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- [00:00]
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- [00:39]
Arsh Manning
to innovation, sustainability to market volatility. There's always more than one side to a story. Explore different perspectives on today's most important business and economic issues with the Flipside podcast from Barclays Investment Bank. Hear two research analysts in a lively debate and get insights from every angle to further inform your view. Listen to the Flipside on your favorite platform.
- [01:07]
Podcast Host
From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Manveen Rana. Tonight in London, the streets will be empty, the pubs will be full and the screens will be blaring, while in Atlanta, Georgia, England will face Argentina in the semi final of the World Cup. For both nations, it's a fixture charged with history on and off the field.
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Arsh Manning
England vs Argentina. Argentina vs England.
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Mehreen Khan
The team that most Argentina fans see
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Arsh Manning
as their biggest rivals, Maradona is everywhere.
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Mehreen Khan
The Falklands are everywhere. I think we better who?
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Michael's Party Shop Advertiser
Argentina.
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Mehreen Khan
What's battering right two nil.
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Podcast Host
Comfortable in the big footballing moments, Argentina have tended to come out on top. But could this time be different? The man shouldering the responsibility for England's performance is a perfectionist who's notoriously hard to please.
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Mehreen Khan
We're in the last four. In general, I think it was not a high level game. The football coach in me still thinks that we can and have to play better football.
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Podcast Host
England's German manager, Thomas Jeff Tuchel.
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Mehreen Khan
The interesting thing about England would have been that for the last decade they have created, I think, a much healthier, less toxic culture. To bring a character as volatile as Thomas Tuchel into that environment, I think was a risk.
- [02:40]
Podcast Host
Could this meticulous footballing obsessive secure the trophy that has eluded England for decades? Or will Thomas Tuchel and his team be undone by his capacity to self destruct? The story today the method in the madness of Thomas Tuchel.
- [03:21]
Mehreen Khan
My name is Mehreen Khan and I'm the economics editor at the Times.
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Podcast Host
We often get you on to talk about the state of the global economy, the markets. It's not often we turn to you for football. And yet that's a trick we've been missing. Just. Just explain to listeners why you're also an authority on that.
- [03:41]
Mehreen Khan
Oh, authority's tough. I'm a football fan and actually my start in journalism was on the sports desk. I didn't last very long. So clearly I'm not very good at the journalism side of football. And I guess I'm here today in my capacity as a Chelsea fan and. And a Thomas Tuchel fangirl, let's put it that way. So he was a brief entrance into my life, like most Chelsea managers, but one that I was fascinated by almost as soon as he walked into the club. So I'm very happy to talk about him, perhaps not as an England fan as such, but as someone who's watched his career and has been emotionally invested in his success.
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Podcast Host
When you say not as an England fan.
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Arsh Manning
Yeah.
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Mehreen Khan
I have a very complicated relationship with the England football team. I don't describe myself as an England fan for various reasons. One, because I have one team and one team only, that team is Chelsea. There's very little room in my heart for anyone else. And actually, there's probably something about growing up in the 90s as a British Asian kid, which meant that England felt quite far away, sometimes even hostile. There's probably lots of reasons. And then the one that I've sort of learned to tell people is that I live in England, I am English, I am British. And there is something beautiful about this culture and these. This nation in defeat. I think I like the English in defeat more than I do in victory. So I'm going to put it out there.
- [04:54]
Podcast Host
There's a whole philosophical track to be written on that. We're hoping we won't be seeing any of that tonight. It is a massive match. England in the semi final. Just for anyone who isn't somehow managing to live under a rock and miss all of this, why is this such a big game?
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Mehreen Khan
It's big game just by the virtue of the fact that England have made it to the semi finals once again. They got there in 2018 in the world cup in Russia. This will be the first time since that was now nearly, what, eight years? And then the nature of the opposition, the opponent, I think, has really amped up the significance of this. We could do a whole episode on the geopolitics of England, Argentina, but all I have to say is.
- [05:34]
Podcast Host
And the tabloid headlines of the 1980s.
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Mehreen Khan
Exactly. I wasn't around, but it doesn't matter. Even if you grew up in the 2000s, you can't really forget how much of a legitimate territorial dispute sort of changed the nature of the footballing rivalry. And this will be the first time that England have played Argentina in a World cup since the infamous David Beckham moment. Owen scores that fantastic goal, England end up losing. David Beckham gets sent off, becomes a national villain. This will be the first time Lionel Messi has ever played against England in a competitive game, which is incredible. It's never happened before. England, to some degree have put to bed one of the ghosts of Argentina, which was Maradona, 1986, in the Azteca, they went to the Azteca. In the knockout round, they beat Mexico. So they already sort of buried one of the traumas of Argentinian past. And now if they beat them, then maybe you could say they finally put it to bed too.
