Contract extensions in football rarely mean anything tangible.
Some supporters may get excited and reply to their team’s social media account with words like ‘wadmin’ when their star player is handed a new five-year deal, or we in the media might write that said player has been ‘tied down’ until 2031. In reality, it often just means a pay rise and a bit more protection for the club offering the contract.
Manager contracts mean even less. Vitor Pereira signed a three-year deal at Wolverhampton Wanderers in September but was sacked in November. Three Nottingham Forest managers in the 2025-26 season had contracts totalling six and a half years and lasted six months between them. David Moyes would have been Manchester United manager until 2019 had his contract been honoured, while Alan Pardew would have steered Newcastle United all the way to the Covid-19 pandemic if the eight-year deal he signed in 2012 had been seen through.
What to make, then, of the Football Association handing Thomas Tuchel two more years because England beat Serbia and Latvia?
When Tuchel started his 18-month deal last January, the parameters and expectations were clear and defined: get in, win the World Cup, get out. Simple.
“It’s 18 months and then we agreed to sit together and we’ll see,” Tuchel told reporters at his unveiling. “It’s a good timeframe because it will help us focus. It is very streamlined.”
Bukayo Saka celebrates against Serbia, an example of England’s improved displays under Thomas Tuchel (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
He made it pretty clear, without stating explicitly, that starting with 18 months was his idea, because international football — not working with staff and players every day — was a “step into the unknown” for him. He might not like it, basically.
Tuchel added: “The last piece for me is to understand that this is something that can really excite me to the fullest and that was the timeframe of 18 months, and to also demand from myself to not lose focus, for all of us. So it’s a good timeframe.”
It likely went against the FA’s instincts to agree to such a short-term fix. Every England manager this century, bar Sam Allardyce (who was handed a two-year contract that may as well have been two weeks), has been appointed on a long deal. Gareth Southgate, Roy Hodgson and Steve McClaren got four years, Fabio Capello four and a half, and Sven-Goran Eriksson five.
The two-year extension indicates that Tuchel is enjoying the job. He may be stressed, he may have less hair than when he started, but the 52-year-old must view this as potentially working out pretty well.
The allure of home advantage at Euro 2028 may be a factor (perhaps Tuchel just wants to finally experience a decent Wembley atmosphere) and if this has been done purely to enrage that coterie of commentators who will foam at the mouth at a German leading England in a jointly-hosted home tournament, well, fair play.
England have gone into competitions with the manager’s long-term future unknown — many times, in fact.
The deals of Bobby Robson, Terry Venables and Eriksson were all expiring after their final competitions as England manager, and in the case of Venables and Eriksson, their successors had already been announced (Glenn Hoddle after Venables and McClaren after Eriksson).
Perhaps a more relevant example is Capello, who signed an amended new contract on the eve of the 2010 World Cup, removing a clause that would have allowed him to leave after the tournament.
England were dreadful in South Africa that year and, 14 years later, when Southgate was offered a new deal before Euro 2024, he had Capello in mind when deciding against it.
“They offered me a new contract,” Southgate told the High Performance Podcast last year. “I didn’t think signing a new contract before the tournament would be a good idea, because I’d seen Fabio Capello do that years earlier and it created tension. ‘Why’s he getting a new contract before the tournament, it should be after?’. It increased the pressure on the team.”
Southgate knew that had England tanked at the European Championship, the pitchforks would have been out en masse for his immediate departure.
Does Tuchel’s new deal increase the pressure on him or the team? Probably not. Southgate was coming to the end of his reign and, rightly or wrongly, a significant chunk of the public had decided they no longer wanted him, regardless of England’s performance at the Euros.
Tuchel’s popularity feels less of an issue, mainly because England haven’t had any proper competitive matches under him yet.
Yes, qualifying for a World Cup isn’t a given (ask Italy) but taking into account the group England had been handed and given how talented the squad is, anything less than serene progress would have been a surprise.
The decision to give Fabio Capello a new contract before the 2010 World Cup backfired (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Improvements seem to have been made in the past six months, an uplift from the concerning 3-1 home defeat against Senegal in June (with the mitigation of it being an end-of-season friendly that the players probably had little interest in) to those impressive 5-0 away wins in Serbia and Latvia.
But until June 17 in Arlington, Texas, when England face Croatia in their World Cup opener, full judgement cannot begin. Do England fans even want Tuchel until 2028? Well, we don’t know yet.
“If we don’t win, I know the desire will be for change, externally,” Southgate added on his pre-Euros contract dilemma. That’s not necessarily the case here.
What the extension does do is remove a layer of speculation. Managerial jobs at several big clubs are expected to be available this summer — Real Madrid, Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and possibly others, too — and Tuchel extending to 2028 stops his name being linked with those vacancies. Uncertainty turns to stability.
It’s a slight risk on the FA’s part. If England really fail this summer — crashing out in the last 16 or earlier — a natural parting of the ways at the end of Tuchel’s contract would have been clean and decisive, and probably welcomed.
But hey, that’s the glass-half-empty view. At the very least, today’s news signifies that all is going well behind the scene — at least until June 17.