The question was inevitable.
At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.
“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”
The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.
Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.
“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”
Not everyone agrees.
English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.
“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”
“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”
That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”
While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.
And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.
Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.
"I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”
For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.
Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.
Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.
Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality."
The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.
The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.
Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.
That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.
“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.
AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
Portugal manager Roberto Martinez during a press conference at the SMiSA Stadium, Paisley, Scotland, Monday Oct. 14, 2024. (Andrew Milligan/PA via AP)
The United States' coach Mauricio Pochettino stands in the sideline during an international friendly soccer match against Mexico at Akron Stadium in Guadalajara, Mexico, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)
The newly appointed England men's soccer team manager Thomas Tuchel smiles as he speaks during a press conference held at Wembley Stadium in London, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali)
With just 21 days to go before the final votes are cast in the 2024 presidential season, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are scrambling to win over and turn out Black voters, women and other key constituencies in what looks to be a razor-tight election.
A coalition of Republicans backing Harris will campaign with the Democratic presidential nominee in pivotal Pennsylvania before she sits down with Fox News for an interview airing Wednesday evening.
GOP nominee Donald Trump, meanwhile, is appearing on TV Wednesday in two town halls — one with a woman-only audience that Fox News Channel recorded Tuesday, and the other with Hispanic voters, hosted by Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-language television network.
Follow the AP’s Election 2024 coverage at: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024.
Here's the latest:
Donald Trump is calling Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris a survivor, offering faint praise while noting her early failure in the 2020 presidential nominating campaign.
Asked during a Univision town hall-style event to name three things about his opponent he likes, Trump said, “She seems to have an ability to survive.”
“Because she was out of the race, and all of a sudden she’s running for president,” Trump added.
The vice president ended her Democratic primary campaign in 2020 and emerged as the nominee four years later after President Joe Biden dropped out.
“That’s a great ability that some people have, and some people don’t have,” Trump said, adding, “she seems to have some pretty longtime friendships.”
“And she seems to have a nice way about her,” Trump said, offering an uncharacteristic personal compliment for someone he has described as “stupid” and “incompetent.”
Donald Trump is facing pointed questions during a town hall-style event for Univision, the nation’s leading Spanish-language network, including why "your own vice president doesn’t want to support you now.”
The question came from a man asking about the January 6, 2021, siege of the U.S. Capitol, when thousands of Trump supporters attacked Capitol police and breached the building trying to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump, in a typical refrain about the violent confrontation, said, “That was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions.”
Trump also fielded questions about immigration, guns and abortion, including whether he agrees with his wife, Melania, whose says in a new memoir that she supports abortion rights.
“Do you agree with her?”
Trump said he encourages Melania to support what she wants to support, and in true fashion, plugged the book.
As for the justices he picked for the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteeing abortion rights, he said it “is what everybody wanted for 52 years.”
“This issue has torn our country apart,” Trump said, claiming that the country will now “heal.”
Vice President Kamala Harris says Republican Donald Trump’s comment that he is the “father of IVF” is “quite bizarre, actually.”
Trump made the comment during a Fox News town hall with an all-female audience that aired Wednesday.
Asked about the Trump comment as she departed Detroit for a campaign visit to Pennsylvania on Wednesday, Harris said that “if what he meant is taking responsibility, well then yeah, he should take responsibility for the fact that one in three women in America lives in a Trump abortion ban state.”
She added that "what Trump should take responsibility for is that couples who are praying and hoping and working toward growing a family have been so disappointed and harmed by the fact that IVF treatments have now been put at risk.”
“Let’s not be distracted by his choice of words,” Harris said. “The reality is his actions have been very harmful to women and families in America.”
Trump had been promoting the idea that the Republican Party is a “leader” on IVF. That characterization is rejected by Democrats, who have seized on access to the common but expensive fertility treatment as another dimension of reproductive rights threatened by Republicans and a second Trump presidency.
Jimmy Carter has cast his ballot in the 2024 Election. The former president voted by mail on Wednesday, according to The Carter Center in Atlanta.
Carter celebrated his 100th birthday on Oct. 1 at his home in Plains, Georgia, where he’s been living in hospice care.
His son Chip Carter said before the family gathering that his father had this election very much in mind.
“He’s plugged in,” Chip Carter told The Associated Press. “I asked him two months ago if he was trying to live to be 100, and he said, ‘No, I’m trying to live to vote for Kamala Harris.’”
The Carter Center statement said Jimmy Carter had voted by mail and that the center had no more details to share.
Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are competing for workers in blue wall states with deep union roots.
Harris is rallying in union halls, standing alongside Michigan's most powerful labor leader, while Trump fires back from rural steel factories, urging middle-class workers to trust him as their true champion. They're making their case in starkly different terms. Campaigning for Harris, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain says the American dream now depends on electing Democrats.
