Let me tell you exactly where England are five days before their opening World Cup game against Croatia in Dallas.
The manager has left out two of the most naturally gifted players in the country. The team were booed off at Wembley in their final home fixture before the tournament. A player who has won sixty six caps went on social media to publicly express his shock and devastation at being omitted. The selection announcement was undermined by leaks that allowed the omissions to circulate on social media before the players had been personally informed.
This is not the ideal preparation for a World Cup. This is not the momentum you dream of carrying into the most important tournament of a generation.
And yet here I am, a Crystal Palace fan who has watched England tournaments through his fingers since he was old enough to understand what was at stake, telling you that I still think this could be the summer everything changes.
Cautiously. Nervously. With one eye permanently fixed on the exit. But genuinely.
Here is what needs to happen.
One. Tuchel’s Selection Gambles Need to Pay Off
This is the one that everything else flows from. If Thomas Tuchel is right about the players he left out and the players he picked instead, England win the World Cup. If he is wrong, we are going to spend the next decade talking about the summer England went to a tournament without Phil Foden and Cole Palmer and still somehow contrived to lose.
The omissions that dominated the squad announcement were Foden and Palmer, two of the most technically gifted English players of their generation, alongside Trent Alexander-Arnold and Harry Maguire. Maguire was among those to respond publicly, posting on social media that he was shocked and gutted by the decision after the season he had produced.
Tuchel confronted the criticism directly rather than avoiding it. The German coach was direct. The goal was never to gather the brightest individual stars but to build a group capable of functioning as a united force throughout one of football’s toughest competitions. Teams win championships. It is as simple as that. That is the philosophy. That is the bet.
I have some sympathy with the argument. Tournaments are not won by collections of individual brilliance. They are won by units, by squads with clear identities and clear roles and the collective belief that comes from everyone understanding what they are doing and why. The history of World Cup winners is full of teams that were not the most individually talented but were the most cohesive and the most clear-eyed about their purpose.
But the history of England at tournaments is also full of moments where we did not have the players available to produce the individual moment that decided the match. A Foden in full flow, a Palmer producing something from nothing in the eighty ninth minute, an Alexander-Arnold picking out a pass nobody else could see. These are the moments that win tournaments and Tuchel has decided he can win without them.
He might be right. Foden had rarely started for City since the turn of the year as his form dipped and he was a non-playing substitute in the FA Cup final. Palmer has not had the same calibre of season as his first two at Chelsea, suffering with injuries and Chelsea’s form plummeting, not scoring in his past eight matches. The form argument has merit. The tournament history of going with the best players regardless of form also has merit.
The only way we find out who is right is by watching it happen. Tuchel’s selections are the foundational gamble of this entire tournament. Everything else is built on whether those decisions look like vision or hubris by the time it is over.
Two. The Wembley Alarm Bells Need to Be Silenced
I will not pretend the final two home fixtures before the tournament did not happen because they did happen and they raised questions that need honest answers.
England were booed off at Wembley after a 1-0 defeat to Japan and an uninspiring draw against Uruguay in their final home games before the World Cup. The performances raised serious concerns about cohesion, about the system, about whether the players Tuchel has selected are clicking in the way a tournament winning team needs to click with less than a week until the competition begins.
Japan are a good team. Losing to Japan is not a catastrophe. But losing to Japan at Wembley in your final home game before a World Cup, being booed off the pitch by your own supporters, is a psychological event that a squad needs to process and recover from before they compete in the highest stakes environment football produces.
The draw against Uruguay was arguably more concerning than the defeat. A performance so flat and so lacking in creativity that the questions it raised were not about result but about identity. What is this England team trying to do? What does Tuchel want them to look like? The answers were not obvious from ninety minutes at Wembley and the tournament starts in five days.
I want to believe those performances were the product of a specific moment in the preparation cycle, of players carrying fatigue from long club seasons, of a manager deliberately not showing his full hand before the competition begins. Some preparation games are genuinely misleading indicators of tournament readiness.
The caveat is that England have used this justification before. The uninspiring warm up games followed by the tournament breakthrough has happened occasionally in our history. The uninspiring warm up games followed by the tournament underperformance has happened more often.
For this to be the summer that is different, the Croatia game needs to be a different performance to the Japan game. The energy, the clarity, the sense of a team that knows exactly what it is doing and why, needs to be present from the first minute in Dallas. If it is not, the Wembley alarm bells will feel like they were ringing for a reason.
Three. Bellingham Needs to Perform at His Absolute Peak
Jude Bellingham is in the squad. That much is confirmed and it matters enormously because when Bellingham is at his best he is one of the three or four best players in the world and England are a different team with him at his best than they are with any version of him below it.
The concern is that we have seen two versions of Bellingham in the past twelve months. The Real Madrid version, the player who can win a Champions League match on his own, who arrives at the back post at the exact right moment, who produces moments of such quality and such timing that you genuinely cannot believe the player exists. And the England version, the one who has sometimes looked like a player carrying the weight of his own reputation into matches where everything is expected of him and the expectations create a constraint rather than a liberation.
