Rebuilding Life: Thomas Tuchel’s India Retreat

There was a time not so long ago when Thomas Tuchel needed to get away. A ‘restart’, he called it. 

We are going back to October 2022, a month after his sacking at Chelsea collided with the end of his marriage, and tornadoes were tearing through his mind. His solution was to board a flight to India.

For three weeks he stayed on the Malabar coast, immersed in the tropical beauty of Kerala at the Sitaram Beach Retreat.

What followed was a cleanse almost as intense as the man himself. There were hours of meditation, no television, and a heavy focus on diet, routine and sleep, mostly under the direct supervision of a spiritual healer named Dr Vignesh Devraj.

Tuchel found it difficult at first. Soon after his arrival he entered a six-day period where sugar was off-limits and that meant no chocolate, which he loves, or anything else he found particularly appetising. For the initial 72 hours, he was climbing up the walls of his wood-lined chalet, grumpy and irritable – it was not dissimilar to what his players witnessed in the dying days of his Chelsea reign.

We know this because he was willingly filmed having a chat with his healer that was unlike most you might see from an elite football manager. The footage runs for 41 minutes and is tucked away on YouTube, showing Tuchel reclined in an unbuttoned shirt, wearing the disposition of a man who had momentarily found peace. He shared his vulnerabilities far more liberally than the resort shared sugar.

‘I am quite okay with myself,’ he said towards the end of the recording. ‘For me it was kind of a ceremony to close things but also to restart things. I feel good right now.’

The fact the conversation was used to promote the resort is neither here nor there. What it subtly showcased was the volume of traffic within the head of England’s new hope – his thoughts and themes charged around, jostling for exit roads.

One moment he reflected on the insecurities he has felt in receipt of criticism. The next he detailed the jogs he has regularly embarked on after midnight to dilute the stresses of his career, before offering a soft lament that his gut instincts too often lose to his brain in a never-ending scuffle.

To see Tuchel in that unguarded mode is to view a cluttered picture of what it means to control a club, or rather how he chooses to go about his work.

Like so many in his gig, he casts an eye in all directions – he would fixate on which players tended to clear their own plates after lunch. Then he would watch out for who cut corners in the recovery sessions and who was rude to staff. Much of this bordered on managerial patter, but he was quickly on a long roll and getting animated.

When is the right time, he pondered, to step in and stop private squabbles between players in a squad? Too short and you stifle the competitive energy; too long and cliques form. How much can you ever teach a guy like Thiago Silva about defending? Why was it that a set-piece maestro could execute perfect free-kicks but had no idea how to explain his method to youth-teamers?

Detail after detail, tactics wrapped in psychology wrapped in pressure, Tuchel’s mind was just whirring and turning and rattling through the minutiae.

Doubtless, it is the kind of landscape that football’s alpha coaches all handle. But they rarely talk with as much candour as Tuchel did and his place beneath a canopy of tropical trees illustrated how taxing such a life can be. It was telling that he described himself as a ‘patient’, a man in need of a reset after his latest immersion in the business of being Thomas Tuchel.

That is the deal with him, of course. You get the genius of a Champions League winner, a master tactician, and an individual whose career timeline is a tale of sprinting until he breaks. Or a club breaks up with him. He never lasts for long in a job and the video, perhaps inadvertently, fuelled our theories for why that is.

All the questions he asks, all that scrutiny he applies to the cogs, all those late-night runs, invite thoughts about life for anyone around him. Put bluntly, if he exhausts himself, then spare some compassion for folk in his professional orbit.

It has been well-documented since long before his appointment by the FA that they have hired a firebrand; a figure whose successes always come quickly and are followed by cascading tensions and rows. A gifted artist who is forever kicking over the easel or furious with his brushes. It happened at Borussia Dortmund, at PSG, at Chelsea and at Bayern Munich, when he burst through the stitches of what he had pieced back together in India.

His intensity works until it doesn’t. He drove Thomas Kimmich to distraction with his positional meddling at Bayern. Irritated that Emre Mor once questioned his methods at Dortmund, Tuchel ordered him to crawl on his hands and knees across the training pitch, repeatedly shouting ‘shut your mouth’ if he grumbled. The meeting of his rigour and Kylian Mbappe’s ego in Paris didn’t work out and not many shed tears when he left Stamford Bridge, either – he nagged incessantly.

Tuchel’s micro-management, his expectations for the exact delivery of his blueprints, have stuffed cabinets with trophies and could just as easily fill a retreat in Kerala with the exasperated men who helped win them. That can be the cost of doing business with smart, demanding people.

And it’s why I believe England will be a great fit for him, even if I side with the idea that international sport should be about the best of ours against the best of yours.

We often perceive these moves of the big-beast managers away from club football as a risky pivot – they have too little opportunity to impart what they have. Time is their enemy. With Tuchel, the opposite feels true, because England stand to receive the best bits and face less exposure to his flames.

They get the tactical brain, one that has won trophies in his first season at his past three clubs, and none of the grating against his higher-ups whenever a transfer window is in view. The squad will get his intensity in a forum where it is most needed, like a World Cup, and none of the day-to-day melodrama that he brought to his clubs. Players get a breather from him and, just as crucially, he gets a breather from them.

Tuchel himself joked about the length of his 18-month contract and we have all wondered about the oddity of it starting in January. But maybe that is the smartest line in the entire contract – long enough for him to get that second star and not long enough for him to burn down Wembley.

Suffice to say it might all end a couple of years from now in the shadow of a palm tree, with Tuchel opening up to a healer on another experience that left him shattered.

But he just might be the brilliant, nagging agitator who chases the footballers of England over the line, waving a meticulously measured stick and counting dirty plates along the way.

Obscene Ryder Cup prices hand Europe the edge

A penny for Patrick Cantlay’s thoughts. A year after his hat-based grumbles about players not being paid at the Ryder Cup, those dopey souls responsible for overseeing the US team, the PGA of America, have this week set the minimum ticket price for next year’s match in New York at an obscene $750. 

While I enjoy the fact that the Cup is the one arena of the game where the stinking rich play for free, I’m not convinced rubbing the golfer’s faces in it with shameless profiteering will ease tensions. 

Having bungled their way to appointing Keegan Bradley as captain when he might still qualify to play, the PGA of America now risk flooding Bethpage Black with more from the corporate class. 

Luke Donald’s Europeans, braced for a fiery atmosphere, would be entitled to watch these acts of self-sabotage and consider themselves one-up before a ball has been hit.

Glazers laughing from across the Atlantic 

If you listen carefully at Old Trafford you might just hear the guffawing from the Glazer family as it carries across the Atlantic. 

Firms usually spend fortunes to manage their PR – they went the other way by accepting a couple of billion from Sir Jim Ratcliffe and he has been blocking all of the brown stuff with his face ever since. 

Best deal they’ve done in years.