Ten years and one month ago, Thomas Tuchel was at the end of his first season at Borussia Dortmund.
He was 42 years old and desperate to prove himself as one of football’s sharpest young managers. Dortmund had a good season in the Bundesliga, clicking emphatically after the winter break, finishing a strong second in the league. And on May 21 they went to the Olympiastadion in Berlin, to play Pep Guardiola’s Bayern Munich in the DFB-Pokal final.
This was Guardiola’s final game at Bayern, before he took over at Manchester City. He had just won his third straight Bundesliga title. His Bayern team was remarkable, defensively strong, technically precise and endlessly tactically flexible. Thiago Alcantara, Arturo Vidal, Thomas Muller, Robert Lewandowski and the rest.
But Tuchel relished the tactical chess match with Guardiola. “We prepared everything in this match,” he said. “I prepared everything. We needed to twist the tactics, they twisted the tactics. We twisted the structure, he twisted the structure. It was like a fight. People got tired, it went into extra time.” After 120 minutes, the game finished 0-0.
But there was a problem. Tuchel had spent so much time obsessing over tactical details beforehand, but had ignored something that could be decisive. “The whistle went and I was just not prepared,” he said. “I forgot to prepare for a penalty shoot-out.” So Tuchel was left, scrambling around, asking his exhausted players whether they would take a penalty or not, and in what order. Bayern, on the other hand, were fully prepared and knew exactly what to do: Vidal, Lewandowski, Joshua Kimmich, Muller, Douglas Costa.
You can probably guess by this point, if you did not know already. Sven Bender and Sokratis Papastathopoulos both missed and Dortmund lost. Tuchel was devastated. “A very painful experience and a big, big scar on me, because I felt really, really badly that I had let myself down,” he said. “It was the first time. It will never happen again. So from there, we started our own programme, our own preparation.”
Thomas Tuchel feels England have every base covered for shootouts (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)
A decade on, the spectre of penalties looms over Tuchel again. He is no longer a young manager proving himself at Dortmund but a 52-year-old at the top of the game, trying to guide England to the World Cup final. He will have seen both Germany and the Netherlands get knocked out on penalties on Monday evening, as he prepared to fly to Atlanta on Tuesday for England’s last-32 game with DR Congo. There is every chance that England will need penalties at some point.
At least, this time, Tuchel is not just relying on himself. When he took over the England job, he inherited a well-established and high-functioning penalties operation. The turnaround in England’s record on penalties has been one of the big wins of the last decade, with notable successes against Colombia (2018), Switzerland (2019) and Switzerland again (2024), even if the biggest shoot-out of all, Italy (at the final of Euro 2020) was lost.
“Now I go into the FA and I have — on the highest level, since years and years — a penalty programme that is so easy (for me to) just (pick up) and wait for people to tell me who are the best shooters. We trained it. We have a process in place. So we are prepared.
“This has become such an important part, a very special part of football now, that you can prepare and do the best to be prepared, which we did. We have assistant coaches, we have background staff who just set one of the best programmes in place that I have witnessed. So we know exactly what is going to happen. And the platform is there.”
How England will actually perform in a penalty shoot-out is still ultimately unknowable. But there is confidence in the squad about how England are shaping up.
Declan Rice, speaking to reporters at England’s Kansas City training camp on Monday, could not have been more positive about England’s chances in a shoot-out. “I look at this group now, I don’t think there’s a better crop of penalty-takers that England have probably ever had,” he said, listing Harry Kane, Ivan Toney, Marcus Rashford, Anthony Gordon, Bukayo Saka, Jude Bellingham and himself.
England tasted success in their shootout against Switzerland at Euro 2024 (Dean Mouhtaropoulos/Getty Images)
Rice spoke glowingly about Kane’s penalty record, the repetitions he puts in and the certainty he goes in with. Rice also believes that the Trionda ball being used this summer should give takers an extra edge. “With these balls as well,” he said, “from 12 yards, if you hit it hard and well, I feel like, for keepers, it’s tough to save. If you put them in the corners, it’s really tough.”
If there is a downside to England’s battery of good penalty takers, then it comes for Jordan Pickford. He joked after England’s 2-0 win over Panama in New Jersey that he was now “down the pecking order” for taking one. But he knows his job is to make saves — his stop from Carlos Bacca in Moscow is still one of England’s greatest World Cup moments — and he has confidence in his ability to keep doing that.
“It’s all about belief and believing in each other,” Pickford said. “They have confidence I can save a penalty. I have confidence they can score them. But we want to be winning the game, we don’t want to go to penalties.”
Tuchel ultimately knows that even the best penalty process in the world, or the best penalty takers, is “no guarantee” of anything. He has not been involved in a shoot-out since 2022, when his Chelsea side lost both domestic cup finals to Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool on penalties. The Carabao Cup shoot-out ended up with every single player scoring until Kepa Arrizabalaga missed. Liverpool won 11-10.
“I had crazy penalty shootouts,” Tuchel said. “So it is what it is. But now, it is on the highest level at the moment, thanks to the FA of course, and thanks to my development. It is just another example that you sometimes have to have a painful experience to understand where to get better.”