- [06:26]
Podcast Host
So there's a lot riding on this one match. And one of the people who could be absolutely key to England's performance is Thomas Tuchel. You are a longtime fan, I have to admit, as somebody who only gets interested in football every time the World cup comes around, I'm kind of new to him. So you need to give me the bluffer's guide. Tell me when you started following him and what made him interesting to you.
- [06:51]
Mehreen Khan
He walked into my life at the beginning of 2021, which was still locked down. Pandemic football. I remember January 2021, Chelsea have just sacked their legendary player, not so legendary manager, Frank Lampard. And this happens at Chelsea on a 12 to 18 month cycle. There's nothing particularly special about it. And Tuchel is just the latest in the managerial candidates that's probably not going to be around very long. He wasn't around very long, but the time that he was around was fantastic because within the months that he was at the club, he wins the Champions League with Chelsea, the coveted European cup, only for the second time in their history. And I fell into the trap, as I always do, of thinking this guy's going to build an empire and collect trophies at Chelsea for a long time. It ended very abruptly about 18 months later when new ownership comes in and he's gone out of my life. And it was a. You know, I've spoken before about never really having closure over that moment. It was a. It was, it was an abrupt ending. It was all sort of clouded in a bit of mystery. We didn't really know what happened. Tuchel then goes on to have a brief stint at Bayern Munich, but he's really, I think, reemerged, of course, in the English psyche when he gets the England job. If listeners really take to our portrayal of him, you should go and listen to an episode of Heroes and Humans, which is a football podcast that I have done with Simon Cooper. And I think I described him in that episode which we recorded just before he got the England job as an antihero, almost Batman type figure.
- [08:09]
Podcast Host
Explain that.
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Mehreen Khan
Yeah, he has a darkness about him. And I think we said in the episode that football is the thing that he's obsessed by and it drives his life so much that it's also the ruination of him. It has driven him to physical and mental extremes. It has driven his players to physical and mental. That's why his tenures at his clubs progressively over time have gotten shorter and shorter because of the extremities in which he puts his players under and I think the difficult psychological relationships that develop with his players.
- [08:38]
Podcast Host
So that's such a useful warning because, I mean, it does seem to be going well. We are doing well, progressing through the World Cup. Although there do seem to be some signs of tensions which will come to. Before we do, though, I mean, you're giving me the bluffer's guide. To understand the man, we need to know a bit more about his background. So, I mean, what do we know about his life before he becomes a world famous football manager?
- [09:04]
Mehreen Khan
Yeah. So Thomas De hall is born in Swabia in Bavaria, which has a very high concentration of elite football managers. So in the world that I come from, in economics, Swabian is known for having an archetype of the Swabian housewife, which is like this archetypal German housewife that saves lots of money and doesn't spend very much. I think we can probably say in the 2000s that they should an archetype for the Swabian football manager, because Thomas Tuchel, Jurgen Klopp, ex Liverpool manager and legendary German manager, is also from Swabia. Ralph Ragnick, who is sort of the godfather of this certain philosophy of German management. He's much older than these guys. He also comes from Swabia. So there's something in the waters in Bavaria, clearly. And he fits the archetype. If we're going to make a stereotype about what it is, incredibly technical sort of management. And I think what's special about the Tuchel generation is that I call them nerd managers. So why are they nerd managers? Because they're not managers that have really had prolific, if any, football careers. And their entry into management is about a technical appreciation and learning of the game on the job. So Thomas Tuchel has a. Has a very ill fated career. He gets injured by the age of 25, he's a defender and he's not going to make it as a professional footballer. So what does he do? He sort of becomes a coach by. So unlike ex players who will go off and become managers because they've been around football their whole lives and they understand and they've worked with great managers. I call them a nerd manager because really there is a huge emphasis on learning on the job and the technicalities of becoming a manager.
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Podcast Host
So this is about technique and efficiency. That feels very German.
