There is a case to be made that England have never had this many elite players available at the same time. Harry Kane has scored ninety-seven goals in ninety-four appearances for Bayern Munich, making him the fastest player in the club’s history to reach that figure. Jude Bellingham plays for Real Madrid, is twenty-two years old, and functions as one of the five best midfielders in the world. Bukayo Saka has just finished a Premier League season in which his club won the title and reached the Champions League final. Declan Rice won both the PFA Player of the Year and the Premier League Player of the Season award in the same year.
And Thomas Tuchel left Phil Foden, Cole Palmer and Trent Alexander-Arnold at home.
The squad announced on the twenty-second of May was described almost immediately, and not uncharitably, as probably the most shocking England World Cup selection since 1998. Harry Maguire — who posted on social media that he was “shocked and gutted” after receiving a personal phone call from the manager — did not make it. Neither did Morgan Gibbs-White, one of the most consistent attackers in the Premier League this season. Neither did Jarrod Bowen, Luke Shaw, or Adam Wharton.
Who did make it: Jordan Henderson, aged thirty-five and playing for Brentford. Ivan Toney, recalled after minimal international football since Euro 2024, on the back of thirty-two goals in thirty-two games for Al-Ahli in the Saudi Pro League. Marcus Rashford, currently on loan at Barcelona and fighting to make his move there permanent.
This is, depending on your perspective, either the most interesting England squad in twenty years, or a collection of departures from obvious logic that suggests Tuchel is operating on principles the rest of us cannot quite follow yet. Possibly both things are true.
The Manager’s Football
Thomas Tuchel was appointed England head coach in October 2024, several weeks after Gareth Southgate’s dignified departure following the Euro 2024 final defeat to Spain. The hire was seen, initially, as a statement of ambition: a manager with Champions League experience, with the tactical sophistication to rebuild a national team around a generation of genuinely world-class players.
What Tuchel has done in his eighteen months in charge has been more disruptive than most expected. He arrived inheriting a squad shaped around the habits Southgate built over eight years — a conservative defensive structure, a tendency to prioritise team shape over individual expression, a reliance on experienced performers even when their form didn’t fully justify it. Tuchel’s instinct runs in the opposite direction.
His football, across his club career at Mainz, Dortmund, PSG, Chelsea and Bayern Munich, has been characterised by intensity in transition, a willingness to use a high defensive line even at risk, and an expectation that attacking players will press from the front and track back when the team loses possession. He likes positional fluidity rather than fixed roles. He has consistently shown, at every club, that he will drop household names if he believes younger players with better current form and energy offer more to the collective shape.
The squad announced for this World Cup is a direct extension of those preferences. The omissions are not random. Foden’s form at Manchester City dipped significantly in the second half of the season; Tuchel spoke afterwards about wanting “freshness” in attacking positions. Cole Palmer had not scored in his previous fourteen appearances for club and country. Trent Alexander-Arnold had not been capped since the summer, following his move to Real Madrid and subsequent complications — and Tuchel’s system requires fullbacks who fulfil specific defensive duties in transition that Alexander-Arnold, reimagined as a midfielder in the Spanish capital, was no longer conditioning himself for.
The reasoning, laid out plainly, makes some sense. The emotional reality — that England are going to a World Cup without Phil Foden — is harder to absorb.
The Group
England landed in Group L alongside Croatia, Panama and Ghana. On paper, this is among the more favourable draws available in a forty-eight-team tournament, though Croatia’s history in knockout football — including their run to the final in 2018 and their exit in the quarter-finals in 2022 — means they will not simply fold. They have aged significantly since Ivan Rakitić and Luka Modrić were at their peaks, but Croatia remain difficult to beat and organised in their defensive structure.
Panama and Ghana represent different types of challenge. Panama, the CONCACAF representatives, are a side built for resilience rather than technical dominance, capable of absorbing pressure and punishing errors on the counter-attack. Ghana, returning to a World Cup after missing Qatar 2022, will carry strong emotional investment and the pace of players like Antoine Semenyo across their forward line.
