Though their elimination at the hands of Paraguay was hardly something to celebrate across Germany, at least in one particular corner of Bavaria, there might be less of a need to worry about the prospect of having to split one's affections further into the World Cup. Now that Die Mannschaft are heading back home, the hierarchy at FC Augsburg can get behind one of their own and cheer on England, or to be more precise, their manager Thomas Tuchel.
At 52 years of age, Tuchel ranks among the most experienced and successful coaches in the World Cup field. A domestic champion with Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain, he has also won the Champions League with Chelsea and is now bidding to end England's 60-year wait for major silverware at the World Cup. It is quite the rise in a senior coaching career that began among the dilapidated buildings of FC Augsburg II, at the time playing in the fifth tier of German football.
Among those who came under his tutelage were future Germany boss Julian Nagelsmann, like Tuchel, an injury-plagued young defender who would pivot to coaching at an early age. Another was Michael Ströll, who would take an unusual path of his own to a position of great authority. Rejoining the club as an intern in the front office in 2006, Ströll rose up the ranks to be named chief executive of the Bundesliga side in 2024.
With Tuchel's long-standing assistant and video analyst Benjamin Weber on staff as Augsburg's sporting director, there is a flavor to this Bundesliga regular and their senior side that harks back to the B team playing in far less illustrious circumstances. No wonder, when you hear the admiration that their CEO has for his former boss.
"Thomas was a nerd," Ströll tells CBS Sports. "In a positive way. He was so detailed, so ambitious. Already in the fifth league of Germany at that time, you could see those qualities. You couldn't know where he would go, of course, but I was very positive he could have a good career. I just did not know that it would end up in the Bundesliga and the Premier League, winning the Champions League."
How could he? As Ströll notes, imagining such a rise would be "crazy" given where their careers began.
"If you look back 20 years ago, we started in an old building that was broken. No pitches, no hydration at the pitches, really horrible circumstances," he said.
That characterisation of Tuchel as the tactical obsessive has endured ever since and with good cause. Few other elite managers are quite as likely to pepper their press conferences with references to expected goals, whose attention to detail is such that he tried to poach the Olympiacos groundsman when Mainz manager, so impressed was he with the cut of his grass. Perhaps the archetypal Tuchel story involves a lunch with Pep Guardiola, then at Bayern Munich, one which descended into a tactical conference through the medium of salt and pepper shakers.
One wonders how that worked in the lower reaches of late 2000s German football. The answer, of course, is that it didn't. And yet Tuchel found a way.
"At the time, there was no data for the fifth league. What there was was a lot of paper and pens and writing. It doesn't matter whether he has data or technology. He only needs something around to show what he has in mind," Weber said.
"He's really a brain of football."
Tuchel's work at Augsburg II soon caught the eye of Bundesliga side Mainz, who tasked him with building on the work done by Jurgen Klopp. Weber, a former tennis player working in video analysis in the scouting department, was one of the few left on the Mainz staff who was familiar to Tuchel.
Soon, he was promoted to what he describes as something of a threadbare staff, the sort where his work encompassed everything from assessing opposition to hurrying around shops to find the right trainers for their first match together against Bayer Leverkusen. For reasons he cannot quite remember, it was extremely important that they furnished themselves with the right kind of Nikes.
"Every detail was important for us at that moment," says Weber. "There was nobody, it was just him as a head coach and me trying to handle the situations around and to deal with it."
From Mainz to Chelsea via Borussia Dortmund and Paris Saint-Germain, Weber and Tuchel would be together for 14 years of a "very tense, very big friendship", one with "very many experiences together on the positive but also on the negative". Who could have believed that the coaching wunderkind of the German fifth tier would eventually have to hold Chelsea together amid the chaos of early 2022 as sanctions on owner Roman Abramovich forced Tuchel, long known for his combustibility, to act as an emotional shield for Chelsea's fans, players and employees.
"I learned a lot, a lot," says Weber of their time together at Stamford Bridge. "I learned to be very clear, both in your speech in front of the group and your decisions.
"But I think the main thing is adaptation, to adapt every day, day by day, because the circumstances, the conditions change day by day. You come to the office and suddenly a player is injured or someone wants to leave the club, whatever. You cannot plan for that.
"You try to, and that's very good because you need to have an objective. But this adaptation day by day to deal with new situations, that's the main thing. And this is, in my opinion, also the biggest strength of him, to adapt to every moment in a football game or every moment in a football club."
Those are lessons that Weber has looked to carry through at Augsburg, where his first year as sporting director saw head coach Sandro Wagner sacked in early December, his now permanent successor Manuel Baum leading the Fuggerstädter to a top half finish in the Bundesliga. Almost two decades after playing under Tuchel as a player, Ströll also finds himself harking back to what he was taught at Augsburg II.
"The most impressive thing that I learned from him is always to think not only one step ahead, keep three steps ahead," he says. "There's no difference for him whether it's the fifth league, the Bundesliga or the Champions League.
"You always have to think further and further and further. You cannot stand still because otherwise the other opponents will pass you. That is the most impressive that I got from Thomas from our time together."
And so with no national team to cheer on and (for the time being at least) no Augsburg players in England's path, there will be a little corner of Bavaria, perhaps even just a few offices at the Augsburg Arena, that are rooting for Tuchel through the remainder of this World Cup.
"It would be great if he would win this World Cup with England," says Weber. "He would deserve this much more than many other head coaches, at least from my perspective."
