“I wouldn’t be where I am without him”

Before the reunion in the Bundesliga, Bo Svensson from FSV Mainz 05 thanked his fellow coach Thomas Tuchel from Bayern Munich.

Before the reunion in the Bundesliga, Bo Svensson from FSV Mainz 05 thanked his fellow coach Thomas Tuchel from Bayern Munich for the time we spent together. “Without him I wouldn’t be where I am,” said the 43-year-old on Saturday evening in the ZDF sports studio. Tuchel, under whom he played in Mainz for five years, is “a special coach, a special person” for him.

Next Saturday (3.30 p.m.) Tuchel will return to his old place of work in Mainz as the new Bayern coach. “It’s interesting to see how he handles the task,” said Svensson of one of his most successful predecessors. Tuchel recently disappointed with Munich in the first leg of the Champions League quarter-finals at Manchester City (0: 3) and in the league in a 1-1 draw against relegation candidate TSG Hoffenheim, in the DFB Cup the German record champions were eliminated against SC Freiburg (1:2) out.

From the time under Tuchel, Svensson remembered his meticulousness in particular. “We didn’t have a training session in the fifth year that we had in the first year,” said the Dane. The Bayern coach had previously praised Mainz in a ZDF interview as a “great guy” who had a high level of tactical understanding even as a player. Even then, he could have imagined that Svensson “can become a good coach if he commits himself to it and falls in love with this job,” said Tuchel: “That’s obviously how it happened.”