Thomas Tuchel Rulebreaker

Tuchel also met up with people like Matthew Benham. At the time, the betting company owner was trying to get his club Brentford FC promoted to the Premier League and had started investing in FC Midtjylland in Denmark as a majority owner. To improve his teams he relied primarily on the knowledge used in creating betting odds. ‘Numbers are the holy grail for me,’ Benham once said. Such an objective and analytical approach made it possible to work out how to achieve the optimum performance from teams. Benham estimated that the performance enhancement potential available in the optimal use of data was 5 per cent. In competitive sports, such an improvement would be a quantum leap.

Steffan Görsdorf of the Potsdam Institute for Match Analysis explains that in important games Tuchel has sometimes made mistakes that don’t fit his usual approach – mistakes that are out of character and unexpected, like the Ginter substitution before Liverpool’s corner. Görsdorf describes this as a ‘certain constant in Tuchel’s career so far’. Time and again, he says, the coach has had the tendency to act against his instincts in important games. At PSG, after a first-leg win against Manchester United at Old Trafford, he did something similar when he took an unusually defensive approach in the second leg of the Champions League round of sixteen tie.

The decision to join PSG rather than Chelsea, where Tuchel was also said to have been a potential candidate to take over as coach in 2018, was, according to many in the industry, also motivated by the desire to distance himself from Klopp – at least at that point in time.