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THOMAS TUCHEL

Be a rule-breaker

Dembélé and adaptability / The Rulebreaker Society / Forget success / Power of small rituals / Talent, aesthetics, and Nietzsche / Segmenting motivation / Mistakes don’t exist / The Lemon Tart and curiosity

Ousmane Dembélé’s first touch was outstanding. He trapped the ball brilliantly, lifting his left leg above waist height and killing it dead. He was on the halfway line, and his next move was to knock it down the touchline and run past his marker to pick it up again. He was approaching the corner of the penalty area, at speed, when he did it again. He played the ball to the defender’s left, and ran around the other side – known in France as a grand pont, a big bridge – to leave his poor marker flustered and floundering. But would there be an end product? Dembélé had just run 50 yards at speed and beaten two men. He looked up and fizzed in the most enticing cross imaginable: at perfect velocity and height, eight yards from goal, a little too far for the goalkeeper to reach.

His team-mate Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang only needed a small jump to power his header into the goal. The move had taken only eight seconds. In that time, you could see just how devastating Dembélé could be. This was February 2017, and Aubameyang had just scored the winning goal in Borussia Dortmund’s win over RB Leipzig.

Dembélé: you may remember his name. He was the player I selected for the Guardian’s ‘Next Generation’ feature back in 2014. At that time, he had yet to make an appearance for his club, Rennes. I was told that this 17-year-old boy, as he was then, had a natural gift for dribbling; that he did so with grace, agility, lightness, fluidity and ease. In some ways, that run-and-cross against RB Leipzig could not have been more appropriate. His unpredictable way of playing is the antithesis of modern football.

I wanted to speak to Dembélé, but Borussia Dortmund was keen to protect its talent. Instead, my colleagues at French TV station BeIN Sports sat down with him for an interview in February 2017 and, on my behalf, asked how he felt when he was named in the Guardian’s ‘Next Generation’. ‘I don’t pay too much attention to it,’ he told them. ‘It’s not an extra pressure for me, it’s just what I do. I’m on the road I have to follow and I don’t think about anything else. I train to get into the team and I’m enjoying my football here in Dortmund.’

As well he might: in the Dortmund club shop, the name of Dembélé is the only one on the back of the shirts of the mannequins; not the top scorer Aubameyang, or the local Germany player Marco Reus, or the cult hero Shinji Kagawa.

In this chapter, I speak with the two managers who hold Dembélé’s future in their hands. I went to Germany to meet his club coach at Borussia Dortmund, Thomas Tuchel, and to France to see national team coach Didier Deschamps. They were excited about Dembélé and his potential. It’s their job to confirm that into talent.

As the season went on, it was clear that whatever they were doing was working. Dembélé provided some of the outstanding moments in European football: a dribble, burst of pace and outside-of-the-boot cross for Aubameyang to score in a Champions League knock-out tie at Monaco; a cutback, which left his marker David Alaba dizzy and grounded, and a curling left-foot shot, which went in off the crossbar, to win the German Cup semi-final at rivals Bayern Munich (and a nice celebration to follow, running straight to Tuchel for a hug). He repeated the move in the German Cup final, scoring a similar goal in a Man of the Match performance to seal Borussia Dortmund its first trophy for five years.

On the final day of the Bundesliga season, he pulled off an outrageous assist, scooping the ball over five Werder Bremen defenders for Aubameyang to volley home another goal. He was outstanding in an end-of-season friendly against England, scoring the winning goal in a 3–2 victory. In late August, just a few weeks before this book was first published, Barcelona signed Dembélé for a reported £135 million, a fee that made him the second-most expensive player in the world. (His new coach would be Ernesto Valverde, formerly of Athletic Club de Bilbao.)

Dembélé was not our only topic of conversation. Both coaches gave me a unique insight into the challenges of modern leadership. Their stories can teach us a lot about the importance of communication, self-development, motivation, disruptive thinking and, above all, adaptability, in today’s professional environment.

Deschamps does not like to talk about individual players but he made an exception for Dembélé. ‘There are times when maybe during a game there’s not much going on and then he will do something special,’ he told me. ‘It’s about getting that quality to express itself over the long term. But as far as he’s concerned, psychologically he considers himself ready. He’s also exposed to daily demands at a club that’s structured to deal with a player of enormous potential. He has got something.’

