Thomas Tuchel, manager of Bayern Munich, admits to having sleepless nights ahead of his team’s Champions League match against Manchester City.
On Tuesday night, the Bundesliga side will travel to the Etihad Stadium to face former manager Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City in the first quarterfinal of the Champions League.
Thomas Tuchel, the 2020–21 UEFA Champions League winner with Chelsea, returns to England for the first time since being fired in September 2022.
The former Chelsea manager has had a mixed bag of results in his native country since taking over the Bundesliga team as Julian Nagelsmann’s replacement last month, defeating title rivals Borussia Dortmund but losing in the DFB-Pokal quarterfinals.
The upcoming match against Manchester City has been weighing heavily on 49-year-old manager Thomas Tuchel’s mind to the point where he is finding it difficult to get a good night’s sleep.
Tuchel has only beaten Pep Guardiola’s teams three times in ten previous meetings; his most recent victory over Guardiola came in 2021 when Chelsea defeated City in the Champions League final, the first of three trophies the German won in his 20 months at Stamford Bridge.
Before Tuchel left, Guadiola’s Manchester City defeated Chelsea twice in the Premier League, but they haven’t faced Bayern since November 2014, when Manuel Pellegrini’s team defeated the Bundesliga team 3-2 to advance to the round of 16.
Thomas Tuchel discussed his preparation for the game at Etihad in a pre-game press conference with UEFA.com, and he revealed
“I will try to go to bed early. I hope I will be able to sleep. The best preparation is sleep, but sometimes it is hard to get that sleep when you’re thinking about things. This morning I woke up really early, and I just decided to go to the training ground because I couldn’t get back to sleep. I just kept thinking about the match.”
Bayern Munich’s manager revealed a strategy to keep Erling Haaland at bay, who was the star of the show in the second leg as he hit five past German side RB Leipzig 8-1 on aggregate in the previous round.
“Of course, the style of Erling Haaland is very unique, and they have adapted to fit him in.” He offers them something they haven’t had in recent years. We have to do it as a team. We will have the role of the underdog, and that is okay. “We have to stay confident and stay on top of our game,” Tuchel indicated.
