Why Tuchel survived, and 17 others didn't

Thomas Tuchel took England to the semi-finals of the 2026 World Cup and lost to Argentina. Three months on, he's still the England manager, the only outcome that looked remotely likely once the dust settled on a run that ended one game short of the final but well ahead of where plenty of critics had England pegged before the tournament.

Elsewhere, the churn has been brutal. Seventeen managers who led nations to this summer's World Cup are no longer in charge of them. Semi-final runs, group-stage exits, quarter-final defeats: it hasn't mattered much. National federations have moved on regardless.

The names doing the rounds

The Guardian's Football Daily newsletter flagged Jürgen Klopp, Xavi Hernández, Zinedine Zidane and Roberto Mancini as figures the game's bigger federations might now go chasing, framing it as major nations preparing to "unleash bigger dogs" in the market that's opening up. None of the four has been confirmed to a specific vacancy, and the newsletter stopped short of tying any of them to a particular post.

Klopp has been out of a dugout since leaving Liverpool. Xavi left Barcelona before making the jump back into club or country management. Zidane has circled the France job for years without landing it. Mancini's own international spell, at Italy, ended before this cycle even got going.

Why Tuchel is the outlier

What separates England's situation from the carousel everywhere else is simply that he's still there. The Guardian's own newsletter didn't frame it as a vote of confidence, needling Tuchel for effectively "gaslighting his employers" into keeping him despite what it called a "comically shambolic" campaign. Whatever the FA's actual reasoning, the result is the same: Tuchel remains in post while 17 counterparts who took teams to the same tournament do not.

Contrast that with federations who've cut ties with managers who reached similar or even better stages of the tournament. Semi-finalists, quarter-finalists, group winners among the 17 who've already lost their jobs. A run to the last four hasn't been enough to save jobs elsewhere. It has been enough for Tuchel.

What happens next

For England, the question is less about Tuchel's security and more about what he does with it. Job stability three months after a semi-final exit is rare in international football, and it buys him room to build toward the next cycle without the noise that usually follows a tournament like this. Seventeen federations are searching for replacements, and Klopp, Xavi, Zidane and Mancini are the four names currently attached to that search.