Tuchel agrees. In training sessions, the coach will tell the players to only play one-touch passes, or two-touch give-and-goes, or do a spatial awareness exercise. ‘It’s no problem for Ousmane. Within minutes, he gets it and I say, “Hey please, what was that?” He adapts so quickly to everything.’

This is crucial to success. In his short career so far, Dembélé has adapted to all the contexts he has had to face. These have involved new teams, relationships, venues, levels of performance, cultures, countries, languages, and levels of media attention. Tuchel and Deschamps understand this better than most: they have also learned to adapt to get their edge.

Thomas Tuchel walks into the Italian restaurant around the corner from the Borussia Dortmund club offices, a five-minute stroll from the Signal-Iduna Park stadium, looking nothing like a football coach. He is wearing high-top trainers, skinny jeans, a grey jumper, leather jacket and a flat cap. He looks more like an artisanal coffee-shop owner than the most exciting coach of his generation.

But that’s what he is. He has been known to change his team’s formation up to six times in one game, and his original tactical ideas have led to comparisons with Pep Guardiola. In his first job as head coach, at Mainz, he took a tiny club to its highest-ever league finish and a place in Europe; at Borussia Dortmund, one of the best-supported clubs in Germany, he improved what the New York Times called ‘the most gifted collection of young players anywhere in Europe, crafted into a team of rich spirit and endless adventure’ – until, after we met, he left his position as coach, ending his second season at the club with victory in the German Cup Final.

Tuchel talks about adaptability as a necessity of leadership, though in his case it requires bravery and humility: bravery to stick to his philosophy, even if results don’t support it (which doesn’t happen too often); and humility to know he doesn’t have all the answers, while remaining open-minded enough to constantly search for them.

‘Tuchel’s team of the future may have no systems of defence, midfield or attack,’ wrote Cathrin Gilbert in German broadsheet Die Zeit,‘but simply “action principles” based on how his players behave in certain situations, the respect they have for the space, and how their character shows itself in the way they play football.’1

He does not know what his next tactical change will be, or where his next idea will come from, but he is open to anything – even, as he said, playing with only two defenders (most teams play with four, though some, Dortmund included, play with three).2

‘Two at the back, really?’ I say.

‘Why not?’ he responds, his clear-blue eyes glinting with mischief.

I ask Tuchel if he is trying to reinvent football. ‘No! A clear no. It’s not reinvention. That would mean I am changing for the sake of change. I’m not looking for change. I’m looking for an edge!’

He remembers Mercedes chief executive Dieter Zetsche comparing business to walking up the down escalator. If you do nothing, you go down. If you walk at a certain speed, you stay where you are. So you’d better run. ‘You have to adapt,’ says Tuchel. ‘It’s not about reinvention. It’s to adapt and to adapt and to adapt and to find the solutions quicker than others.’

And if that means doing things differently, then he will. Just before we meet, a year-old video of American basketball coach Geno Auriemma has gone viral. He coached the USA women’s basketball team to Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016 and has led the Connecticut Huskies to five straight national titles. ‘On our team, we put a huge premium on body language,’ Auriemma told a press conference in 2016. ‘And, if your body language is bad, you will never get in the game. Ever. I don’t care how good you are … When I watch game film, I’m checking on the bench. If somebody is asleep over there, if somebody doesn’t care, if somebody’s not engaged, they will never get in the game.’

‘I know what he’s talking about,’ Tuchel agrees. ‘We call it “the eyes”. Does he have good eyes or not? Can I trust this guy? It’s about binding relationships and respect and belief and faith. Even if you just sense it’s not there in a player, it’s already complicated.’ Tuchel sometimes looks over at his bench during a match and might see a player disengaged from the game. He will decide then not to bring them on. ‘You have to adapt.’

I’ve never heard a coach say this before. Instead, when Mario Balotelli needs two minutes to get someone else to tie his shoelaces during a game for Nice, or when Paris Saint-Germain substitute Serge Aurier takes seven minutes to get ready to come on, they are indulged as ‘characters’. Tuchel would not be so forgiving.

Tuchel tells me that shaping the personality of his players is just as important as improving their football ability.3 This is part of his own methodology that he has developed to improve performance.

