Chelsea co-owner Todd Boehly seems to have been spared, for the immediate present at least, further embarrassment at Stamford Bridge after Thomas Tuchel’s latest struggles at Bayern Munich.
As Chelsea continue on their search for a third permanent head coach, former gaffer Thomas Tuchel is apparently struggling at Bayern Munich in both the Champions League as well as in the Bundesliga. The German tactician has been hastily ushered back into management for a little over one month now but has been coping too well in attempting to overturn things from where former manager Julian Nagelsmann left things.
The Bundesliga giants had decided finally to part ways with the highly-rated 35-year-old gaffer after their season went into crisis mode for a couple of weeks in the Bundesliga and Champions League. From a galvanizing blistering first 45 minutes for Tuchel and his side, going 3-0 up on their way to beating title rivals Borussia Dortmund 4-2, things have since gone on a downward spiral, with Tuchel having now only seen one win in the last six games with 3 defeats coming since then.
Bayern are now out of Europe and the domestic cup whilst the recent loss to Mainz has seen them spin out of control of their own fate in the Bundesliga. Rivals Borussia Dortmund could go one point clear if they win their game in hand with seven games to play.
Under Nagelsmann’s helmsmanship they had only lost two of their previous 16 league games as well as progressing past Paris Saint-Germain in Europe. However, he had allegedly gone at a tangent to the sentiments in the dressing room and fallen out with several of his players, along also with reportedly failing to live up to the image of how a Bayern coach should look and behave.
With off-field problems posing additional obstacles in his path, Nagelsmann also encountered a tricky start to the season, a continuation from the faltering run towards the end of last term. Be that as it may, few expected the Champions League winner and fan favorite to lose his job so early.
In Tuchel’s case his biggest issue was that Boehly and his partners wanted a manager more willing to work from top-down within a structure rather than someone having more independence in the role. The American co-owner addressed this at a conference last year: “When you take over any business you have to make sure you are aligned with the people in the business,” he said.
“And Tuchel is obviously extremely talented and obviously someone who had great success with Chelsea.
“Our vision for the club was to find a manager who really wanted to collaborate with us, a coach who really wanted to collaborate. Our goal is to bring a team together; all of that needs to be a well-oiled machine. The reality of our decision was that we weren’t sure that Thomas saw it the same way we saw it.
“No one is right or wrong. We just didn’t have a shared vision for the future. It wasn’t about Zagreb. It was about the shared vision of what we wanted Chelsea to look like. It wasn’t a decision that was made because of a single win or loss. It was a decision that we thought was the right vision for the club.”
Tuchel is now seemingly encountering similar problems at Bayern similar to those he had faced in his earlier Chelsea days, like a lack of goals and cutting edge, with his red card against Manchester City in midweek clearly demonstrating his discontent and angst.
Meanwhile things at Chelsea have also not been exactly in the ideal state of affairs but had 49-year-old Tuchel succeed in Bayern Munich in his early days there now whilst the Blues search for another new head coach would have looked bad on Chelsea’s owners, especially Boehly.
As it is, things for the Blues now only look pretty bad instead of extremely bad.