At around the same time Pep Guardiola was winning his sixth La Liga title as a player with Barcelona, Thomas Tuchel spent an entire day touring the bars and cafes of Stuttgart trying to find work.
But the hours spent collecting glasses, learning how to pull pints and mix cocktails, and cleaning up in the small hours of the morning, while Guardiola was playing in front of a full Nou Camp, acted as a valuable lesson for Tuchel, whose ability to forge relationships quickly has been a feature of his four months as head coach of Chelsea.
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“I didn’t have a good insurance policy for my injury, so all of the money I saved until this moment was – it was not big money of course – spent on my rehabilitation, because I tried to come back for more than half a year,” said 47-year-old Tuchel.
“I needed to accept it’s maybe impossible, so I was very, very disappointed and I started to study economics, because I had no other idea.
"And while studying, I wanted to earn some extra money and so I went to work in a bar like a normal student.
“Overcoming my pride to go into a bar, because now we can talk and laugh about it, but taking the first step to admitting I needed to earn some extra money and to step out there and to, on one day, go into 10 or 12 cafes and bars to ask ‘do you need some help? I would love to’. There was quite some pride to swallow for me.
“But it was good and in the end it turned out that I made some friends and I got my positive feedback, my reputation or whatever from just being the guy I am and they did not know that I played football.
“Suddenly, I really felt more self-confident because I was absolutely sure that they liked me because of who I am and because of what we do here together behind the bar, to clean the place until 3am and to do all that.
"It was a completely different life, but it was a good life because it taught me a valuable lesson and let my self-confidence grow in a very positive way.
“Until then, in my hometown, I was this kid who could play, was a bit better than the other kids at football, so you end up going to Augsburg, to a bigger club, and you’re kind of like a little bit famous and then you play maybe for the U-18s of Germany and you become professional in the second division, and I was living in this kind of bubble,” he recalls.
"It was a different bubble to now, but it was a kind of bubble and I got a lot of my self-confidence from all that.
"And falling out of this bubble, nobody taking care of me, taught me a tough lesson.”
It took Tuchel two years before he was allowed to work behind the bar, by which time he fancied himself as the leading part in the hit Eighties film Cocktail.
“Maybe not like Tom Cruise, but I felt like Tom Cruise,” he said, laughing.
Starting his coaching career in youth football at Stuttgart and then Augsburg, Tuchel got his big break in 2009 as Jurgen Klopp’s successor at Mainz, where he spent five years, before replacing Klopp for a second time at Borussia Dortmund.
It was towards the end of what proved to be his final year at Dortmund that Tuchel was part of what could have been a life-changing incident, when the bus carrying him and his players for a Champions League quarter-final tie against Monaco was attacked with roadside bombs.
Defender Marc Bartra and a policeman were wounded in the attack for which Sergej Wenergold was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
“It did not catch me like it caught others, I have to say,” said Tuchel.
“To this day, I do not feel the danger that we’ve been in. I can still see the nails sticking in the bus.
"I can see the nails sticking around where I even sat and like in the middle and in the end and in the very front. And I heard that the nails went over 50 metres and then into other windows of houses and stuff.
“Hopefully, [the impact] will not come some day, but it’s not that I’m thinking about it when I go into buses, when I go through a crowd. Somehow not. I’m not waiting for it, actually. I don’t want it to come. But it was totally surreal and it still is today.”
Tuchel testified during the trial of Wenergold and added: “Once I was in court later to meet the guy who admitted to doing it.
"I was even feeling sorry for him a little bit, I could not even feel anger, like ‘wow, what could you have done?’
“My wife tells the story that I went home late [after the incident]. I drove home. I had written a message to her that ‘everything is OK, don’t worry’. She was in the stadium, then I went home and my manager and my wife were there.
"They were quite freaked out and I came home a little bit like a robot, not talking too much about it.
"I was in front of the TV watching Barcelona against Juventus because it was a Champions League night. She was like ‘that’s a bit weird’.
“The biggest impact for me was the next morning when I saw my players and they were waiting for me in my office. That was when I really realised ‘wow, this is . . . [blows out his cheeks]’. I hide it maybe somewhere, but it’s still there and it did not have the huge impact that you maybe can imagine.”
Other than his time as a barman, Tuchel credits his upbringing in the Bavarian town of Krumbach for his empathy and his interest in learning from people in all walks of life.
“No matter what happened my family was there, so I had this super-protected childhood and that was pure joy,” said Tuchel.
"We treated everybody totally equally, I learned from my parents and particularly from my mother, who worked her whole life with disabled and disadvantaged people, that there are no differences to make.”
Having been sacked by Dortmund and then Paris St-Germain, on Christmas Eve, after falling out with his bosses, Tuchel arrived in England with a real reputation for confrontation.
But he has already displayed a light touch and tactile nature, which includes daily hugs for his players, proving himself capable of reintegrating players who had become disaffected, such as Marcos Alonso and Kepa Arrizabalaga, and handling big characters like Antonio Rudiger, who has excelled under Tuchel.
“I remember when a player from Mainz, my first club as a professional coach, wrote me a letter after he ended his career,” said Tuchel.
“He wrote that what he remembered from my first speech, when I stepped into the dressing-room, was that I smiled.
"I was not even aware of that, but he said ‘you came in and you smiled and I thought OK, let’s try together’. So sometimes it’s just this moment that you have for a first impression.
“Other players, I needed to try harder, I needed to convince them, they were maybe more in doubt.
"And I’m a person also who cannot cope so well if I don’t see emotions in another face.
“There are people out there, even in my teams, who don’t show me these emotions and it’s very hard for me also to adapt to it and to accept it because I am maybe very direct. But I have to cope with anybody’s right to be who he is.
"In training, for me it’s important, little things like when we split the group in three parts. I like that the players here don’t go by instinct into the same groups, ‘I always go with these guys’.
“No, they mix and I’m very happy about it that I don’t have to do it. So I told them, after two or three days ‘I like this a lot and don’t change it’.”
Tuchel had little time for preparation when he arrived at Chelsea.
He took just one training session ahead of his first game in charge against Wolverhampton Wanderers and it was on the flight from Paris to London that he plotted the switch to three at the back which has proved to be so successful.
“Honestly, on the flight I had some papers with formations so I was handing them out and constantly writing new ideas from all four of us, because I arrived with my staff,” said Tuchel.
“And then I shared my ideas, because, of course, I was thinking and watching some games from my impressions through the night and through the morning.”
Tuchel wants his players to laugh “not in a disrespectful way” at him and share in jokes, but he also believes that “if they sometimes are even a little bit in fear, good, even better! A little bit of fear is always good”.
There will not, however, be any fear in the way in which Tuchel approaches City and Guardiola.
And should Chelsea win then the German, who is practically teetotal during the season, has promised a big end-of-season party.
“I will get drunk because that is easy, two gin and tonics, and that’s it,” said Tuchel.
“But then I can take a third one and a fourth one, and feel actually pretty normal again and then the fifth one makes me, again, drunk.
“No, we will have fun, we will have a lot of fun, of course.
“I love it when other people are happy.
"Maybe I’m not the guy to dance on the table, but I will be so super-happy if we win and I see my team, my staff, the families and when I feel what it means to my family and to people around my family, to my grandma and to others.
"This is huge for me and we will have fun, I’ll not drink a still water all night.”
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