There are basic conventions when it comes to running not just a football club, but any sort of sports team — heck, any kind of business. Namely, when you choose to fire the guy in charge, you strip him of responsibility and hand the reins to somebody else, even if only on a caretaker basis. Bayern Munich, in announcing that Thomas Tuchel will leave at the end of the 2023-24 season, just drove a fleet of Audis right through them.
The decision to move on from Tuchel isn’t surprising. He’s steered this team to being eight points behind Bayer Leverkusen in the Bundesliga title race, he’s had run-ins with senior players, he wasn’t liked by the vast commentariat of former Bayern stars-turned-media talking heads, he lost three games on the bounce — including the round-of-16 first leg against Lazio in the Champions League — and his team has generally played turgid football. Which, after nearly a year at the helm and after the addition of Harry Kane for €95 million ($102.6m) in the summer, is hugely disappointing.
What is surprising — or counterintuitive, if you want to give Bayern the benefit of the doubt, or demented, if you don’t — is announcing to the world you’re done with him and still having him stick around until the end of the campaign. Bayern are effectively saying that Tuchel is part of the problem — and, implicitly, is not part of the solution — and yet they want him to stay and coach this group of men for the rest of the year.
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How is that supposed to work? If Tuchel couldn’t get the players to listen to him and perform when he was the big boss with a deal through June 2025, how is he supposed to do that now when they all know his days are counted? If the club higher-ups no longer believe in him, what makes you think the players will?
