Thomas Tuchel and the moral maze

As a rule of thumb, it pays to look at the cast of characters already arrayed on one side of an argument before deciding to join them. When that list starts with Nigel Farage, swallows up Sam Allardyce and eventually sprawls across the editorial board of The Daily Mail, it should, really, serve as a burning red flag.

That all three should have taken roughly the same position on England's decision to appoint Thomas Tuchel as manager of its men's national team is not anything approaching a surprise.

Allardyce, in his defense, at least made a cogent and relevant case: Hiring a foreigner to lead the English national team could hardly be said to encourage English coaches. Farage and The Mail could not even muster that level of subtlety. Farage, England's most stubborn bargain-basement populist, just wants the England manager to be English. The Mail seemed especially vexed that the choice was German.

Still, as England's fans tried to define their personal reaction to Tuchel's arrival, many would -- not unreasonably -- have concluded that the presence of Farage and the rest clinched the matter. Much of public discourse is underpinned, now, by the belief that our identities are what is known as stacked: that what an individual thinks about abortion, say, is a reliable indicator of their views on gun control.

To side with Farage, The Mail and the rest on Tuchel, then, would involve being unwillingly and unwittingly tethered to their views on a variety of subjects. It might, even, be seen to serve as a tacit endorsement of their positions on immigration, say, or who is and who is not eligible to claim English national identity.

And yet, as the reaction to Tuchel's hiring has unspooled over the past few days, it should have become clear that it is not quite so simple as that.

An individual's views on whether the England manager should be English -- whether, in other words, the rules on who can represent a country in international football apply only to those on the field or whether they also extend to those on the bench -- do not map neatly on to the familiar spectrum of left and right, progressive and conservative.

Take, for example, the soccer-specific case for his hiring. Tuchel is an elite coach. He has won domestic honors in Germany and in France. He has a Champions League winner's medal. He has a record of drastically improving teams in a short space of time, which is precisely what he will need to do if he is to fulfill his mission of turning England into World Cup champions.

At the same time, the field of English options was undeniably thin. Eddie Howe found himself at the top of that list, but he has never won a major honor. Graham Potter, out of work since leaving Chelsea more than a year ago, was probably second. Frank Lampard may have been third.

All the Football Association has done is appoint the obvious, outstanding candidate. It has not broken any rules in doing so. Fine, most major nations tend to go for native coaches, but Portugal is coached by a Spaniard, Belgium by an Italian-born German, and the United States (men) by an Argentine and (women) an Englishwoman. Seven of the 10 teams currently vying for a World Cup spot from South America are coached by Argentines. Only one of those teams is Argentina.

Suggesting that England should make itself an exception can therefore be characterized as a little pretentious, slightly holier-than-thou, and also insular, small-minded -- maybe even xenophobic. The idea that a job should go to the best candidate, regardless of nationality or skin color or religion or sexual orientation, is a central tenet of the liberal mindset. Demurring seems, well, more than a little Farage-ist.

That argument is perfectly valid. It is one to be engaged with in good faith. But so, too, are its rebuttals. Not the reactionary one accentuated by The Mail -- it does not matter in the slightest that Tuchel is a German -- but those that are less deliberately incendiary.

One of them is sporting: What is international soccer for, if not to test the best of one country against the best of another? That principle applies to the players on the field and is, rightly, fiercely defended. Nobody would dream of suggesting that England, a little short at central defender these days, should go and pluck some uncapped prospect from Argentina. FIFA took exception years ago when Qatar, for one, attempted to field a team of naturalized players.

It is possible to draw a line there, to say that the manager is an accessory to a game, rather than a participant in it. But that seems at odds with the pervasive atmosphere in modern soccer, in which the most consequential figure in any fixture is often assumed to be the manager.

Manchester City's success is attributed to Pep Guardiola much more than it is to Kevin De Bruyne. Erik Ten Hag's shortcomings, not Marcus Rashford's, are held to be at the center of Manchester United's ills. Mikel Arteta is the architect of Arsenal's revival more than Bukayo Saka is.

That the manager has always been an exception in international soccer is both historic and pragmatic. In what counts now as the game's prehistory, the role of manager was considered far less important.

In the modern game, FIFA has likely averred from addressing the loophole because it is eminently reasonable to allow developing soccer nations to hire imported coaches to accelerate their improvement. (To address the elephant in the room: Yes, the United States men's team occupies something of a gray area here.)

