Thomas Tuchel’s England reign started in seamless fashion this month, with comfortable victories over Albania and Latvia at Wembley Stadium. His first international camp with England will provide the foundations for the tactics and squad alterations that will hopefully facilitate success for the national team at the World Cup next summer. European qualification games against low-possession, low block opposition rarely engender excitement, but this was still a positive start for the German.

The media and fanbase though are still grappling with the reality of having a foreign manager at the helm – more so someone that represents the auld enemy in Germany. Whilst Tuchel is very much an anglophile these day, he represents just the third permanent foreign manager in the history of the men’s England national team, all of which have come in the 21^st century. Each appointment has been met with controversy and backlash, with both the Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello reigns continually dogged by supporter unease. Tuchel will be judged far harsher than some of his predecessors, and a large portion of the fanbase will be waiting for his first misstep.

The debate around a foreign manager singing the national anthem has been an issue that everyone appears to want to bury, but also one that many people want to debate and take a view on – we are clearly just as guilty in this regard. Tuchel cannot win though, and his decision to respond to a question on the topic was a mis-step. During his press-conference ahead of the Albania game he made the following comments:

“I feel that it is not just a given. You cannot just sing it. That’s why I decided that I will not sing it in my first matches,”

“Maybe I have to dive more into the culture and earn my right from you, from the players, from the supporters, so everyone feels like ‘he should sing it now, he’s one of our own, he’s the English manager, he should sing it’,” he said.

Tuchel has added credence and legitimacy to a debate that really shouldn’t matter. If England win the World Cup next summer most fans won’t care if he did so wearing a German tracksuit and singing ‘Deutschlandlied’ throughout. There is no ‘right’ answer to this debate, and he is going to potentially to do more harm than good by even engaging on the topic. For every person that sees Tuchel as ‘one of us’ by singing the anthem, there will be another person that will view it as inauthentic and an affront to his own German heritage.  

On the other side of the debate are those that would criticise Tuchel for not singing, because that would suggest a lack of commitment to the national cause and clear evidence that he is an outsider without true care for the success of English football. In reality there have been plenty of club and international managers with little historic affinity to the club or country they have managed, but who have had tremendous success. Conversely, there are plenty of club and national legends that have proven to be tragic failures when it came to managing the sides closest to their hearts. Perhaps someone without the same level of emotional attachment as the fans will actually do the national side some good.

Yet what is best for the team is not always what is most popular, and it is likely that a straw poll on Tuchel’s appointment itself would prove inconclusive. On the issue of the anthem specifically, it would probably have been better for Tuchel to decide one way or another and to move on with the actual footballing side of the job. By giving an indeterminate response, there is a risk that we continue the debate about his commitment, instead of discussing whether there has been any noticeable improvement on the field.

Maybe it will take a German to break the English footballing curse, but does matter if they sing the national anthem in the process?