- [10:36]
Mehreen Khan
Yeah, exactly. It's about meticulous attention to detail. It's about understanding where players position themselves on their pitch. It's about creating environments at training to give players the ability to cope with pressures. And it is quite formulaic and mechanical in a sense because you're playing with systems and you're creating systems to defeat the opponent's system. And Thomas Tuchel probably is not going to be able to hit a ball top bins from 40 yards. But it doesn't matter because if he's got the players to do it, he wants to get them in the positions where he's going to make them excel. And so he gets various jobs. First at Stuttgart with the youth team, then his main job is at Mainz, which is a kind of mid table, even lower league Bundesliga team which never really did very well. Their claim to fame was that they had this guy called Jurgen Klopp as him manager. Thomas Tuchel takes them to pretty giddy heights in the Bundesliga. He, he becomes the most winningest manager in Mainz's history. And then his big break comes at Dortmund, which is a storied German football club, one of the great football clubs alongside Bayern Munich. He doesn't have a great time there. He again is following in the shadow of Klopp. And then I guess most people probably around football would have heard as Thomas Zuckel because he became the manager of PSG in Paris and he took them to a Champions League final which they didn't win against Bayern Munich. And up until that point he is a European manager with great promise. And then he ends up in the Premier League where I guess English fans learn about him for the first time and where I developed this unhealthy emotional relationship with Thomas Tuchel.
- [12:05]
Podcast Host
And when he was at Chelsea, when he's been at any of these teams, what is his style? What is his style with the players?
- [12:12]
Mehreen Khan
The first thing I think a player would notice about a Thomas Tuchel team is that when Tommy T, as we like to call him, comes into a dressing room, the first thing that he's going to do is work out what they're doing in the canteen. It's quite striking when you look at him, that he is quite a lithe figure. He has those big teeth and those big ears, which are accentuated by the fact that he's quite skinny. And that's because he imposes quite a lot of physical discipline on himself. He's a man who's spoken about spending a whole summer in Italy but never eating any pasta or pizza, as in no carbs policy.
- [12:44]
Podcast Host
Oh, wow. God, that's so joyless.
- [12:47]
Michael's Party Shop Advertiser
Exactly.
- [12:48]
Mehreen Khan
Joyless. Ascetic. I think monkish. I would describe some of his own dietary habits. And he imposes this on his players. I think the thread that you hear from players who have worked with Tuchel, who have loved Tuchel, who have hated Tuchel, is discipline. And I would say a monomaniacal degree of control and discipline over the players lives, over their routines, from their diets onwards. And it's a level of, I think, fastidious attention to detail which some players thrive under and some players fold under. There are testimonies of players who've worked with Tuchel, one at Mainz who actually ended up suing the club over a contractual issue. He was in court and he testified about the cruelty of Thomas Tuchel. He called him a bully. He said he was cruel. Yeah. You know, in general, HR practices, this is. We would consider this stuff to be really beyond the pale, but, you know, there are. There are eras in football where, you know, you have managers of this kind of archetype. There have been images of Thomas Tuchel, particularly in the Bundesliga, when he takes training, of him berating players, like, screaming at the top of his voice at them about how they don't understand his system and they don't understand how to play football. And we can talk about the psychological impact of that, whether that's good or whether. Whether it's bad, but it is part of him. That's what he does. Often there is a deep bipolarity about the nature of Thomas Tuchel, which can go from incredible warmth to sometimes incredible cruelty. And again, these are testimonies of some of his players who describe this as very jarring. When he was at Mainz, he leaves the club actually on a high, and he does a very heartfelt speech in the changing rooms where he describes how wonderful a couple of years he's had at Mainz and what a brilliant experience it's been for him and his life and his career and his family and everything about the club. And one of the players says that, you know what, I didn't believe him. You know, I couldn't believe the heartfelt goodbye from a man who'd spent the last couple of years, you know, being incredibly cruel to us. You could describe it as being in, you know, a bit of a toxic relationship as a cod psychoanalysis of the man. I guess his life in professional football is balancing those two things out and maybe masking some of the darker parts of himself. Is he really learning? He keeps falling out with clubs and and having really tempestuous ends. The question about him now that he's getting into his mid-50s, is that is Thomas Tuchel evolving as a football character or is he still gonna, you know, self immolate in the ways that he has done in all of his previous jobs?
- [15:15]
Podcast Host
That is the question coming up, will Thomas Tuchel raise England to new heights or will our World cup hopes come crashing down and is he the right man to take on Gareth Southgate's legacy? That's in just a moment.