This is why Tuchel was the first sporting leader asked to address a fascinating group of disruptive innovators called the Rulebreaker Society. It was founded in Switzerland in 2013. Its members include Walter Gunz, who set up Media Markt, Europe’s largest retailer of consumer electronics; Gabor Forgacs, a medical entrepreneur who has pioneered 3D bio-printing technologies to produce human tissues for medical and pharmaceutical use; and Tan Lee, whose company Emotiv uses electroencephalography (EEG) to track mental performance, monitor emotions, and control virtual and physical objects with thoughts.

The Rulebreaker Society claims to bring together people who seek to innovate and inspire through their visions. They see progress in business and society through the creative destruction of conventional rules. Its inner circle has put together a manifesto, not of rules (of course!), but as a platform for inspiration:

1 No company will be market leader for a long period of time.

2 If I don’t cannibalise myself someone else will do it.

3 If someone else attacks my business model it will be a more radical and damaging approach than if I did it on my own.

4 The development of a business model happens through creative destruction and a so far unknown re-combination of business elements.

5 Most rules made to be broken are mental rules. They exist only by your own cognition.

6 The unspoken rules are the most solid rules. They need to be broken first.

7 Digitisation and Internet technology will change every business.

8 Asymmetry of information will vanish by the digitisation of society. As a result of that, you need to model your business without those asymmetries.

9 I always look at the market from the user’s perspective.

10 If rule-makers get nervous I am on the right track. If rule-makers start to fight me, I am almost there.

During his final season at Mainz, Tuchel addressed the Rulebreaker Society at a get-together in Rorschacherberg, St Gallen. Wearing a plain black T-shirt and jeans, he explained that it had been a tough summer before his third season at the club, probably his toughest ever. Mainz had sold three influential players – Zdenek Pospech, Nicolai Muller and Eric Choupo-Moting – and lost two more with long-term injuries. They signed ten new players who were still bedding in. They had a Europa League qualifier second leg away to Romanian side Gaz Metan Medias. Mainz dominated the game, with 46 shots to the opposition’s four, but lost on penalties.

That night the team had an 11 p.m. flight back to Frankfurt, and would be starting a new Bundesliga season on the Saturday in a brand-new stadium against the previous season’s runner-up, Bayer Leverkusen. As they sat in the departure lounge, Tuchel looked around. ‘I’ve never seen a team more empty and more disappointed than my team in that moment,’ he told the society. ‘I’ll never forget the players’ faces. Everyone was just empty. We were awake for the entire flight, and the journey home, thinking, “What can we do here? The way everyone is feeling now, there’s no point in us turning up to play Leverkusen. It’s impossible for us to play.”’

Tuchel broke one of his rules. He did not show video analysis of the Gaz Metan game, as he normally does after a match-day. Instead he gathered his players into the video-analysis room and put this quote on the big screen:

‘I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’

Michael Jordan

For the next five minutes, he showed footage of Jordan in action, featuring all his achievements and successes. The message was clear: ‘We will fail, we will be labelled failures and we’ll lose games and we’ll have the most disappointing moments in order to develop ourselves.’ The players understood and changed their frame of mind. They ended up beating Leverkusen 2–0. The lesson Tuchel wanted to give is one that we should all remember.

His Mainz side was measured by what they achieved in his second season when they finished fifth. They beat every team they faced at least once. With Tuchel in charge, Mainz famously beat Bayern more often than they lost. That was what they were always judged against. The best moments. The over-achievement. That was a burden. Tuchel called it ‘a heavy load we have to bear’.

Ending his talk, he proposed what he called a controversial theory. I don’t believe it is. Rather, it is something we should all carry with us in our everyday lives. He said: ‘It’s more important to forget and move on from the greatest, most unexpected success you might have than to forget and move on from the failures.’

