With Thomas Tuchel, the devil is in the detail and it can often seem like an obsessive, controlling force. The new England head coach sees the minutiae like few others. “In training, he will check if you control the ball with the correct foot,” says Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who played under him at Borussia Dortmund and, briefly, Chelsea.
Even this does not tell the full story. As other members of Tuchel’s Chelsea squad will tell you, he demanded they knew the favoured foot of every teammate on the pitch and always passed into it; at the right speed, at the right angle, at the right time. Get it wrong and they could expect to hear about it.