- [15:37]
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- [16:13]
Arsh Manning
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Podcast Host
Marine. You've been describing the sometimes tempestuous career of Thomas Tuchel up until he arrives at England. This is every club he's at where things seem to be going well and then he slightly blows up. There are tensions, there's difficulties. Accused of being cruel. Were you surprised that he wanted the England job?
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Mehreen Khan
I wasn't surprised that he wanted the England job. I was surprised that they. The fa, wanted Thomas Tuchel.
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Podcast Host
Really?
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Arsh Manning
Yeah.
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Mehreen Khan
I mean, not a level. Look, the pool of very elite managers is small and there are a lot of them, by virtue of the fact that they are of different nationalities that are never going to manage England. I don't think Pep Guardiola is ever going to manage England. I don't think Jose Mourinho is ever going to manage England. You could argue whether or not he's elite anymore. Don't think Carlo Ancelotti, Jurgen Klopp, these storied names were gonna manage England. Thomas Tuchel wouldn't have been a first choice for me. I say that because I imagine that if you were at the FA and we'll talk about, I guess, the Southgate years previously, you will have seen that Thomas Tuchel comes with this slightly dark reputation. You will have heard stories from players at Chelsea about, you know, incredibly tough training regimes. There are incidents where he calls up players to do training at obscene hours in the morning or late at night, depending on where you are. And this is not stuff that players were really going to tolerate, you know, that he liable to combust. And I guess it's a brave decision on part of the fa, because you think that actually you could manage this character. And the interesting thing about England would have been that for the last decade they have created, I think, a much healthier, less toxic culture. To bring a character as volatile as Thomas Tuchel into that environment, I think was a risk. I still think it is a risk. You could probably argue it's a risk that is paying off for now. My question is always about the longevity with Thomas. So I'm not surprised that he, he, he wanted the job. I think it would have been difficult for any club to have taken him after Bayern Munich ended up really not doing that well. He goes to Germany's most famous famed club. They win the league, basically, because Dortmund throw it. He complains all the time about transfers. It's a very unhappy time. So he hasn't really rehabilitated himself from Chelsea and he's probably looking around and thinking, who's going to take me on next.
- [19:36]
Podcast Host
Was there much pushback when the FA announced that he would be the next manager? I mean, partly because he's, as you say, you know, he has a reputation for being difficult, being quite toxic, but also because we haven't always been great in the past with foreign managers.
- [19:50]
Mehreen Khan
I think that was actually more the element, I imagine most England fans. And if you're outside of Chelsea, you didn't actually know much about Thomas Tuchel apart from that. He was at Chelsea in the one Champions League, which is brilliant, and he's considered to be a great manager. I think actually the Germanness was probably the psychological barrier that was most difficult for people to swallow. Yes, England have had foreign managers. One was Swedish Svenjr And Eriksen and Fabio Capello was Italian. They had mixed records. But Germany's something else. Germany is the old enemy in terms of historically, but also footballing, in footballing terms too. So I think a German manager is a choice of a nationality which is going to provoke and press people's buttons a bit more than an Italian, a Swede, something else.
- [20:34]
Podcast Host
And as you say, it's a really interesting decision on the part of the FA to follow up a character like Gareth Southgate and the culture he created with his team with Thomas Tuchel. I mean, for people who haven't followed it, just describe the difference.
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Mehreen Khan
Gareth Southgate takes the England job. I would describe as an adir for England in the modern era, in the last couple of decades. England lose to Iceland.
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Arsh Manning
Where do we start with England then?
