“They look like two grandmasters, a clash of minds between Fischer and Spassky.”

Editor’s note: This text was first published ahead of the 2020/21 Champions League final. We publish its updated version before a new round of confrontation between Tuchel and Guardiola.

In 2021, Thomas Tuchel became the first coach to reach the Champions League final two years in a row with different teams. At first, his PSG failed to cope with Bayern, but a year later, with Chelsea, they beat Pep Guardiola’s Man City (1: 0) for the third time in a row.

The previous two victories happened in England. In the first 4 months in London, Tuchel dealt with a bunch of top coaches , including Guardiola twice. Chelsea won 1-0 at Wembley in the FA Cup semi-finals and 2-1 at the Etihad in the Premier League.

Pep promised that he would use these defeats as a lesson before the Champions League final. It did not help him then, but in the next season of the Premier League, the Catalan already got used to Tuchel and beat him twice with a minimum score of 1:0. Thomas spoke of his opponent with traditional admiration: 

“When you play with the Guardiola team, you understand that the most difficult match has come. Now he is the coach of the best team in Europe, they are the standard in the league. Playing against Pep is a high level, and it is important to be at a high level of coaching yourself in order to instill confidence in your team and show the best football.”

Tuchel managed to beat Pep only on the sixth attempt. When they worked in Germany, the forces were too unequal: Tuchel’s Mainz lost twice to Guardiola’s Bayern, and the German’s Borussia lost twice and drew once with Munich.

The first ending in their confrontation happened there. In the decisive match for the German Cup, everything was decided only in the penalty shootout.

At the same time, mutual respect and sympathy were always felt. Tuchel, while still at Mainz, flew several times to Barcelona to study Guardiola’s team live. He read all the biographies of Pep and admitted that that Barca was for him the standard of team play.

Once the Mainz coach was watching a documentary about Guardiola on the bus. When a graph appeared on the screen showing Barça’s defensive schemes, he suddenly paused and stuck.

“For some, this picture meant nothing,” says former Mainz sporting director Christian Heidel in an interview with The Independent. “But for Tuchel, it’s a treasure trove of information. The screen remained on pause for two hours. That’s how much Tuchel spent studying the charts.”

Tuchel himself, in an interview with FourFourTwo, explained his attitude to the methods of the Catalan as follows: “Guardiola is the best coach in the world, even if he does not like to admit it. His work at Barcelona made a strong impression on me. But this does not mean that I will copy his style. This is impossible”.  

Their first meeting outside the football field took place in 2014 – in the Munich bar Schumann’s. The participants of that meeting are still talking about this many hours of conversation.