The gap between those two versions has been one of the defining frustrations of watching England under Tuchel. Bellingham in a Real Madrid shirt looks like a player who has no limits. Bellingham in an England shirt has sometimes looked like a player who is very aware of them.
For England to win this tournament Bellingham needs to perform at the Real Madrid level, not the England level. He needs to be the player who makes things happen rather than the player who is expected to make things happen. The distinction sounds subtle. In tournament football under enormous pressure it is the difference between a country ending sixty years of hurt and a country going home in the quarter finals wondering what might have been.
Everything about England’s prospects flows from Bellingham finding that level and sustaining it for seven matches.
Four. The Penalty Shootout Curse Needs to End
I know. I know we say this every tournament. I know that saying England need to win a penalty shootout is the most English thing it is possible to say, so self aware and so resigned simultaneously that it has become its own form of gallows humour.
But it needs to be said because the statistical reality of England in penalty shootouts is not a stereotype. It is a pattern of genuine historical significance that has shaped the outcome of more tournaments than any other single factor.
The preparation for this has been better under Tuchel than under any previous England manager. The sports science around penalty taking, the psychological preparation, the practice sessions that actually replicate the pressure of the real situation as closely as possible, all of it has been invested in with a seriousness that previous regimes did not always apply.
Jordan Pickford is an excellent penalty saving goalkeeper. The players in the squad have the technical quality to score penalties. The infrastructure around the preparation is the best it has ever been.
At some point England are going to win a penalty shootout at a major tournament. The mathematics demand it eventually. The hope is that eventually is this summer and the preparation gives it a better chance of being this summer than any previous occasion.
If England reach the final and win on penalties I will be unable to write about it coherently. I will try anyway.
Five. The Mental Shift Has to Be Real
This is the one that is hardest to assess from the outside and most important on the inside.
England have the players to win this tournament. That sentence is true regardless of the selection controversy and the Wembley defeats and the legitimate questions about Tuchel’s decisions. The squad contains sufficient quality to compete with anyone in the competition and to win it if everything aligns correctly.
What England have not always had is the collective belief that they can actually do it. The weight of sixty years of failure, the pressure of a nation that simultaneously expects success and expects disappointment, the specific psychological environment of being an England player at a major tournament where every moment is analysed and every error is magnified and the history of the team you are representing is present in every conversation, is unlike anything any other national team experiences.
The teams that have won World Cups in the past thirty years have almost all shared a quality that is difficult to manufacture but impossible to replace. The genuine, unaffected belief that the trophy is theirs to win rather than someone else’s to give them. The freedom that comes from not carrying the weight of previous failures into every match. The ability to exist in the tournament rather than to brace for it.
England have rarely had that quality and when they have had glimpses of it, at Euro 96 under Venables, at the 2018 World Cup under Southgate’s first tournament, it has produced their best performances in decades.
Tuchel’s philosophy of building a team rather than collecting talent is partly an attempt to create those conditions. A group that trusts each other, that has a clear identity, that is not looking over its shoulder at the players who were left out, is more likely to develop the collective belief that tournament football requires.
Whether the controversy around the selection has undermined that before it had the chance to develop is the question I cannot answer from the outside. The players in that dressing room know. The answer will be visible on the pitch from the seventeenth of June.
The Honest Assessment
I have watched England at every major tournament since I was a child. I have believed before and been wrong so many times that belief itself has become a complicated emotion, something between genuine hope and learned defence mechanism, an insurance policy against the disappointment that always seems to be waiting just around the corner of the quarter final.
This summer is different to previous summers in ways that are real rather than manufactured. The squad is deeper than any England squad I can remember. The manager has a genuine track record of winning at the highest level of club football. The draw has given England a path that, while not easy, is navigable. The preparation, beneath the controversy and the Wembley performances, has been more systematic and more sophisticated than anything that preceded it.
It is also similar to previous summers in ways that I cannot ignore. The selection controversy that has created noise and division before a ball has been kicked. The question marks over the manager’s decisions. The performances that have raised doubts rather than answered them. The gap between what England could be and what they sometimes are.
England are in Group L and will kick off against Croatia in Dallas on the seventeenth of June, six days after the tournament starts. The same Croatia that England beat in the Euro 2020 group stage and lost to in the 2018 World Cup semi final. The same fixture that contains all of England’s recent tournament history in miniature. Progress and failure, hope and heartbreak, the same opponent providing the backdrop for both.
Win that game the right way, with energy and clarity and the sense of a team that knows exactly what it is doing, and suddenly everything the manager has decided feels like vision rather than gamble. Lose it, or stumble through it without conviction, and the questions become significantly louder.
Five things need to happen. Some of them are in Tuchel’s hands. Some of them are in the players’ hands. Some of them are in the hands of the football gods who have been conspiring against England for sixty years and who I choose to believe are due a change of mood.
Come on England. Please. Just this once.
