Miami, in the first week of June, is a city whose football culture runs on different frequencies from the one Thomas Tuchel has spent the past eighteen months inhabiting. The England manager, preparing his squad for the World Cup in Mexico and the United States, has spent the last fortnight not at St George’s Park but in south Florida, where he has leaned on an unlikely ally in the task of getting twenty-six professional footballers ready for the most pressurised tournament in the sport.
That ally is Miami United, a club that plays in the National Premier Soccer League, the fourth tier of the American soccer pyramid, and whose home ground, Tropical Park Stadium, sits on a patch of flat, sun-baked turf fifteen minutes from the city’s airport. The arrangement, first reported by Sky Sports, is that Tuchel has used Miami United’s training facilities and their players as opposition in closed-door practice matches, a low-profile option that allows England to simulate competitive scenarios without the scrutiny of Premier League pre-season friendlies or the logistical complexity of arranging matches against other national teams.T2 - Sky Sports
The move is unconventional by any managerial standard, but it is consistent with the way Tuchel has approached the England job since his appointment. The German, who won the Champions League with Chelsea in 2021 and was dismissed by Bayern Munich in early 2024, arrived at the FA with a reputation for meticulous preparation and a willingness to disregard convention when the tactical case for doing so is clear. His decision to base England’s pre-tournament camp in the United States rather than in Europe was itself a departure from the norm, a choice shaped by the desire to acclimatise to the conditions his squad will face in the group-stage venues of Los Angeles and Atlanta.
Miami United, for their part, are an amateur outfit in the truest sense. Most of their players hold jobs outside football. Their weekly training schedule is built around evening sessions that accommodate day shifts in construction, hospitality and logistics. The club’s head coach, when contacted by Sky Sports, described the arrangement as “an incredible opportunity for our boys to test themselves against the best”, a phrase that carries a sincerity that the English football press has largely translated into bemusement. The idea of England preparing for a World Cup by playing against part-timers in a Florida park is the kind of story that, in the English tabloid tradition, invites mockery. In practice, it is a calculated exercise in controlled opposition: players whose movement patterns can be calibrated, whose intensity can be managed, whose presence in a practice match offers Tuchel’s coaching staff the chance to rehearse specific scenarios without the risk of injury that a higher-standard friendly would carry.
The England squad arrived in Miami on the last day of May and have spent the past ten days working through a programme that, according to Sky Sports, includes double sessions on most days, video analysis in the evenings and the closed-door matches against Miami United’s first team and reserve players. The squad’s schedule has been designed to compress the gap between club-season fitness and tournament readiness, a gap that England managers have historically struggled to bridge. Gareth Southgate’s 2018 squad arrived in Russia having played their last club match six weeks earlier; the result was a group stage in which England looked sharp but a semi-final in which they looked, in the final twenty minutes against Croatia, like a team whose legs had been borrowed from someone else’s season.
Tuchel’s solution, in Miami, is to keep the engine running. The practice matches are not about the quality of the opposition; they are about maintaining the rhythm of competitive decision-making, the split-second choices that separate a tournament that ends in the quarter-finals from one that ends on the final Sunday. The Miami United players, in this framework, are not opponents so much as variables, bodies on a pitch whose movement Tuchel can control by instructing his coaching staff to set specific tasks for the fourth-tier side’s defenders and midfielders.
The wider context is one of a manager who has, since taking the England job, been willing to make decisions that resist the expectations of the English football establishment. His squad selections have been pragmatic rather than sentimental. His tactical setup has shifted between a back four and a back three depending on the opponent. His press conferences, conducted in fluent but accented English, have been notably more guarded than those of his predecessor, a man who understood the therapeutic value of public warmth and deployed it strategically. Tuchel, by contrast, treats the press conference as a functional obligation and saves his energy for the training ground, where, by all accounts, he is most himself.
The Miami arrangement is, in miniature, a reflection of that temperament. It is a decision that prioritises the private work over the public narrative, that chooses a fourth-tier Florida side over a more glamorous friendly because the fourth-tier side offers something the glamour does not: control. Whether it works will be known in three weeks, when England’s group stage is complete and the squad either looks tournament-sharp or looks like a team that spent its final preparation week playing against electricians and hotel receptionists. Tuchel, it is safe to say, has already made his calculation. The rest of the football world will find out soon enough whether he was right.