Before Thomas Tuchel became England manager, he was collecting empty glasses and serving cocktails at a Stuttgart bar in the late 1990s.
The 52-year-old German, now tasked with ending England’s World Cup drought, spent a formative period working in the famous Radio Barth building on Stuttgart’s Rotebuhlplatz.
The venue had been transformed from a beloved music department store into an iconic nightlife and culture hub before its eventual demolition following insolvency in 1995.
Tuchel’s workplace became a hotspot for Germany’s burgeoning hip-hop scene, attracting huge crowds and some of the country’s most recognisable musical talent.
Bar manager Carlos Coelho recalled in a 2008 student documentary that the venue was so popular they were regularly forced to turn people away at the door.
“We had so many people coming that we had to shut the doors because nobody else could fit in the space,” Coelho said.
Tuchel’s path to bar work had begun after a serious knee injury ended his playing career at just 23, leaving him without the financial support he had anticipated.
“I still had nothing in my bank account. I felt like I was a professional footballer, but I still had to go looking for a job,” Tuchel told Die Zeit.
While working at the bar, Tuchel befriended Stuttgart musician Max Herre, who would go on to become one of Germany’s most celebrated rappers and a significant figure in the hip-hop scene.
Herre recalled in a 2024 podcast how Tuchel became part of his circle of friends and regularly attended his concerts, even travelling to Vienna for one performance.
The turning point came in 1999 when Tuchel’s former club SSV Ulm were promoted to the Bundesliga while he was mid-shift at the bar.
“I was really annoyed because I thought, ‘I always wanted to get to the Bundesliga, and now they are living my dream,'” he told Die Zeit, adding that he left work shortly afterwards.
It was respected German coach Ralf Rangnick who had already spotted Tuchel’s potential and personally called to offer him a youth coaching role at VfB Stuttgart.
“When I found out that he was working in a bar in Stuttgart to earn his living, I could hardly believe it,” Rangnick told the BBC in an interview with Thomas Hitzlsperger.
“I called him and I said, ‘what are you doing?’ He said ‘I have to earn my living there’. I said to him, ‘Thomas, please, why don’t you come to us in Stuttgart and work as a youth-team coach?'”
Rangnick, who had coached Tuchel at Ulm and was one of the first German managers to introduce zonal marking, added: “I brought him together with the academy director and that’s how his coaching career started.”
Tuchel later worked as assistant to Stuttgart’s renowned youth coach Hans-Martin Kleitsch, helping produce talents including World Cup winner Sami Khedira and striker Mario Gomez.
Kleitsch, who described Tuchel as “the man with the X-ray vision”, was hugely impressed by the analytical qualities his assistant displayed from the very beginning of his coaching career.
“His match plans always worked. He would dissect the opponents and always find solutions with his analysis. It was phenomenal,” Kleitsch told Spox.
Tuchel reflected that his time working at the bar also gave him crucial lessons in confidence and communication that would serve him well throughout his career ahead.
“Shift by shift, night by night, I slowly built up my confidence working in the bar,” he told Die Zeit, crediting the experience with helping him overcome his inhibitions around strangers.
Three decades on from those Stuttgart nights, the England manager faces arguably the greatest challenge of his coaching life as the 2026 World Cup gets underway.
