Southampton boss Tonda Eckert had an unusual job before management | OneFootball

Tonda Eckert helped rank players on FIFA before he worked his way up into coaching

Tonda Eckert's route to the Southampton dugout was anything but conventional.

Usually, at the age of 33 in the footballing world you are starting to wind down a playing career, perhaps dipping their toes into some coaching, perhaps with youth teams, just to see what that career path would look like after they hang up their boots.

On Eckert's 33rd birthday, though, he led Southampton to a 2-0 win against Stoke City — the third of their mammoth 19-game unbeaten league run which transformed the Saints from an underachieving mid-table side to one that finished four points off an automatic promotion place.

Ultimately, the brilliance that was Southampton throughout 2026 was undermined by Spygate, which saw the Saints expelled from the play-offs and Tonda Eckert himself charged with three breaches of FA Rule 3.1.

It tainted what has otherwise been a miraculous journey from being an analyst to head coach, which included some peculiar jobs in the interim.

Tonda Eckert's short-lived playing career

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Tonda Eckert already has an extensive career working in various analysis and coaching roles, but he did start his time playing football, as most do.

The professional career wasn't for him, though. He played for Hertha Zehlendorf during his teenage years, playing alongside former Chelsea and current Real Madrid and German defender Antonio Rudiger.

At 17, he called time on his professional career while at Union Berlin. Two years later, he'd work as an analyst for the German national team at Euro 2012.

Tonda Eckert's early analyst roles and one peculiar job he had before he became a coach

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Two years after that, aged just 21, Eckert was key in Germany's World Cup-winning summer in 2014 in Brazil. He prepared a dossier on Argentina, the side Joachim Löw's side would beat in the final.

Around that time, too, according to a piece in The Sun, he was also working for EA Sports, watching local teams to determine the ratings for their FIFA games. Slightly less demanding than working for the national team, but still intriguing nonetheless.

"I needed to make sure the ratings were right," he explained. "I was in Cologne at the time, so all the first-team players came to me and asked me to put theirs up a little bit.

The American centre-back was a popular player in squads around FIFA 16 and 17 during his time at Hertha and Wolfsburg. He jumped five ratings between FIFA 15 and 16 — perhaps Eckert had a say in that.

Tonda Eckert's packed a lot into his career ahead of his first managerial role at Southampton

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It was shortly after that period that Tonda Eckert's coaching journey truly kicked off. As mentioned, he worked in Cologne with the Koln under-17's side up until 2016, when he joined now-Bournemouth boss Marco Rose at RB Salzburg's Under-18s outfit.

Youth coaching jobs at RB Leipzig and Bayern Munich followed, the latter seeing him work under German footballing legend Miroslav Klose, before he moved to England to become Gerhard Struber's assistant manager at Barnsley.

Struber left shortly after, but Eckert stayed under the leadership of Valerian Ismael, who led the Tykes to the Championship play-offs in the 2020/21 campaign. The 33-year-old remained at Oakwell until January 2022.

From there, he coached in Italy with Genoa, which brings us to last summer, when the German was appointed Under-21s coach at Southampton. Not many believed that he'd be making that step up to his first permanent senior management role just four months later.

With all the experience that Tonda Eckert has in his career as an analyst, FIFA ratings creator and a coach, at such a young age, too, the 33-year-old has the scope to manage right at the top of the game.

Right now, we still await the outcome of the FA's charges, and whether that may limit the Saints boss's career in the short-term. Both he and Southampton's fans are hoping for the best possible outcome, leaving him to take the reins uninterrupted in what is hoped to be a promotion-winning campaign.