Edge: Leadership Secrets from Footballs’s Top Thinkers. Ben Lyttleton
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player Marco Reus, or the cult hero Shinji Kagawa.
In this chapter, I speak with the two managers who hold Dembélé’s future in their hands. I went to Germany to meet his club coach at Borussia Dortmund, Thomas Tuchel, and to France to see national team coach Didier Deschamps. They were excited about Dembélé and his potential. It’s their job to confirm that into talent.
As the season went on, it was clear that whatever they were doing was working. Dembélé provided some of the outstanding moments in European football: a dribble, burst of pace and outside-of-the-boot cross for Aubameyang to score in a Champions League knock-out tie at Monaco; a cutback, which left his marker David Alaba dizzy and grounded, and a curling left-foot shot, which went in off the crossbar, to win the German Cup semi-final at rivals Bayern Munich (and a nice celebration to follow, running straight to Tuchel for a hug). He repeated the move in the German Cup final, scoring a similar goal in a Man of the Match performance to seal Borussia Dortmund its first trophy for five years.
On the final day of the Bundesliga season, he pulled off an outrageous assist, scooping the ball over five Werder Bremen defenders for Aubameyang to volley home another goal. He was outstanding in an end-of-season friendly against England, scoring the winning goal in a 3–2 victory. In late August, just a few weeks before this book was first published, Barcelona signed Dembélé for a reported £135 million, a fee that made him the second-most expensive player in the world. (His new coach would be Ernesto Valverde, formerly of Athletic Club de Bilbao.)
Dembélé was not our only topic of conversation. Both coaches gave me a unique insight into the challenges of modern leadership. Their stories can teach us a lot about the importance of communication, self-development, motivation, disruptive thinking and, above all, adaptability, in today’s professional environment.
Deschamps does not like to talk about individual players but he made an exception for Dembélé. ‘There are times when maybe during a game there’s not much going on and then he will do something special,’ he told me. ‘It’s about getting that quality to express itself over the long term. But as far as he’s concerned, psychologically he considers himself ready. He’s also exposed to daily demands at a club that’s structured to deal with a player of enormous potential. He has got something.’
Tuchel agrees. In training sessions, the coach will tell the players to only play one-touch passes, or two-touch give-and-goes, or do a spatial awareness exercise. ‘It’s no problem for Ousmane. Within minutes, he gets it and I say, “Hey please, what was that?” He adapts so quickly to everything.’
This is crucial to success. In his short career so far, Dembélé has adapted to all the contexts he has had to face. These have involved new teams, relationships, venues, levels of performance, cultures, countries, languages, and levels of media attention. Tuchel and Deschamps understand this better than most: they have also learned to adapt to get their edge.
Thomas Tuchel walks into the Italian restaurant around the corner from the Borussia Dortmund club offices, a five-minute stroll from the Signal-Iduna Park stadium, looking nothing like a football coach. He is wearing high-top trainers, skinny jeans, a grey jumper, leather jacket and a flat cap. He looks more like an artisanal coffee-shop owner than the most exciting coach of his generation.
But that’s what he is. He has been known to change his team’s formation up to six times in one game, and his original tactical ideas have led to comparisons with Pep Guardiola. In his first job as head coach, at Mainz, he took a tiny club to its highest-ever league finish and a place in Europe; at Borussia Dortmund, one of the best-supported clubs in Germany, he improved what the New York Times called ‘the most gifted collection of young players anywhere in Europe, crafted into a team of rich spirit and endless adventure’ – until, after we met, he left his position as coach, ending his second season at the club with victory in the German Cup Final.
Tuchel talks about adaptability as a necessity of leadership, though in his case it requires bravery and humility: bravery to stick to his philosophy, even if results don’t support it (which doesn’t happen too often); and humility to know he doesn’t have all the answers, while remaining open-minded enough to constantly search for them.
‘Tuchel’s team of the future may have no systems of defence, midfield or attack,’ wrote Cathrin Gilbert in German broadsheet Die Zeit,‘but simply “action principles” based on how his players behave in certain situations, the respect they have for the space, and how their character shows itself in the way they play football.’1
He does not know what his next tactical change will be, or where his next idea will come from, but he is open to anything – even, as he said, playing with only two defenders (most teams play with four, though some, Dortmund included, play with three).2
‘Two at the back, really?’ I say.
‘Why not?’ he responds, his clear-blue eyes glinting with mischief.
I ask Tuchel if he is trying to reinvent football. ‘No! A clear no. It’s not reinvention. That would mean I am changing for the sake of change. I’m not looking for change. I’m looking for an edge!’
He remembers Mercedes chief executive Dieter Zetsche comparing business to walking up the down escalator. If you do nothing, you go down. If you walk at a certain speed, you stay where you are. So you’d better run. ‘You have to adapt,’ says Tuchel. ‘It’s not about reinvention. It’s to adapt and to adapt and to adapt and to find the solutions quicker than others.’
And if that means doing things differently, then he will. Just before we meet, a year-old video of American basketball coach Geno Auriemma has gone viral. He coached the USA women’s basketball team to Olympic gold in 2012 and 2016 and has led the Connecticut Huskies to five straight national titles. ‘On our team, we put a huge premium on body language,’ Auriemma told a press conference in 2016. ‘And, if your body language is bad, you will never get in the game. Ever. I don’t care how good you are … When I watch game film, I’m checking on the bench. If somebody is asleep over there, if somebody doesn’t care, if somebody’s not engaged, they will never get in the game.’
‘I know what he’s talking about,’ Tuchel agrees. ‘We call it “the eyes”. Does he have good eyes or not? Can I trust this guy? It’s about binding relationships and respect and belief and faith. Even if you just sense it’s not there in a player, it’s already complicated.’ Tuchel sometimes looks over at his bench during a match and might see a player disengaged from the game. He will decide then not to bring them on. ‘You have to adapt.’
I’ve never heard a coach say this before. Instead, when Mario Balotelli needs two minutes to get someone else to tie his shoelaces during a game for Nice, or when Paris Saint-Germain substitute Serge Aurier takes seven minutes to get ready to come on, they are indulged as ‘characters’. Tuchel would not be so forgiving.
Tuchel tells me that shaping the personality of his players is just as important as improving their football ability.3 This is part of his own methodology that he has developed to improve performance.
This is why Tuchel was the first sporting leader asked to address a fascinating group of disruptive innovators called the Rulebreaker Society. It was founded in Switzerland in 2013. Its members include Walter Gunz, who set up Media Markt, Europe’s largest retailer of consumer electronics; Gabor Forgacs, a medical entrepreneur who has pioneered 3D bio-printing technologies to produce human tissues for medical and pharmaceutical use; and Tan Lee, whose company Emotiv uses electroencephalography (EEG) to track mental performance, monitor emotions, and control virtual and physical objects with thoughts.
The Rulebreaker Society claims to bring together people who seek to innovate and inspire through their visions. They see progress in business and society through the creative destruction of conventional rules. Its inner circle has put together a manifesto, not of rules (of course!), but as a platform for inspiration:
1 No company will be market leader