Southampton manager Tonda Eckert interview: 'You go to Wembley to compete, not for the occasion'

Birmingham CityBlackburn RoversBristol CityCharlton AthleticCoventry CityDerby CountyHull CityIpswich TownLeicester CityMiddlesbroughMillwallNorwich CityPortsmouthPreston North EndQueens Park RangersSheffield UnitedSheffield WednesdaySouthamptonStoke CitySwansea CityWatfordWest Bromwich AlbionWrexhamScores & ScheduleStandingsPodcastsTonda Eckert celebrates Southampton's victory at Leicester City in February Michael Regan/Getty Images Share articleSometimes, how a coach speaks offers a small window into their approach to football. It is certainly true of Southampton’s head coach, Tonda Eckert. The Athletic meets the 33-year-old German hours before Southampton’s league fixture against Bristol City on Tuesday night. Their manager, Roy Hodgson, is 45 years Eckert’s senior. But under the young coach, Southampton, with a run of seven straight league victories (the first time the club has achieved such results since 1908), have been the Championship’s juggernaut in recent weeks, gathering momentum no opponent has been able to halt. Not even Arsenal. In all competitions, Southampton have registered eight straight wins, with the 2-1 FA Cup quarter-final victory against Mikel Arteta’s side among the most captivating and complete performances fans at St Mary’s had witnessed for many years. And despite Bristol City eventually ending this winning streak with a 2-2 draw, Southampton extended their unbeaten run to 20 games across all competitions. This relentless run is no surprise considering that Eckert tends to give complete focus to what and who is in front of him. He provides unflinching eye contact with his wide hazel eyes, which rarely blink, while friends speak of him having dinner for hours, without looking at his phone once. The Athletic also notices Eckert’s tendency to pause a second longer before answering questions, a trait he obtained from his father, who was a doctor in mathematics.  “I didn’t inherit too much of him; he’s many levels above me in terms of general intelligence. But at least some of it, I think, dripped onto me,” he says. “I feel comfortable dealing with numbers and data, but I also know that data is never going to replace a good pair of eyes.” Away from the cameras, Eckert is funny, sociable and relaxed. Once this interview is over, he intends to get a few hours of sleep in his hotel room before kick-off. “I feel the pressure,” Eckert says. “But that’s good. I would be a fool to say that there is no pressure; you need to accept it is there and embrace it. You come towards March… lovely. But you really start to play in April and May. That’s the period where you decide the season. “It was the only message to my players after the international break: embrace the pressure. Don’t pretend it’s not there. It doesn’t make it better. Use it as something to give you fuel.” On Saturday, Eckert will lead Southampton out at Wembley in an FA Cup semi-final against Pep Guardiola and Manchester City. “You go there to compete,” Eckert says. “I don’t go there for the occasion. I don’t go there as a fan. If you want to win, you need to be ready.” Eckert’s coaching stock has long been admired in certain circles and with executives, namely Johannes Spors, Southampton’s sporting director. “I met Johannes when I worked for RB Leipzig (as an academy coach). We didn’t have too much to do with each other,” Eckert says. “But when he moved to Italy, he asked if I wanted to join Genoa as their assistant manager.” Spors then called again in March 2025, by which time Eckert had finished his UEFA Pro Licence. He invited him to apply for the job as Southampton’s Under-21s coach. “I felt ready for big parts of what comes with being a manager, but I wanted to try a couple of things out on a stage where I don’t have full media attention straight away, or someone judging me every three days. So going for the under-21s job was more about finding something out about myself in situations that are different as a head coach.” Eckert arrived as Southampton’s Under-21s coach in July, with fellow staff immediately recognising he would soon be managing at a senior level. But they might not have envisaged that coming only four months later, when Eckert was initially placed as Southampton’s interim head coach following Will Still’s dismissal. The fraught mood of the 2024-25 season, in which Southampton were relegated from the Premier League with only 12 points, had permeated into the new season. Still lasted 13 league games, as Southampton sat 21st with just two wins. But fast forward almost five months, and as well as an FA Cup semi-final, Southampton sit fourth in the Championship with two games remaining, two points behind Ipswich Town in the final automatic promotion spot. Eckert was born and raised in Berlin. He was educated in a bilingual school, with English his second language. His parents were not football-obsessive but supportive of their son’s interest. Eckert would play cage football, with the winner staying on and if you lost, facing the ignominy of either sitting on the sidelines or going home, sometimes without the ball you had brought. Eckert was a late developer and the smallest player on his junior side. The team were so dominant that they all joined Hertha Zehlendorf, an academy in Berlin. He would play out wide until, he jokes, changing from the nimble player who played with freedom — “colour in my hair” — to the tall defensive midfielder and later centre-back, who had “very short, normal hair”. Eckert is candid about why he stopped pursuing a career as a footballer: he had accepted his limitations, exacerbated by his rapid growth spurt, which contributed to knee and joint pain. “I’m in touch with some of the coaches, and they say I used to have a couple more questions than some of my team-mates,” he says, grinning. “Once I realised I was not good enough to become a professional footballer, I went to Michigan when I was 15 for a year to study. It was through a direct link between my school and an agency.” Eckert was offered a return to the U.S. to continue his studies, but did not know which subject to focus on. In the meantime, an opportunity to remain in Germany studying sports science materialised. It required him to move to Cologne, on the other side of the country. “There was a close connection between the university and the German FA,” he says. “So while studying sports science, an opportunity came up to do analysis for the national team. They needed someone to watch some games ahead of Euro 2012.” It led to Eckert becoming an analyst for the German national team aged just 19. “Maybe they hadn’t found someone to do all the dirty work!” he says, laughing. “The person who got me into the project is now the Barcelona match analyst, Dr Stephan Nopp, and he was always close with the German Federation and Hansi Flick. “I looked up to him. I watched the first game, and it was the one thing he said to me: ‘Take your eyes away from the ball.’ It’s still the same when I’m on the sideline now. Intuitively, you know what happens on the ball, but you can’t affect that anyway.” Eckert snaps his fingers to emphasise his point. “Play is already there. But what you can affect is what happens further away from the ball.  “You need to see the next pass, or the pass after, or if you do lose the ball, what happens there? In the Championship, it’s not that you have 90,000 fans on top of you, so the players can hear if you have a good voice. There are more than enough situations where we can scream players into positions where they receive a couple of seconds later.” Eckert left his post following Germany’s triumphant 2014 World Cup campaign. He moved into club football, becoming head of scouting at Fortuna Koln. “There were a lot more spreadsheets than actual databases,” says Eckert. “But it was the beginning of trying to quantify performance in players. That was interesting, because nowadays you get judged on numbers a lot. “You need to be able to have a conversation about numbers, especially if you have an ownership structure that might not see every game. Many conversations start or end with underlying data, so to understand how you put that into context. I think it helped me to be a head of scouting. “But the eye test is the biggest factor. If you look at our game against Hull City in January, for example, we were the clear winners in terms of data. We lost 2-1. If you just continue to go down that road and say the underlying data is good and you do the same thing again and again, it doesn’t help you, because football is never based on numbers. “It’s so much more profound. Germany won 7-1 against Brazil in 2014, but if you look at the data, it draws a completely different game. You need to be able to understand what the data can give you, but also understand the limits.” Later that evening, following Eckert’s chat with The Athletic, Southampton recovered twice to draw with Bristol City. The second equaliser was a demonstration of Eckert’s tactical flexibility, switching to a direct 4-4-2, his side’s third formation during the match. He deployed two towering strikers in Ross Stewart and Cyle Larin. The latter brought the ball down from a long goal kick, with Stewart rounding off the move with a header at the back post. Leveller from Loch Ness 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 pic.twitter.com/d13mkHdQmD — Southampton FC (@SouthamptonFC) April 21, 2026 “I wouldn’t ever go anywhere and say, ‘This is my football, and it has to look exactly this way,'” Eckert explains. “There are some games we win in possession, some in the way we defend. Some we win on transition, some we win on a set piece. Every game writes its own story, and that’s why football is so complete as a game. “It starts and finishes always with the player. Roberto De Zerbi was always good in that he would never put a player in a position where he feels uncomfortable, because he would say, ‘My first thought is if that were my son, would I want to expose him in this moment? If the answer is no, then you need to find a different solution.’ “His approach is he wants to bring a player into positions where they can show their strength and do everything not to expose them. Another coach I like is Marco Rose. I texted him yesterday and told him, ‘Welcome to the south coast.’ He was a big inspiration and is a great manager.” Asking Eckert who his biggest influence is, however, is far too broad a question. He instead breaks down the ingredients of a good coach. “I like the humility of Alberto Gilardino (who Eckert worked with at Genoa). He is the most humble person. That’s been a big theme for us here: to be humble in everything we do. That’s something that (Pep) Guardiola also constantly repeats as a secret to success. In contrast to Eckert’s perceived rapid ascent, he progressed incrementally as an academy coach through RB Salzburg, RB Leipzig and latterly Bayern Munich’s youth age groups. “Sometimes you feel ready, but then you look back a year and realise, ‘No, I wasn’t,'” says Eckert. “I don’t have to be somewhere within a year, but there is just a pathway that sometimes unfolds. The one thing you can do is to make sure you’re ready, but not actively look and jump on everything coming your way. “So often before last summer, I had the chance to be a head coach. But there was no rush — I don’t feel I need to be anywhere at this age.” “I’ve been sacked three times already. It helps to fail, and sometimes it even helps to fail hard and early, because you reflect, and it makes you more resilient. “I listened to Carlo Ancelotti on my Pro Licence course about being sacked. You realise it becomes part of the game. It’s not that I enjoyed being sacked; you’re just not as afraid to fail. That’s the reason I don’t feel I need to rush anything.” After four wins in five matches, Eckert was appointed Southampton’s permanent head coach in December, agreeing a contract until 2027. It was the first foray into senior management, but perhaps the final step in the journey to get there. His greatest examination will surely come on Saturday evening, against Guardiola at Wembley. Yet Southampton’s rejuvenation under Eckert suggests there is no better time to face their biggest test. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms