Thomas Tuchel: ‘I want to win. I am not ready to use transition as an excuse’

If one incident summed up the chaotic end to Chelsea’s season for Thomas Tuchel, it was when his staff arrived at their hotel the day before their FA Cup quarter-final against Middlesbrough and found that some of their rooms were not available until 12 o’clock.

“Our whole staff just sitting in the lobby because only the players and myself had the rooms longer – it was a very strange situation for a club used to a kind of level and organisation and support that’s absolutely outstanding normally,” Tuchel says. “If you don’t know how you will arrive in a Champions League game, whether you have a plane or don’t have a plane or after you play Newcastle as a long trip and you don’t know if you need to travel by a bus or plane …

“You arrived in some crazy moments but it was absolutely nice to see that we can adapt. We are spoiled but not so spoiled that everyone gets in a bad mood. We’d play cards or watch a match live together and it was nice to see everyone was ready to adapt and do the best.”

Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the end of February, it has been all about adapting at Chelsea. The end of the Roman Abramovich era was never going to be an easy transition but fewer than 50 days since Todd Boehly’s takeover, Tuchel is the only senior figure who remains from that regime after the departures of the director Marina Granovskaia, the chairman Bruce Buck and the technical and performance adviser Petr Cech.

“I could never have imagined that I stayed longer at the club than Roman, Marina and Petr,” he admits. “This was impossible. So now with Marina not in charge and Petr not here any more it has changed a lot. We didn’t see that coming and of course with Todd taking over as a sports director we are in a very