But Harris failed to secure two key union endorsements that went to President Joe Biden, who calls himself the most labor-friendly president in U.S. history. The International Association of Firefighters and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters both declined to endorse anyone. Any break in labor movement unity can have an amplifier effect in a place like Michigan, where most people have a family member or close friend in a union.
Many Midwestern communities once core to the labor movement have shifted to the right as jobs moved overseas. And non-college-educated white voters have been voting more conservatively, concerned about cultural issues involving race and gender.
Trump has seized on these trends while accusing Harris of mandating electric vehicles in the home of America's Big Three automakers. Trump also labeled Fain a “stupid idiot” and praised Tesla CEO Elon Musk for firing workers who went on strike.
Former first lady Michelle Obama will headline a turnout-minded, celebrity-studded “Party at the Polls” rally in Atlanta aimed at engaging younger and first-time voters as well as voters of color.
The Oct. 29 event will be hosted by When We All Vote, a nonpartisan civic engagement group that Obama founded in 2018 to “change the culture around voting” and reach out to people who are less likely to engage in politics and elections.
The group’s co-chairs include professional basketball players Stephen Curry and Chris Paul; musical artists Becky G, H.E.R., Selena Gomez, Jennifer Lopez and Janelle Monáe; beauty influencer Bretman Rock; and actors Tom Hanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Kerry Washington.
The group has hosted more than 500 “Party at the Polls” events, ranging from pop-up block parties in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Philadelphia to voter registration partnerships with professional sports leagues and music festivals. Executive Director Beth Lynk said the group chose Atlanta for Obama's appearance because of the state’s diversity and the impact that only a handful of voters can make in Georgia.
“A lot of people don’t believe that their votes have power. But they do, plain and simple,” Lynk said. “We know that democracy has to work for all of us and that’s what we will be stressing at this rally.”
A coalition of Republicans backing Kamala Harris will campaign with the Democratic presidential nominee in pivotal Pennsylvania before she sits down with Fox News for an interview airing at 6 p.m. Wednesday.
GOP nominee Donald Trump, meanwhile, will appear on TV Wednesday in two town halls — one with a woman-only audience that Fox News Channel recorded Tuesday, and the other with with Hispanics, hosted by Univision, the nation’s largest Spanish-language television network.
As the race entered its final three weeks, Harris is expected to talk about upholding the Constitution and defending patriotism in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a vote-rich stretch of suburban Philadelphia where Democrats have held a narrow advantage in recent presidential elections. Flanking her will be former U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and other GOP officials who argue that Trump is a threat to American democracy.
Trump's Univision event Wednesday afternoon in Miami will air at 10 p.m. Trump is counting on increased Latino support even as he centers his campaign on a darker view of immigration, suggesting migrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
Attention, American men: Donald Trump and his allies want you to believe your vote says big things about your masculinity. The Republican nominee is amping up his hypermasculine tone and support of traditional gender roles, a reflection of the surgical campaign-within-a-campaign for the votes of men in a showdown with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.
But where Harris is deploying “dudes” who use bro-ey language and occasional scolding to boost her support particularly among Black and Hispanic males, Trump’s camp is meeting men in alpha-male terms, often with crude and demeaning language.
“If you are a man in this country and you don’t vote for Donald Trump, you’re not a man,” Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk said on his podcast.
As the razor’s edge contest elevates the importance of small caches of voters who are apathetic or on the fence in battleground states, both camps are reaching beyond their ideological bases.
“You’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is?” former President Barack Obama scolded Black men last week in Pennsylvania, the largest battleground state. “That’s not acceptable.”
An Associated Press survey finds that more than 63,000 Georgia voters have had their qualifications challenged since July 1. That’s a big surge from 2023 and the first half of 2024, when the AP found that about 18,000 voters were challenged. But only about 1% of those challenged in recent months have been removed from the voting rolls or placed into challenged status, mostly in one county.
The challenges are part of a wide-ranging national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to enlist Republican activists to remove people they view as suspect from the voting rolls.
The Georgia push is part of a national effort coordinated by Donald Trump’s allies to remove people they view as suspect from the voting rolls. The effort to remove voters has drawn scrutiny from the U.S. Justice Department, which in September issued a seven-page guidance memo that aims to limit challenges and block parts of the new Georgia law by citing 1993’s National Voter Registration Act.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a Univision town hall, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, in Doral, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
John Olsen, of Ankeny, Iowa, stands in line for early voting at the Polk County Election Office, Wednesday, Oct. 16, 2024, in Des Moines, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump greets supporters at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pa. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris claps on stage during a campaign rally at Erie Insurance Arena, in Erie, Pa., Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem dance to the song "Y.M.C.A." at a campaign town hall at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center & Fairgrounds, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024, in Oaks, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a stop at Cred Cafe, a local Detroit small business owned by former NBA players Joe and Jamal Crawford, in Detroit, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
