In 2024, when the Football Association was tasked with finding Gareth Southgate’s successor, Mark Bullingham hired two external data companies who built a profile of what successful international managers looked like then tailored it to mesh with England’s player base.
The top 50 coaches in the world were matched against the criteria and a shortlist emerged. “I joked with the team afterwards, because it came up with a list you and I could have come up with in the pub in 10 minutes,” Bullingham, the FA’s chief executive, says.
“But actually it was incredibly valuable to see the relative strengths and weaknesses and there are some amazing things you can do with data, like looking at which coaches are good at developing players, which are good in knockout tournaments and so on.
“Playing style was important; tactical flexibility was important. Being a proven winner was important – and a proven winner relative to the resources they had. It’s a bit like xG for managers. With the budget and players available, did they over or underperform? It’s looking at the details and seeing if they added value.”
Three distinct categories emerged from this process. There were coaches with high potential who were still developing their careers, “elite” coaches already achieving top results and demonstrating top-level qualities, and finally the “super-elite” – those at the pinnacle of their trade who had won big, managed big (in terms of players and clubs) and were recognised as being among the very best in the world.
Then came a crucial piece of filtering. Excluded were coaches who had not worked at the top of the English game and demonstrated a knack with English players. This left five “super-elite” candidates, the best of the best in terms of fitting the FA’s needs. Bullingham and John McDermott, the men’s technical director, started with them.
This led – though the FA has never confirmed this – to the sounding out of Pep Guardiola and approaches to other targets, with the FA recognising they had to be personal, patient and discreet.
A normal recruitment process would involve multiple candidates, a series of interviews, a series of presentations and then board meetings to choose the best one.
“But with the top five [coaches] in the world, we felt it should be more of a ‘rifle shot approach’, where we were going really specific and speaking to them. And, putting it crudely, you’re selling to them as much as they’re selling to you,” Bullingham says.
“The overwhelming criteria was I wanted someone we could put in front of the players and they would say: ‘Thank you, you’ve given us a chance to win.’”
The last of the five the FA reached out to was Thomas Tuchel who, initially, proved hard even to get on the phone. Eventually he took a call from McDermott. The conversation was supposed to be of the brief, “Are you interested?” sort, but they talked for well over an hour.
Once Tuchel is in, he is all in, say those who know the German best, and when McDermott travelled to Munich for face-to-face discussions, he was met with a whirlwind.
“There was a connection straight away,” McDermott says. “He loved football. He loved English football. He asked me a million questions about the Euros, about the players.
‘He’d had an incredible experience at Chelsea. A bit like when you speak to Mauricio [Pochettino – whom McDermott worked with at Tottenham], he just loved the Premier League, feels there’s something magnetic about it.
“Thomas is almost Latin in the way he speaks. There’s a warmth and tactileness. He comes alive when he’s speaking about the team, the players, the games. I’m not sure [managing England] was something he was thinking of before our initial call, but he was certainly hooked.”
Wind back. Actually, McDermott met two whirlwinds. His day in Munich ended with dinner with Tuchel, but began with a one-to-one with Anthony Barry. “When we sat down, just me and him, again what came through was passion,” McDermott says.
To get Barry as part of the Tuchel package was a considerable bonus. None of the candidates identified in the “super-elite” bracket were English, though several in the tiers below were and the FA talked to at least three English candidates, partly with an eye on the future. If their time wasn’t now, these could be England managers further down the line.
However, hiring Barry alongside Tuchel would allow the FA to get an outstanding young English coach into their system, one who would be working directly with the England team. Why was nationality not decisive when it came to the top job? “Just because of the depth of the talent pool,” Bullingham says.
“We were starting with the priority we wanted to have someone to help us win. In our role you would love to be sitting in a room analysing a talent pool where there are between five and 10 English managers you felt could win tournaments. We didn’t feel that. We thought it was a relatively small talent pool and we wanted to go beyond it.”
Bullingham’s first encounter with Tuchel and Barry was in an unusual location. McDermott’s trip to Munich left him eager to bring the chief executive out to Germany to see the pair, but they were desperate to stay under the radar. So, a meeting was organised at a German airport, where the FA hired a private room and McDermott and Bullingham flew there on separate flights – just in case they were recognised.
The meeting? “I think it’s safe to say Thomas blew us away,” Bullingham says. “He had a PowerPoint presentation about how to put a second star on the shirt and it was so well thought through, right down to what the next 18 months would look like in terms of days at St George’s Park and how he would get the best out of players, how he would link with players, how he was going to maintain relationships, what he felt was important going into the World Cup.
“It was the type of presentation you might expect on a third or fourth meeting – and still be impressed by – but this was the first proper meeting. And it wasn’t just the presentation and slides, it was the passion and eloquence with which he was delivering it. It was brilliant.”
McDermott wasn’t at all surprised, but “I was pleased Mark wasn’t disappointed. In that more formal environment where you’re presenting, Thomas excelled just as much as in the more informal, conversational environment.
“I sometimes think you’ve got to be bilingual [in any top football role]. You’ve got to speak the language of the training ground, but then there’s also the executive level, especially with the England job. And Thomas is very articulate, whatever the setting.”
This is an edited extract from Inside England: Behind the Scenes of the Three Lions’ World Cup Dream (Bonnier Books, £10.99) by Rob Draper and Jonathan Northcroft. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