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Mehreen Khan
This debacle? Well, that was the worst performance I have ever seen from an England team ever. From start to finish, from the game, we were out fought, we were out
- [21:15]
Michael's Party Shop Advertiser
thought,
- [21:17]
Mehreen Khan
we were out battled, and we were totally hopeless for 90 minutes. There is that peak toxicity. I think that relationship between England, the press in this country and the fans is at an absolute low. They are underperforming, perennially underperforming group of players far lesser than the sum of their talents. Given that some of the best players in the world play in the Premier League and play for England, but they can never do it when they've got the three lions on their badge and the job of Gareth Southgate is to come in as a former player to kind of, I think, detoxify the entire England brand, to create a sense in which there's going to be more stability and I think a healthier environment where they, the players, when they come to England, when they come and train with England, don't feel so much pressure. He takes on a lot of younger players and he has almost immediate success by getting to the semi final. Very, very unlike the semi finalist of the 2018 World cup with a group of players that probably were far greater than the sum of their parts. Yes, they lose to a better team in Croatia and they weren't, they weren't better than the eventual winners, France, but I think it's, it's a real turning point. And Southgate, given that he is this, you know, incredibly, I don't want to over hyper him. He's a very civilized, calm, mature character who speaks very well. I think he can handle kind of the tabloid, rabid tabloid obsession with the English football team by just dialing everything down a notch and creating a healthier environment for England players to succeed. And actually, you could argue to the FA that if you're going to think about the long term development about how to get England back to where they think they should be, you do need to have a period, a solid period of consolidation, changing the internal culture. And then once you've kind of created that foundation, that base, then your job is to go and find that elite manager that's going to take these players actually to the level now that they're all comfortable wearing that shirt and they don't feel so pressurized by it and the relationship with the fans and the media is healthy. Now you take that next step by getting an elite football manager to get you to win trophies, to win the Euros and to win the World cup, to extract the level of performance from the players once you've done that. So in a sense, the FA is probably in the lingerie of England. They're really doing a strategy that this is probably a good one.
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Podcast Host
It does seem to involve injecting at least a little bit of toxicity. I mean, it's been really interesting watching him criticise the way England are playing when everyone else is cheering and jubilant. He does seem to be quite critical with the players and there do seem to be some tensions brewing.
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Mehreen Khan
I think it's a manifestation of his own, the standards that he sets for himself. So there's now that infamous interview with Gabrielle Clarke of ITV after England really struggled, but do make it past Norway way and he's annoyed and I'm very. This is a very familiar sight to me. Chelsea have just like scraped a two one or one nil victory and the manager's annoyed. He's annoyed because they didn't exact the plan that their standards fell short of what they were training for. That he, as he said, we didn't perform to our level, we became sloppy and we got through because of. We have a genius in Jude Bellingham and his. The force of his character literally dragged England through to the semi final. I think England fans might find it a little bit odd that the manager is not celebrating and overly emotional. I would tell them that actually, that that's, that's the good part of Thomas Tuchel, is that he will be the calmest man and the most cerebral sober man in the room when everyone in the dressing room is celebrating about being in a semi final. For Thomas Tuchel, being in a semi final is not an achievement. The achievement is winning the World Cup. That is the standard that he sets for himself and his players and they know that. And you can have your, you know, 24 hours of relief post Norway game and celebrate, but ultimately, when you get back into training to think about how to play Argentina, he's going to kick your ass again, again. So there's no resting on your laurels, there's no complacency. And I think for some play, actually, I think for players like Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham, who are the biggest clubs in the world, they are used to this at their domestic club levels. He wants to extract ultimate performance. Harry Kane should be winning World Cups. There's no reason why the greatest striker of maybe the greatest England player ever, potentially, should not have a World cup to his name. And if he doesn't, Thomas Tuchel will
- [25:22]
Podcast Host
be annoyed forever about that, which is reassuring. At the same time, you know, as you say, what got us through that last match was the sheer power and will of Jude Bellingham. And yet Jude Bellingham seems to be one of the characters who has the most open tensions with Thomas Tuchel. What's going on there?
- [25:42]
Mehreen Khan
Yeah, I mean, it's true, you know, Jude Bellingham was one of the players maybe about a year ago that was unfancied by Thomas Tuchel. He wasn't picked for a couple of friendly games and qualifying tournaments. Thomas Tuchel made quite disparaging remarks about Jude Bellingham. And how has Jude Bellingham responded? Well, in the way that maybe if this was all a reverse psychology thing, exactly how Thomas Tuchel wanted. He basically put him under A lot of pressure publicly. And now when he wears that shirt, he is by far one of, well, probably the best player in the team, along with Harry Kane and Declan Rice, the most game changing player. And we've seen that with the goals that he's scoring, he really needs, I think tension and animus and some needle. I think he thrives on that. He's not a calm player. So I think in some senses we may look back and think the Tuchel Jude Bellingham psychodrama was actually necessary condition to get the best out of Jude Bellingham, rather than the kind of players who need big hugs and who need emotional support and who need to be told that they're loved. Some players are like that and other players aren't. The other one I should mention is Jed Spence. So when Jed Spence is berated on the touchline, I think a lot of people in England were like, this is really unfair. You shouldn't treat your players like this. He's really going to suffer now because, you know, this is psychologically tormenting for him, what has happened. Jed Spence, who started and then come on for games has been fantastic in this tournament since that moment, right, he's kind of put his body on the line, he's making last ditch tackles, he nearly won a penalty in the match against Norway. You know, the Thomas Tuchel trick has worked. He's pressing the right buttons to get the best out of Jed Spence.