This attitude is right out of the Netflix playbook. Company founder Reed Hastings had the original idea to set up a video subscription after he was fined $40 for the late return of Apollo 13. He broke the rules of late fees, turning his company into a subscription-only service (subscribers could keep DVDs for as long as they wanted). That was a success in itself. But rather than stopping there, Hastings adapted; he recognised that broadband services would speed up and so launched Netflix as we know it, a company that breaks the rules in other ways: episodes can vary in length as they don’t need to fit into a schedule; dramas don’t need contrived cliff-hangers; and the company doesn’t release viewing figures, apparently to build ‘mystery and intrigue’. This is the equivalent of content trumping results, which is exactly how Tuchel wants it.4

I ask Tuchel if he is still a rule-breaker, and he refers me to one of the valuable lessons we learned from Athletic sporting director José Maria Amorrortu in Chapter 1. How do you measure success?

‘Points are not the only way to judge my work, so how else can we judge it?’ asks Tuchel. I come up with some suggestions. For some people, it might be chances created and conceded; or the development of individual players; the joy felt by 80,000 fans every other week; the emotion conjured up when you think of the team; the spirit you feel when you come into the stadium. After all, the Dortmund team slogan is ‘Echte Liebe’ (True Love). ‘I never wanted to become a rule-breaker but we just did it this way,’ he adds.

The genuine warmth of the greeting Tuchel gave to the restaurant owner when he walked in came as no surprise. The pair shook hands and hugged like old friends. Tuchel believes in the power of small rituals like this. In his first few days as a senior coach, it was one of his most important messages.

It was back in 2009 and the circumstances were unique. Tuchel had been Under-19 coach at Mainz 05 for one year (beating Borussia Dortmund in the youth cup final), the first team had been promoted into the Bundesliga but coach Jorn Andersen had been sacked after falling out with the sporting director, Christian Heidel. Tuchel had never played in the Bundesliga before. His career was limited to eight appearances for second division side Stuttgart Kickers. He had never coached a senior team before. He was 35, younger than some of the players in his squad. And four days before the Bundesliga season was due to start, Heidel put him in charge.

On his first day Tuchel outlined his most important rules, hand-written on a flipchart. Among them was that everyone greets each other with a handshake. It was to start with the coach, by looking each player in the eye and greeting them – not a cursory greeting but one that said, ‘I’m happy you’re here and I’m looking forward to training with you in a few minutes.’

He soon realised that mealtimes were a problem. He noticed some players leave the table just as he sat down for his lunch. The next day, he asked them all to wait for him to say, ‘Enjoy your meal,’ before tucking in. The buffet on offer was plentiful: soup, meat, fish, fruit, three different desserts. As Tuchel put it: ‘Grilled this, poached that.’ But before he’d finished his soup, half the squad had left again. It really bothered him. So he addressed the squad at the end of training the following day. ‘Sorry guys, I’m embarrassed to speak about eating as a team again, but I have one more thing to ask. I’d like for us all to spend at least 20 minutes eating together.’ The players agreed. Very quickly, the mealtimes became a period to reflect and bond with each other. Eighteen players would sit for 45 minutes on two tables of nine, and no one would leave until the last person had finished eating. Tuchel did not ask them to spend that long together, but he was happy to establish what he saw as a basic principle of respect. The players got to know one another.5

Tuchel wanted to create a ritual that reinforced the culture of the team; a ritual that says, ‘This is who we are and this is how we behave.’ The stronger those relationship ties are, the better the team will operate. Teams that perform small acts of kindness for and with each other shore up bonds and develop trust. There is egalitarianism in eating together. Tuchel is part of the same group, no one is better than anyone else: we are all in this together.

I have been in offices where similar rules exist. A friend who works in a high-pressure TV news studio in Paris laughs that everyone in his office spends the first ten minutes of their day double-kissing their colleagues every morning. Even when he is on the phone to someone, a colleague waits to greet him in a formal way. But he accepts there is an atmosphere of respect, goodwill and collaboration.

Mauricio Pochettino instigated a similar ritual when he took over at Tottenham Hotspur. The players shake hands with one another every day before they start work. ‘It is a small thing but it means a lot to create a real team. It shows you are interested in the people with whom you shake hands.’ That rule has now become a habit. When chairman Daniel Levy turned up at the training-ground canteen and every player greeted him with a handshake, he may have suspected it was a wind-up.

