Let’s say you’re finishing a day of work, and you’re getting ready to head out the door.
The boss stops you. “We need your help,” the boss says. “We had to let someone go, and he had a major project due in five days. We’re reassigning it to you. Good luck.”
Now imagine that your project will be unveiled in front of a global TV audience measuring in the nine figures.
That’s the situation Hervé Renard faces. He is the new coach of Tunisia, which fired head coach Sabri Lamouchi after just one game in the World Cup — a 5-1 loss to Sweden.
The veteran coach was hired on Tuesday. His first game with Tunisia will be against Japan on Saturday night in Monterrey, Mexico. (Midnight for those on the East Coast; 9 p.m. Pacific.)
Renard was available because he was fired two months ago, when Saudi Arabia said, “Thanks for leading us through World Cup qualifying, but we’re going in a different direction.”
The Frenchman’s resume is impressive. He led Zambia to its first African Cup of Nations championship in 2012. He won his second African championship in 2015 with Ivory Coast. He then led two consecutive World Cup qualification campaigns — Morocco in 2018, Saudi Arabia in 2022 — and was on the sideline with Saudi Arabia for its colossal upset over Argentina. He has pulled off a rare double by coaching in both the men’s and women’s World Cups, leading France through the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
It’s safe to say Renard’s assignment is far from routine. A few coaches have been fired after two group-stage games, including another Tunisian national team coach — Henryk Kasperczak in 1998. But those firings were essentially capitulations by teams that were already eliminated.
In the 48-team World Cup, in which eight of the 12 teams that place third in their groups will advance to the knockout rounds, the math doesn’t rule out a Tunisia comeback. Unfortunately, the degree of difficulty is about as high as whatever Simone Biles tries in the Olympics.
Realistically, Sweden was the team that Tunisia needed to beat to have a solid chance. In the current FIFA rankings, Sweden stands 34th, far lower than their next two opponents — Japan (17th) and the Netherlands (8th).
The good news for Tunisia is that changing coaches doesn’t seem to faze the players too much. The team had three different coaches in World Cup qualification but didn’t concede a single goal in 10 games. Even the third coach didn’t last — Lamouchi took over in January, three months after qualification ended.
But with the World Cup expanding to 48 teams, many countries had easy paths, and Tunisia’s was among the easiest. The rest of their group: Namibia, Liberia, Malawi, Equatorial Guinea, and Sao Tome and Principe. None of those teams have ever qualified for the World Cup, nor are they in the top 100 in FIFA’s rankings.
The bottom line is that nothing in Tunisia’s history, recent or otherwise, suggests that expectations should have been high. The team has three World Cup wins in its history. They won the African Cup of Nations in 2004 but only made the semifinals one time since then, and they didn’t make it past the round of 16 last year.
In international soccer, coaches have to play the hand they’re dealt, and the cards are not in Tunisia’s favor. The team is in a transitional phase, with some older defenders and defensive midfielders (Nice’s Ali Abdi, Union Berlin’s Rani Khedira, Frankfurt’s Ellyes Skhiri) over age 30 and promising young players (Augsburg’s Ismaël Gharbi, PSG’s Khalil Ayari, Burnley’s Hannibal Mejbri) not yet firmly established as seasoned top-level professionals.
The site transfermarkt, which estimates the value of each player on the transfer market through which clubs buy and sell their players, estimates the total value of Tunisia’s players at a little less than 70 million Euros, or $80 million. The other teams in their group are much higher: Japan is more than 270 million Euros, Sweden is over 400 million Euros, and the Netherlands’ squad is over 750 million Euros. (For the purpose of comparison: The U.S. team is at 385 million Euros.)
So advancing to the knockout rounds for the first time was always going to be a long shot. Scrambling to hire a new coach after one game doesn’t seem likely to change that.
But the team was going nowhere under Lamouchi. Under Renard, they may suffer two more lopsided defeats — or they might induce enough chaos to shock the world.
Lamouchi would surely feel differently, but from the team’s perspective, maybe they have nothing to lose.