England should top this group with relative comfort. The real test will not come until the round of sixteen at the earliest, where the paths of the top seeds from Groups I, J and K converge. France, Argentina and Portugal are all realistic second-round opponents. Any notion that England can sleepwalk through this tournament ends there.
The Omissions That Will Define the Story
No World Cup squad announcement happens in a vacuum, and this one arrived already carrying the weight of argument. The question will not go away through the group stage or the knockout rounds: was Tuchel right?
Phil Foden is the biggest name not on the plane, and the hardest to fully justify even accounting for his below-par second half of the season. In the first half of the campaign, Foden was exceptional — he remains, at twenty-five, capable of moments that no other English player can produce. His decline in form from January onwards was real, but whether it justifies exclusion from a major tournament is genuinely debatable. Tuchel’s argument is that the position Foden would occupy is already filled by players who have been more consistent across the full year: Saka on the right, Rashford on the left, Eze centrally. It is coherent. It is also ruthless.
Cole Palmer had a more straightforward case against him. Fourteen games without a goal for club and country going into the tournament selection is, regardless of how the earlier part of the season unfolded, a difficult platform from which to argue for inclusion in a high-pressure squad. Palmer’s ceiling remains extraordinary — he is one of the most technically gifted English players in years. But form is a genuine selection criterion, and his form was not good.
Trent Alexander-Arnold is the most complicated omission. He left Liverpool for Real Madrid last summer, was signed specifically for a project designed by Xabi Alonso, and found himself navigating an entirely new positional identity at a club where the managerial situation then collapsed under him. He played for England last summer and then, as his appearances at Real Madrid became irregular and his role shifted, the international caps stopped. Tuchel explained it, carefully, as a positional decision: his system has no role for someone between a midfielder and a fullback who isn’t quite doing either. Whether that explanation holds up over a full tournament — whether England will miss Alexander-Arnold’s ability to break lines from deep — will become clearer as the competition unfolds.
Harry Maguire is, in some ways, the selection that most encapsulates the tension at the heart of this squad. Across his England career, Maguire has been a different player to his domestic self — commanding in the air, organised across the defensive line, capable of the kind of leadership that matters in tournaments. In the 2018 semi-final, the 2020 Euro final, the 2022 World Cup quarter-final against France, he was one of England’s most reliable performers. The problem is what came next. At Manchester United under the various managers since, his playing time declined and his form when he did play was inconsistent. Tuchel looked at the evidence base and chose Guéhi, Stones, Konsa and Quansah — younger, more active in possession, better fits for the pressing system. The decision is defensible on the current balance of evidence. It does not make it less painful for a player who has given, in tournament football, significantly more than his domestic reputation would suggest.
The Arsenal Effect
If there is a single club whose season provides the strongest argument for England’s chances at this tournament, it is Arsenal. The Gunners won the Premier League title — their first since 2004 — and reached the Champions League final against PSG, which takes place four days after today. They went through the entire Champions League group phase without losing a match, the first team in the competition’s history to achieve a perfect record in the new format.
And in this England World Cup squad, they have four players.
Declan Rice is the most decorated of the four. His season at Arsenal was, by any reasonable assessment, one of the best individual campaigns by any midfielder in England in a decade. He won the PFA Player of the Year award, the Premier League Player of the Season, and ran Arsenal’s set-piece delivery — his inswingers from the left have directly produced eight Premier League goals and a further six across all competitions. He has been the engine of the best English club side since the Invincibles. That form, arriving at a World Cup under a manager who prizes pressing intensity and defensive discipline, is the closest thing to a guarantee England have.
Bukayo Saka has been in comparable form on the right wing and in the half-spaces — twenty-two league goals, eighteen assists across all competitions, his work rate in transition as important as his technical output. He arrives at the World Cup in the middle of the most significant period of his career.
Eberechi Eze, signed from Crystal Palace for sixty million pounds in the summer, took time to find his footing at Arsenal before becoming indispensable to Arteta’s midfield structure. His inclusion in the squad — at the expense of Palmer and Foden — is a direct expression of Tuchel’s preference for players who have been embedded in a high-intensity, high-tempo system for a full season. Noni Madueke, also at Arsenal following his move from Chelsea, provides wide attacking depth.
The Arsenal core gives England a shared understanding of press triggers, set-piece mechanics and positional discipline that you cannot manufacture by assembling a squad once every two years. It is one of Tuchel’s most significant structural advantages.
Harry Kane and the Goals That Define Him
By the time England play their opening group match, Harry Kane will have scored ninety-seven goals in ninety-four appearances for Bayern Munich. He is the fastest player in the club’s history to reach each of the significant milestones — fifty, seventy, ninety. Three consecutive Bundesliga top scorer awards. The numbers are not an accident or the product of a favourable environment; they represent a striker who has, in his mid-thirties, found a club context that maximises his particular genius.
Kane’s talent is one of those that does not quite translate in description. He is not the fastest, not the most physically imposing, not particularly impressive in the physical duels that define the modern image of the centre-forward. What he is, and what very few players in the history of the position have matched, is the ability to inhabit space before the ball arrives — to understand, several moves ahead, exactly where and when the ball will be available and to be there at precisely the right moment. He scores goals that require the pass to be played to where he already is. He creates goals for others from deep positions that suggest a complete understanding of the game’s geometry.
He came to the 2018 World Cup and won the Golden Boot with six goals. He came to Euro 2020 struggling for form and was, at times, a peripheral figure. He came to Euro 2024 and was central to England’s run to the final — scoring in the semi-final, carrying his composure throughout a tournament where England’s football was often frustrating but their results were not. He is a player who has been to major tournaments before and knows exactly how to manage himself through them.
The question around Kane, heading into this World Cup, is not whether he will be ready. It is whether Tuchel’s system will position him correctly. Kane operates best when the ball is played through him and when runs from midfield arrive in support — when he is the pivot around which attacks are built rather than the isolated target at the end of long balls. At Bayern, with Musiala and Olise running from depth and Kimmich threading passes from the base, the system was built for him. Whether Tuchel can recreate something similar for England — with Bellingham and Rice providing the movement — will be one of the defining tactical questions of the tournament.
Jude Bellingham’s World Cup
Jude Bellingham arrives at this tournament having had a season that is harder to characterise than his extraordinary debut year in Spain. He has been at Real Madrid through a period of significant turbulence — the Xabi Alonso project, the collapse in January, Arbeloa’s interim management, the chase behind Barcelona for a title that ended unreached. His personal numbers have remained good, his involvement in the team’s attacking play consistent. But the season has not produced the kind of trophy and collective success that was expected.
For England, he is different. In an England shirt, Bellingham has consistently been the player who connects the technical midfield quality to the attacking threat — who can arrive in the box from deep, who can receive under pressure and turn, who can carry the ball through the lines in the way that no other player in the squad can. At Euro 2024, he was England’s best player in the knock-out stages. His late equaliser against Slovakia in the round of sixteen may prove to be one of the defining images of his international career, at least until this tournament produces new ones.
Under Tuchel’s system, Bellingham’s role will likely be as a box-to-box midfielder with licence to advance into the attacking third when the press has won possession high up the pitch. Rice will sit behind him, providing the defensive cover that allows Bellingham to be progressive. The two of them, as a midfield partnership, represent one of the most attractive England combinations in many years.
The remaining midfield position — the third slot, alongside Rice and Bellingham — is where Tuchel’s squad selections create most intrigue. Jordan Henderson’s inclusion, at thirty-six, against the omission of younger options like Adam Wharton or Morgan Gibbs-White, suggests Tuchel values Henderson’s in-game leadership and tactical intelligence in tournament knockout football above the physical contribution. Whether Henderson is fit and sharp enough to contribute meaningfully over ninety minutes against elite opposition will become clear only when it needs to be.