In an office I visited in Zurich, everyone eats together and no one is allowed to eat alone at their desk. The team is multi-national and once you get past the punch-line potential – there was an Australian, a Spaniard and an Irishman all eating goulash overlooking Lake Zurich – the mealtimes are a small but positive part of team-building. They reinforce collaboration between the company across all levels. Managers will speak with juniors, and vice versa, and often this will act as an ice-breaker for future work together. You don’t build trust sitting at a conference or in a meeting-room – or in Tuchel’s case, just on the training ground. You do it slowly and with consistency. By creating mechanisms for real interactions to take place. These connections trump technology.

This respect for people helps shape personality. Tuchel sees that as a key part of his role: not just to improve talent but to develop personality, which is essentially formed by what happens off the pitch. When a Dortmund player snapped, ‘Where’s my shirt?’ at the kit-manager during half-time, and it turned out he was sitting on it, Tuchel took him aside the next day and told him that was unacceptable. The player apologised to the kit-manager straightaway.

‘I will tell the player that type of behaviour is not what we do here and, by the way, it’s not cool either. Because if I go to training and I’m not looking forward to saying hello to every player there, then it’s the first problem. So you don’t let them off the hook. If he doesn’t say hello to someone, it’s not good enough. These are my values. For some players, it’s tougher to adapt to thanking the physio, or saying hello in the morning, than to playing football. But life is not only about the green grass. If you want to become the best, you have to shape your personality.’

Sometimes it can be a slow process. He remains embarrassed that he and his team fly to so many cities (in 2016–17, Dortmund played in Madrid, Warsaw, Lisbon and Monaco) but never see anything beyond airport, hotel, training pitch and stadium. ‘I want to develop personality for the players and I am sure that if we knew something more about Lisbon, for example, it would help us in our game preparation. I want to see more of the cities.’ It’s another form of respect he strongly believes in: respect for the opponent. In future, he might ask certain players to give a talk about what their home country means to them. On the day we meet, in discussions about Dortmund’s planned summer tour to Japan, he had requested an extra day in Tokyo so players could visit the city and learn more about the culture.

This respect extends to the training ground, where slide tackles or fouls out of frustration are forbidden. The rules need to be respected. Things can fall apart very quickly, with one small disagreement potentially leading to a rift. That didn’t happen at Mainz. The team did well. So well, in fact, that Mainz never worried about relegation. They finished ninth in his first season, their highest ever position. The following year, when everyone tipped them for relegation citing ‘Second Season Syndrome’, they won their first seven games and finished fifth, qualifying for the Europa League. The next season was harder and Mainz ended up thirteenth. Not once did they drop to sixteenth (the relegation play-off spot, which plays the team that finished third in the second division) in the table. In Tuchel’s five years in charge, only the big four German teams of Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Schalke and Bayer Leverkusen accumulated more points than his side.6

How did Mainz develop an edge under its new coach? In part, it came from Querdenken, the German word for thinking outside the box. Based on Tuchel’s analysis, Mainz would copy how other teams would play in training, learn different formations to cope with that, and the players, constantly adapting to new systems, would intuitively understand their jobs. ‘We wanted to establish flow. This willingness of my players to play in different positions and systems, combined with the opponents’ continued use of that old-style, outdated thinking, allowed us to establish a competitive advantage over those teams.’

A turning-point in his own education came at Mainz, after the club had approached the local university looking for analysis on players’ endurance and sprint abilities. ‘I presented the sprint results directly to Mr Tuchel [then Mainz head coach] and his coaching team, and later we spoke for several hours about the benefits of Differential Training on technical and tactical training,’ said Wolfgang Schöllhorn, Professor of Training and Movement Science at the Johannes Gutenberg University. ‘I still remember that straight after our meeting, his team used some of my suggestions in their practice sessions.’

So when he wanted to teach his players to make diagonal runs towards goal, he changed the training pitch into a diamond shape. When he wanted his players to stop grabbing shirts while marking at corners, he gave them tennis balls to hold while playing. He is a problem-solver. A Querdenker.

We will look at more working examples of Differential Training later in the chapter. ‘That influenced me a lot because it changed my role as a coach completely,’ Tuchel says. ‘With this, there is no right and wrong. You cannot make mistakes. I’m not there to tell them right and wrong, I’m just responsible for the ideas and principles of how we play. Within those they are free to find their own solutions.’ Tuchel is an expert in analysing opposition, and explaining to players how to use space to make chances. ‘I can find the spaces but you