But still, a tacit understanding has held among the game's (often self-appointed) great powers that the general idea for them, at least, is that the coach should be homegrown. Some, like the Netherlands, had a raft of imported coaches in the first half of the 20th century. Most have been coached only by natives for the last half-century, at least.

This can broadly be understood to be an expression of national pride and, on some level, an acceptance of what serves as both the purpose and, increasingly, the unique selling point of international soccer.

The aim is to test what a country can produce by itself. The appeal, in a game increasingly defined by the capacity of unfathomably rich teams to buy solutions to their problems, is in seeing countries forced to make do and mend, to find the best way to accentuate their strengths and to disguise their weaknesses. It is what makes the World Cup, say, both less predictable and more compelling than the Champions League.

England, here, is an exception. Alone among the countries that would consider themselves aristocrats, England has disregarded that concord. It is only, really, in England that the logic of the free market -- the one that applies, unchallenged, in club soccer -- should apply to the national side.

Tuchel is the third foreign coach of the country's men's team. (Sarina Wiegman, a Dutch coach, led England's women to the European Championship in 2022.) Like Tuchel, the previous examples were recruited on the logic that the coach should not be subject to the same restrictions as the players, that the only criteria that mattered were their qualifications.

Like with Tuchel's hiring, those decisions were criticized out of knee-jerk prejudice. And like him, those predecessors were therefore defended on the grounds that only prejudice could explain the objections. The coach of the national team should be the best candidate for the job; nothing else was relevant. To feel the England team should both consist of and be coached by the English was seen as old-fashioned at best, and bigoted at worst. It was cast as an indelibly right-wing view.

As naïve and romantic as it might sound, though, the idea that international soccer should test a nation's relative strength -- that it should act, in some way, as a gauge of pretty much every aspect of a country's soccer culture, should not be dismissed so lightly. Nor, in fact, is it easily characterized as progressive.

It is strange, at first glance, that it should be England that has decided that nationality should not be a factor in identifying a national coach. It is an island nation. It has long had what might be described as an uneasy relationship with pretty much everyone who is not English. It has always worn its exceptionalism on its sleeve.

But it is also, more immediately, the home of the Premier League, that great melting pot of talent, an entity whose abiding philosophy is essentially that anything that cannot be grown should be imported, an institution that exists largely as an endorsement of the idea that the solution to any problem is money.

The Premier League is, at heart, a monument to unashamedly Thatcherite principles, a triumph of naked and unabashed capitalism. Its influence on the way the English think about every aspect of soccer is more profound than is often realized.

It is in England where the transfer market is most frenzied. It is in England where owners, no matter how dubious the origins of their wealth, are welcomed so long as they bring with them a war chest with which to acquire players. And so it is in England, naturally, where the issue of not being able to produce high-quality coaches is solved by simply hiring someone from the outside.

The lines, here, are sufficiently blurred that Farage and The Daily Mail find themselves, on some level, lined up against the forces of the free market. That in itself is an indication that the issue of whether the England manager should be English does not fit neatly into any sort of stacked identity. Their reasons for objecting might be straightforward, noxious and wholly predictable. But, in this one case, perhaps that does not render all objections invalid.

A hot new star for 2026

The World Cup may still be 18 months or so away, but keep an eye out for the thrilling new talent emerging from Argentina. Few Europeans will have seen Lionel Messi, a diminutive playmaker for Inter Miami in Major League Soccer, but his hat trick for his national team against Bolivia this week suggests he will make a considerable impact on the 2026 tournament.

The idea that Messi might surprise anyone is, of course, ridiculous, but it is also somehow real. It would be a stretch to say that he has been forgotten since his move to MLS -- there are kids in hot pink Inter Miami jerseys all over the world, after all -- but there is a lingering assumption that he is, in some way, on his retirement tour.

That may be true, but it most likely will not preclude him from making more of an impact than might be expected -- injury permitting -- as he and Argentina set out to defend their World Cup crown.

Partly that is because Lionel Scaloni, Argentina's coach, has found a formula that allows Messi to take on all of the responsibility with none of the obligations. And partly it is because, in the brief time since he departed the old world, quite how good he was has become a bit fuzzy. Messi is not what he once was. But what he once was happened to be the greatest player of all time. He will be 39 by the time the World Cup ends. But he will still be Lionel Messi.