“This is a dark day for English football. We are the laughing stock of the world game.”

That’s how The Daily Mail reacted to a recent UEFA Champions League winner being appointed as Gareth Southgate’s successor with the England men’s national team.

“A DARK DAY FOR ENGLAND,” boomed the headline, while capital letters also made sure readers were aware that Tuchel is, in fact, GERMAN.

If this is a dark day for anyone, it’s for the many fine sports journalists who work for The Daily Mail who saw their back page festooned with such jibbering nonsense. The right-wing newspaper’s comment writers truly are the laughing stock of British journalism.

But objections over Tuchel coming in to try and get England “over the line” — this phrase cropped up more than once in his Tuesday press conference, referring to Southgate’s agonising tournament near misses – are not rooted in simple jingoism.

MORE: Why is the England manager not English? FA explains search that led to Thomas Tuchel appointment

Plenty of commentators who would run a mile from the “Two World Wars, One World Cup” crowd (all the very best with them, Thomas) bemoaned the missed opportunity for one of Southgate’s compatriots to build on the work he did, to deepen re-established bonds between a national team and its football public.

Gareth Southgate’s England

It is worth remembering that the Southgate era was not all sunlit uplands. The atmosphere around the England team as they struggled at Euro 2024 and beat a path to the final through sheer force of will bordered on toxic. The manager had given fans their best times in living memory. Some of them threw beer cups at him.

But Southgate’s England at its best was an exercise in progressive patriotism, where young players were given a platform to stand up for what they believe in. They were in the business of inspiration rather than tub-thumping and nearly…nearly made history.

It would be a big ask of any coach, from England or elsewhere to match Southgate’s knack for reading the room. There is no guarantee another Englishman, certainly none of those who came before him, would have grasped the national mood and shaped it as he did at his best.

Social intuition is a great thing in such a relentlessly public-facing role, but you can’t really interview football managers on that basis. You can ask them how they’d set a team up, what they’ve won and how they will win with your team. It’s hard to imagine Tuchel giving anything but impressive answers to all of those questions. He is a superb tactician.

But then, what about all those potentially superb English coaches and their pathway?

Gary Neville and others have framed the appointment as a slap in the face for the St George’s Park project. If the central hub of excellence in a powerhouse football nation cannot help to create the conditions for an English coach to take the top job, then what are we doing here? You’d never get this sort of thing in Spain, Italy, Germany or France.

No you wouldn’t. But England is different. We have a unique football culture bursting with pride, idiosyncrasies and more than couple of blind spots.

MORE: Thomas Tuchel’s tactics and what his England team might look like

Why are there no elite English coaches?

There are a couple of main differences between England and the other heavyweight countries mentioned above. Spain, Italy, Germany and France have 22 major honours between them. France’s four is the smallest haul of the quartet. England have the 1966 World Cup. That’s it.

Secondly, it is a long time since English coaching bequeathed ideas that changed the football world. Alf Ramsey’s “wingless wonders” of 1966 were a fairly radical departure, but you realistically have to go back almost a century to Herbert Chapman’s pioneering WM formation to find a time when England was truly at the forefront of tactical innovation.

That is not to say there have not been great English coaches since, even though Howard Wilkinson remains the most recent Englishman to win the country’s top division as a manger with Leeds United in 1991/92. It’s more that we have been a nation of pragmatists, those who refine and adapt rather than blaze a trail.

“We are in a rut when it comes to English coaching,” Neville, who served as an assistant to Roy Hodsgon during his time as England manager between 2012 and 2016, told Sky Sports News.” English coaching is one of the least respected big nations in Europe when it comes to taking charge of a football team. Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese coaches are renowned for their styles of play, for their philosophy.

“We don’t have a clear identity as an English nation of what we are anymore. We haven’t built a style, we haven’t got a coach who’s built a style that’s unique to us.”

But that lack of a unique style has proved to be an advantage, a lucrative blank canvas, at club level.

Is there a Premier League style?

Spain’s Dutch-influenced positional play and Germany’s gegenpressing have been the dominant tactical ideologies of the 21st century, shaping the game across the world. Those ideas are now thoroughly incorporated within the halls of St George’s Park, which was established in 2012.

Comparable centres of excellence in Europe are Clairefontaine in France and Italy’s Coverciano, nestled in the Tuscan hills. They opened in 1988 and 1958 respectively. Thriving coaching cultures take time to develop and England’s thriving age-group teams demonstrate fine progress from a standing start over the past decade.

All that considered, what claim does England have to be a major nation spoken of in the same breath as countries that actually win things? The simple answer is the Premier League.

For all its imperfections and ongoing civil war at boardroom level, the Premier League is English football’s most enduring gift to the world. As a domestic league, it sets a standard for excellence because it attracts the finest talent from everywhere. Yes, this is down to money rather than any over-arching philosophy, but the result is a level of competition where the best — especially coaches — want to come and test themselves.

At Wembley on Tuesday, Tuchel spoke about wanting to get back to England having enjoyed his time at Chelsea so much. Pep Guardiola has spent more than double the amount of time at Manchester City as he has in any other job. Jurgen Klopp rejuvenated Liverpool, compiling Anfield’s greatest side since their 1980s glory days.

This is the day-to-day environment in which the best English players have developed. Their individual and collective quality makes the national team job attractive to a coach like Tuchel. Turning him down due to the colour of his passport would needlessly deny England’s players the sort of environment they thrive in week after week, one of internationalism and achievement. Maybe no other leading international team would appoint a foreign coach, but none of them suit a foreign coach as much as England and its globally consumed top division do.

The next step is for more homegrown contenders than Eddie Howe and Graham Potter to be in the England conversation, but it’s not as if Tuchel will raze St George’s Park to the ground. English theories, ideas and identities will continue to mingle and evolve. There is a system to support Tuchel and form him to enhance, something that was not the case when Sven Goran-Eriksson and Fabio Capello were parachuted in as Three Lions figureheads.

The likes of Italy and Spain have more romantic stories to tell. But rather than wistfully regretting how we never built our own Jerusalem, the English game should not be afraid to harness the powerful reality of its football melting pot. Thomas Tuchel makes sense as the head coach of the Premier League’s national team.