Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers. Ben Lyttleton
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
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