The Athletic FC

Welcome to the Athletic FC podcast with me, Matt Davis-Adams.

England has extended Thomas Tuchel's contract beyond the 2026 World Cup.

So why has this happened now?

And with sacking season in full flow, how does this impact the wider managerial market?

Yeah. season in full flow. How does this impact the wider managerial market? Joining me today, I have Tim Spears. You okay, Tim?

Hi, Matt. You okay? Yeah, good, thank you. Olly Kay's back with us as well. How are you doing, Olly?

Very good, thank you. Very good. Excellent. So, right then, Thomas Tuchel's contract originally set to expire after the 2026 World Cup.

Tim, you've been covering this for the athletic, well, the details of the extension, and why have England made this decision now?

It feels like a pretty sort of straight extension to 2028, yeah, covering the home euros.

Yeah, the sort of the extra details of it haven't really sort of come out yet. If there are ones to be found, I'm sure there will be like

maybe a break clause, for example, after the World Cup, which FAC and Mark Bullingham wouldn't

sort of go into that yesterday. I suspect this is probably something that they maybe semi-agreed to when he joined that,

you know, we'll say it's 18 months because I'm not sure if I'm going to like it.

I think it would be Tuchel's sort of basic sort of look at it because he obviously

been only in club management exclusively before, wasn't sure if he would take to international management.

This 18-month original contract is pretty unusual for England.

You know, they always tend to give long deals when they hire a manager.

They probably wouldn't have been too keen on that 18 months,

so I think they'd probably come to some kind of agreement where, look,

if it's going well, we'll agree to sit down before the World Cup and extend it. But yeah, if you look at the way the FA have done things, you know, well, forever, really. It's always been at least sort of four years that the new managers get when they come in, apart from Sam Adelaidey who only got two. Maybe they saw something come in. but yeah it seems like it was probably Tuchel who insisted on that 18-month thing initially because he wasn't sure if he would take to the lack of day-and-day involvement that, of course, you get from club management. So I think it adds a layer of stability and ends a bit of speculation that inevitably would have happened over the summer. Interesting timing, Ollie, isn't it? I mean, we're four months away from the World Cup. We're over a month away from England's next game. They've got this pair of friendlies against Uruguay and Japan. Why do you think it's been announced now? They're being proactive. They felt that they didn't want to sort of wait for it to get nearer and wait for any, to become a pressurized

situation. It's fairly sensible from that point of view. It does, it does remove that question

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