- [27:12]
Podcast Host
So this seems to be a healthy, creative tension.
- [27:15]
Mehreen Khan
So what I would caution is that often there is a limit to how long this can work. And at club level, when you're basically, this is week in, week out, your reality, this is how demanding your manager is of you, it exhausts itself very quickly. Maybe the good thing about being England manager is that there can be longevity because he will only get once the World cup is over. He'll get to see his players, I think in beginning of September and then he won't see them for a very long time, maybe until the end of the year when they're doing qualifying rounds for the Euros. So he has a limited interaction with his players, which means that the control freak element of Thomas Tuchel isn't able to live its best life. He has to contain that because they go off to their clubs and they belong to their club. And so maybe national team management might be the best way to ameliorate the worst parts of Thomas Tuchel's character.
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Podcast Host
He's not at combusting level yet, thank God. How far do you think this can go? Is he a Winner.
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Mehreen Khan
He's a winner for sure. He's a winner for sure. That cannot be doubted because winning is what drives him, what motivates him. And as you saw with that interview, getting to a semi final is not an achievement to Thomas Tuchel in the fullness of time. I'm sure whatever happens in this tournament, it should be considered to be a success. Success. Getting to a semi final was no easy feat. I would hope, and I hope that he's listening, but I would hope that Thomas Tuchel has learned from his experiences at previous clubs where tensions always get to a level where there's no point of no return, where players are so exhausted that they just can't go through the mental torture enough. I would hope that he learned from that. And he learned. He learns that being a national team coach is a form of basically underemployment.
- [28:50]
Arsh Manning
Right.
- [28:50]
Mehreen Khan
You're just not doing your job all the time, but that's a good thing. But don't have the ability, and it can be a good thing. I think underemployment can be a very good thing for a control freak and a monomaniacal figure like Thomas Tle. It can actually bring out the better parts of his character. And so in theory, this kind of chemistry could work fantastically well. But again, it will always depend on, I think if there are players in that dressing room that say they can't work with this guy, ultimately the FA would have to listen. If it gets to a point where, say, England go through a really rough patch of qualifying or they don't, they're not successful in tournaments, it gets very dark very quickly under Thomas Tuchel, and those are usually the conditions in which he goes or he's fired. So I would be cautiously optimistic if I was an England fan, that they may have found a guy that could probably do this for a long while. But if he also just walks out the door tomorrow, don't be surprised because that also happens.
- [29:50]
Podcast Host
A Marine as a fan girl. And I think I can say with some certainty that under a Tuchel regime, there will be zero tears from players on the field. Will you now be rooting for England?
- [30:04]
Mehreen Khan
Oh, great question. Honestly, my heart is really sopping towards England, maybe because I'm just old and soppy now, but I really want him to do well. I want him to do well because I need that kind of closure from Chelsea when he just sort of walked out of my life. I also feel like I have had such an affiliation with him that, you know, I've been someone that is sort of a champion and an advocate for Thomas Tuchel. When most people are like, why? Like he's a bizarre, odd, big eared fellow, like. But I think England fans are learning that this something incredibly captivating about him. His mastery of English is also fantastic. You know, there's that moment where he looks into the players and the crowd and he says, he, he's asked about character and he says, look, you could bottle it and sell it. You know, he has a kind of turn of phrase and he loves the thing that he does so much that you know that it's going to ruin him. But it's also the only thing that gets him out of bed every day. And I think seeing someone so invested in football and as a fan, I love that and I think he is going to win a lot of hearts and minds over and so I'm sort of, you know, England fans are going to go on the journey of discovery that I did with Thomas Tuchel and it's a ride, you know, I'll put it that way. It's definitely a ride.
- [31:26]
Podcast Host
That was Marine Khan, economics editor of the Times, and Thomas Tuchel fangirl. If you want to hear the back catalogue of her football podcast, including a special on Tuchel, it's called Heroes and Humans of Football and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. You can find live coverage of the game tonight@thetimes.com the producers today were Jesse Fox and Harry Stott. The executive producer was Edward Drummond. Sound design and theme composition were by Malicetto. If you want to get in touch with us about this or any other episode, do drop us a line to the story@thetimes.com thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
- [32:40]
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