Winning is all in mind for Tuchel
RICHARD EDWARDS THOMAS TUCHEL was named as FIFA’s best men’s coach last week – the crowning moment of a career that has seen him go from barman and student into a Champions League winner.
The 48-year-old German is hardly your average modern manager.
Just ask Wolfgang Schollhorn, the chair for training and movement science at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, who worked with Tuchel during his time in charge of Mainz.
“When I came to Mainz, we offered to do a biomechanical analysis of the club’s footballers sprinting,” he said. “Tuchel came to us with three or four of his co-coaches and wanted the data explained.
“We did this and were almost finished when I asked him if he knew how he could change this and
improve performance. He was kind of surprised that this was possible.
“We organised other appointments and spent two days with Mainz. He was very curious but he understood major things very quickly.”
Tuchel’s training methods owe a lot to ‘differential learning’ – a training method which dispenses with repetition and instead introduces a series of distractions in order to increase the mental, as well as physical, load on the player.
This could involve changing the shape of the pitch in order to increase the pressure of those in possession and looking to pick a pass. The idea is that if training is hard and mentally stressful, then anything the player then experiences in the game becomes easier.
It is a form of training used by Barcelona when under Pep Guardiola – another club Schollhorn consulted for.