‘A hairband and 1960s trousers’ – how Thomas Tuchel’s hometown remembers new England manager

In the deep south of Germany, it would be hard to say that the streets of Thomas Tuchel’s hometown Krumbach are humming with excitement at the prospect of the local boy accepting a job that no German has ever done before.

Hans Hafner, 76, one of the town’s many retirees, is out strolling with friends in the town square and considers for a moment the appointment of Tuchel as the England manager. “It is a difficult job,” he considers. “A good club manager, but a national team is a different story.”

This is the quiet town in the Schwaben region of Bavaria where Tuchel grew up with parents Rudolph and Gabriele, and sister Sabrina. The couple still live in the same family home and Rudolph, a retired water management engineer, politely declines an interview when we visit. The family is leaving the talking to Thomas from now on.

Tuchel, 51, has been a famous figure since he was propelled into the Mainz 05 job, his first in senior football, as Jurgen Klopp’s successor in 2009. But when he returns to Krumbach, he finds life there much as he knew it growing up in the town in the 1970s and 1980s.

It was swept along in the post-war West German economic miracle, and sustained by high employment in the car parts industry and in mechanical engineering. In 1987 at the Simpert-Kraemer-Gymnasium – Krumbach’s senior school for the most academic students – they achieved something unprecedented for the town. The school football team, including the 14-year-old Tuchel, won the national championship, triumphing in the final at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium – where England lost this year’s Euro 2024 final.

“A great team,” says Hans Komm, the school’s former head of physical education, over lunch in the nearby town of Ichenhausen. He taught Tuchel between 1990 and 1992 when the teenager took his abitur – the German equivalent of A-levels – including one in sport and physical education. Komm, 71, who taught at the school for 35 years, says that Tuchel was a very good midfielder. But what struck him most was Tuchel’s all-round ability – in tennis, volleyball, basketball and his academic studies.

Tuchel also played for the youth side of FC Augsburg, currently in the Bundesliga, almost an hour’s drive away and was selected for Germany’s Under-18s before his young football career succumbed to injury. “He was a very tactically motivated kid,” Komm says. “When he played volleyball for the school he would switch the players around on court during the match to try to get the best out of them. His school coursework for his abitur sport course was on youth football and how it was coached. He got a lot of that material from his coaches at Augsburg.”

In a yearbook produced for leaving students, heavy with early 1990s teenage Krumbach in-jokes, Tuchel is teased for his “playful arrogance” when it came to his football ability. Such that his class-mates joked he “must have a FC Bayern contract in his pocket”. He was accused of an “extravagant” style of clothes including “a hairband and 1960s trousers”. Also noted were his preferences for sunglasses during the daytime and nights out in the nearby town of Ulm, bigger than Krumbach. As were his older girlfriends.

“But enough of the bad things!” was the summary. “All in all, Thomas was a conscientious student whom the rest of his pitiful class could not surpass in terms of punctuality and accuracy, nor in terms of homework enthusiasm and friendliness.”

Tuchel came back to Krumbach as the local celebrity when he was manager at Mainz, which was something of an event in the town with signing sessions at the local newspaper offices. But since he became the Borussia Dortmund manager in 2015 he has only returned privately to visit Rudolph and Gabriele, a retired special needs teacher. His career has gone stratospheric – from Dortmund to Paris Saint-Germain to Chelsea to Bayern and now the English Football Association.

There is a well-worn Tuchel heritage trail around Krumbach and Komm tots up the number of interviews he has done with French press during the PSG years and now the English media. “Thomas was one of those boys who was obsessed with the game,” he says. “I took his class on a hiking trail when they were teenagers and when we got back we let those who wanted one to have a beer. He just headed off to play football.”

Tuchel has two daughters, Emma and Kim, who live in Bavaria with his former wife Sissi, a journalist. He suggested at his press conference at Wembley this week that he will live between London and Munich over the course of his 18-month FA contract. He is also understood to be buying a villa in Sóller on the island of Mallorca.

Tuchel’s father Rudolph was also a coach of the town’s team TSV Krumbach and nearby SV Wattenweiler – relative tiddlers in the vast German amateur game. The town is not known for producing world-famous Germans. Tuchel’s fame has overtaken that of Krumbach’s other most notable son, Theo Waigel, who served nine years as finance minister, first for West Germany and then for the unified state. Waigel was known for steady fiscal governance and extraordinary eyebrows.

One of Tuchel’s team-mates from his all-conquering school team, Georg Ringler, is still in Krumbach, as the head chef at his family’s hotel in the main square. As we chat with Komm in another restaurant, Villa Elia, in Ichenhausen, the owner Georgios Vavitsas comes over to tell us that Tuchel would often come to his Krumbach restaurant with a Greek-heritage team-mate at Augsburg. A lengthy discussion ensues about England’s shortcomings against Greece this month and the scale of the job facing Tuchel.

“I hope that England get to the World Cup final in America [in 2026],” Komm says, “and that they play Germany. That way, even if Germany lose, we will still have a German winner.”