping insects, a rustle of leaves in the breeze. The music of moneyed relaxation; and from this, England hope to build a soundtrack ending with Sweet Caroline.
Generals show themselves through how they treat their troops and it was fascinating being at this resort near Girona, Spain, to see Thomas Tuchel's version of what Gareth Southgate did eight years ago.
In June 2017, at the start of his stint as permanent England manager, Southgate used an end-of-season camp as a sort of culture ground zero — a chance to bond the squad and instil the values that would sustain it at the following year's World Cup.
Players met in the dressing room at St George's Park and a door sprung open, through which marched representatives from the Royal Marines. The players were told to leave everything, including their phones, and change into fatigues.
They went on a bus all the way to the Royal Marines Commando Training Centre near Lympstone in Devon where they spent two days camping on Woodbury Common and tackling gruelling challenges such as the 'sheep dip', which involved crawling through a submerged tunnel of brown, freezing water. Southgate himself plunged in first.
It was all very Gareth, the combination of men sharing their feelings under the stars in a context as patriotic as hell. It successfully set the tone for a period peaking at the 2018 World Cup in Russia where a new England, an honest, un-glitzy, vulnerable-but-proud younger squad, recaptured the affection of the English public.
The boot camp also helped Southgate choose how his group would be led — by Harry Kane, who the Marines picked out as having the most officer-like quality.
REUTERS/ALBERT GEA
La Camiral is very Thomas Tuchel. Refined, relaxed and overseas — with a decluttered focus on sport. This is a man who likes a yoga retreat and Japanese tea ceremony. He's more a barefoot than a boot camp guy.
But he took England to their retreat in the Pyrenean foothills for the same reason Southgate played soldiers: in a conscious attempt, a year from a World Cup, to establish the relationships and behaviours he thinks necessary for success at a tournament. It's why John Stones, who is rehabilitating an injury is here, and the players going to the Club World Cup were not excused. Being part of the camp was crucial, even if England's match against Andorra on Saturday, in Barcelona, is not.
Tuchel is an unusual mix of personal informality and professional intensity, and the camp reflected that. The work part, involving high-tempo training and heat-testing where players ingested digital pills and strained on exercise bikes, in tents, to the point of exhaustion, made headlines.
But the downtime stuff has been just as important. On Wednesday, the players were given a recovery day which included gentle exercising in the garden of their hotel with Pilates poles. Then they were free to do as they pleased. Several made use of the resort's world-class golf courses (used for Spanish Opens and PGA Tour events), Cole Palmer went for a bike ride, Jordan Henderson, Jude Bellingham and Trent Alexander-Arnold used the outdoor swimming pool.
Eberechi Eze 'spent time just chilling and speaking to family'. There were card games and a PlayStation. Had they been minded to, the players could have used the resort's bird-watching station or fishing pier.
EDDIE KEOGH – THE FA/THE FA VIA GETTY IMAGES
For a technocrat known for tactical detailing of the highest level, Tuchel is perhaps surprisingly fixated on the human side, and for him the camp has been invaluable for observing his group and furthering his own connections with them — often through casual, individual chats, like he enjoyed with Palmer, each sitting on a ball, briefly shooting the breeze.
His ideas around leadership are embodied by Henderson's return to the fold. He sees the 34-year-old midfielder's vocal, outgoing influence as necessary to complement Kane's lead-by-example style and prizes his particular connection with Bellingham. Tuchel is thought to have in mind, as a leadership group for the next year, the quintet of Kane, Henderson, Bellingham, Stones and Bukayo Saka, which adds to the significance of Stones travelling to continue his rehab out here.
The week started with a visit to the Spanish Grand Prix. To observers, Palmer seemed pretty nonchalant (or was it nonplussed) about being there but he claimed he enjoyed himself. 'It was good. I went to the one in Abu Dhabi not long ago. But I fell asleep at that one. This one, I was awake,' he said.
The motor racing was not only a bonding jaunt but part of an attempt to replicate tournament conditions. The World Cup starts exactly a year from Wednesday (June 11) and trips to finals begin with a send-off, so being part of a big public event was seen as mimicking that in a fashion.
Squads have to arrive at tournaments five days before their first game, generally checking into their base camp, preparing there, then moving to the city where they are playing on match day minus one. Accordingly, England spent five days at La Camiral and head to Barcelona on Friday for their meeting with Andorra the following evening. The idea is to have been, as close as possible, in tournament mode.
Wednesday's media day was a conscious replication of this. Players were ferried from their hotel to a close-by external location, accompanied by media officers, just like at finals. Similarly, La Camiral — handpicked by the FA's team operations department — was organised like an England base camp hotel with an emphasis on socialising and eating in outdoor areas, and freedom to roam about the site.
It is not a dissimilar location to the Spa & GolfResort Weimarer Land in Blankenhain used by England during Euro 2024, and the ForRestMix Club in Repino, England's base at the World Cup in Russia in 2018. Being in the open air and feeling able to move around freely are seen as important by the FA's performance team, in staving off stress and boredom in tournaments. 'A mini-base camp' and 'World Cup lite' were two descriptions of what La Camiral has been about.
England stayed at the main hotel on the resort and it was very much Tuchel's vibe. There, ambient piano music plays. On the corridor walls are giant, soothing paintings of woodland. There are Oriental chairs, diffusers, an open-plan atrium filled with natural light, where a red-brick fireplace and artful bookshelves stretch from floor to ceiling over two stories.
In the wellness centre you could book for the 'Yoga & Brunch series'. Apparently each session is aligned with the lunar cycle, offering a unique blend of mindful movement, water rituals and nourishing seasonal food. Maybe Tuchel will come back for a holiday.
Time will tell. If it all goes wrong, the place will be forgotten. But if England end up parading the World Cup, to their fans singing Sweet Caroline, La Camiral, June 2025, will go down as the starting point, the where and zen a journey began.
Andorra v England