Three Coaching Stories from the 2026 FIFA World Cup
With the 2026 FIFA World Cup well underway, there have been countless interesting coaching decisions and situations. I wanted to bring up a few here and ask some questions that hopefully create a dialogue.
Tunisia and Coaching Attrition
You don’t need to look any further than the English Premier League where there were a whopping 11 coaching changes in the past season to know that the role of manager is a precarious one at best in football.
But things got turned up a notch by the Tunisian Football Association when they fired their manager, Sabri Lamouchi, after one game at the World Cup, probably the most extraordinary managerial move in World Cup history.
African football is notoriously chaotic but this was a different level, and the question was: who would want to jump into the breach to try to right the ship with mere days before Tunisia’s next, and deciding match against Japan.
Enter Herve Renard, a man whose managerial career has been forged in the chaotic firestorm that is Africa and the Middle East.
Renard is not a glamorous hire. He won the Africa Cup of Nations with Zambia in 2012, a result that genuinely stunned the continent. He did it again with Ivory Coast in 2015. What he brings to a situation like this is the ability to walk into a broken environment and not flinch. Tactics can come later. First you need someone who doesn’t need the conditions to be perfect before they do their job.
Tunisia lost to Japan anyway. The intervention changed nothing about the result. Which raises an uncomfortable question about what the federation’s decision actually accomplished. They created maximum disruption, handed the chaos to one of the most experienced coaches on the continent, and still went home early. Whether Lamouchi would have done any better, nobody will ever know now.
We talk about managerial changes as if they are solutions. Sometimes they are. This one was a message. The question is who it was for.
Tunisia made one of the most dramatic managerial decisions in World Cup history and ended up with the same result. The next time you or your organization makes a reactive personnel decision under pressure, ask yourself honestly: what problem are you actually trying to solve?
Jesse Marsch and Canada’s First World Cup Win
One of the host nations, Canada, won their first ever World Cup match this past week in a game versus Qatar that was full of drama.
Two red cards, a horrific leg break, six goals, confrontations after the final whistle, all in front of a packed house of Canadians in Vancouver, BC.
In a move that has been lauded by some, and ridiculed by others, Jesse brought his squad out onto the pitch after the game for a team talk. He has stated previously his desire to create a “soccer” culture in Canada but given the backlash the question has been asked if this was the way to do it.
I’ve watched football for 20 years and can count the number of times a coach has done something like this on one hand. It felt more Ted Lasso than real football and begs the question on what is the value of public versus private culture building.
There is a version of what Jesse did that makes complete sense. The moment was historic, the crowd was still there, and if you believe culture is built in shared experience then that pitch was as good a setting as you’re going to get. But the moment also had an audience, and any time culture building has an audience you have to ask yourself who it is really for.
The locker room version of that same talk would have been private, unfiltered, and impossible to ridicule. What was gained by moving it outside, and what was lost?
Jesse’s team talk on that pitch divided the football world. But would the exact same words, said in a locker room with no cameras and no crowd, have landed differently with the players who actually needed to hear them?
Luis de la Fuente and Managing High Expectations
Spain are my favorites going into the tournament, and after a less than convincing 0-0 draw against Capo Verde to start the tournament, that hadn’t changed for me.
But the media, and many fans went into panic mode, reminiscent of the kind of panic that led to Tunisia sacking their manager.
Less than a week later, the communication about and around Spain is back to normal after a convincing 4-0 win against Saudi Arabia. Spain’s manager, Luis de la Fuente didn’t mince words in his press conference afterwards.
De la Fuente is one who knows the Spanish football system and pressure that comes with it well from his years as a player and now having coached various of Spain’s national teams over the last 13 years.
He and his squad are using the criticism early in the tournament as fuel, and it is eerily similar to how Argentina started their tournament back in 2022, one that they ended up winning.
“We live in a bubble, but criticism motivates us because we have very competitive footballers,” De la Fuente told reporters on Saturday. “And everything that has been said about us, and I’m not really paying attention to this, although some things I do hear here and there so you never know what I know or I don’t know, but this might have an impact on footballers.”
Thirteen years inside a national football system gives you a particular kind of steadiness. De la Fuente has been through enough cycles of Spanish football to know that the panic after one poor result is as predictable as the praise after a convincing one. The media pendulum swings. The players are watching to see if the coach swings with it.
Staying grounded when the environment is losing its mind is a skill most coaches underestimate because it is invisible when it works. Nobody writes about the coach who refused to panic. They write about the coach who changed everything after one bad result and either saved or sank the season.
Spain went from media villain to tournament favorites in under a week without De la Fuente changing a single thing about how he worked. Your athletes are watching how you respond to that same kind of noise. What are they actually seeing?
Until next week,
Caleb Cousens
---
Join the Advantage community — the home for serious performance practitioners