Kobbie Mainoo and Morgan Rogers provide younger alternatives in central midfield, both with the pressing intensity Tuchel prizes. Elliot Anderson’s selection, from Nottingham Forest, rewards a quietly excellent season in the Championship-turned-Premier League — his engine in transition and his reading of the game have made him one of the most quietly impressive midfielders in English football this season.
The Defensive Question
England’s back four, as Tuchel has settled on it, is built for a system that asks significant things of its fullbacks. On the right, Reece James — if fit, and with James fitness is always the primary conversation — provides the attacking quality that England have lacked for years from that position. When James is available, he is one of the best right backs in the world: physical, technically exceptional, capable of high crosses and cutback passes at speed.
The problem is that Reece James has not completed a full season without significant injury interruption since 2019-20. His inclusion in this squad is as much a statement of hope as of certainty.
Djed Spence is the backup at right back, which tells you everything about the depth available at that position and why the absence of Trent Alexander-Arnold, whatever the tactical justifications, carries practical risk. Spence has had a solid season at Tottenham but is not the profile of player who alters a tournament with individual quality. He is a reliable, energetic option — not a match-winner.
On the left, Nico O’Reilly — a twenty-year-old who has broken into the Manchester City first team this season — is something of a wildcard inclusion, suggesting Tuchel sees youth and potential as a valid trade-off against experience in this particular position. Tino Livramento provides another alternative from the right.
At centre-back, John Stones and Marc Guéhi represent the established partnership, with Ezri Konsa providing depth and Jarell Quansah — only capped once before this tournament — filling the fourth slot. Quansah’s inclusion over Maguire, purely on Tuchel’s tactical and physical preference, remains the decision that will be most scrutinised if England concede from set pieces. Maguire’s aerial presence in the defensive box was real and consistent. Whether England miss it is something we won’t fully know until a game where a corner at a crucial moment is not dealt with.
The Forward Line
The attacking options available are, even with the omissions of Foden and Palmer, genuinely impressive. Saka on the right, with his ability to run inside or hold width, is one of the first names on any England teamsheet. Marcus Rashford on the left, currently producing his best football in years while at Barcelona — twenty-eight goal contributions across all competitions in the loan spell — provides pace and directness that England’s system will use on the counter-attack.
Ivan Toney is the most intriguing selection. Thirty-two goals in thirty-two Saudi Pro League games is, transparently, a different level of competition to the Premier League or major European leagues — but Toney has always been a player whose technical qualities around the box translate across environments. His control, his hold-up play, his ability to create space for runners with intelligent movement — these are skills that don’t regress in a different league. His goal-to-game ratio since moving to Al-Ahli has been extraordinary, and Tuchel made the judgment that this form, combined with his physical presence as an alternative to Kane, justified the recall.
Ollie Watkins completed another excellent season at Aston Villa and provides similar box-threat from a starting position, capable of operating in behind or as a link-up option. Anthony Gordon’s selection — from his directness and his ability to run at defenders in transition — adds a different attacking dimension on either flank.
A History That Never Quite Goes Away
England last won the World Cup in 1966. They did it at home, at Wembley, with a side that included Gordon Banks, Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton and Geoff Hurst — who scored a hat-trick in the final against West Germany, one of the most debated goals in football history, the ball that may or may not have crossed the line producing an answer the Soviet linesman gave and England have been gratefully citing ever since.
In the sixty years since, they have reached a World Cup final zero times. The closest moments have been arresting and brief: the semi-final in 1990, when a Gascoigne yellow card in the semi-final and a Waddle penalty miss defined the whole bloody thing. The quarter-final exits, the group stage collapses, the hand of God in 1986, the penalty shootout eliminations that became a kind of national identity — a football culture that has internalised underachievement as the default expectation.
2018 came close to something. Southgate’s team reached the semi-final in Russia, beating Colombia on penalties along the way in what felt at the time like a small psychic liberation. They lost to Croatia in the last four and it was painful but it felt different — like evidence that the culture around the national team was beginning to shift. Euro 2020 (played in 2021) brought them to a home final, where Italy held on and the penalties were lost and England supporters spent the next three years carrying that particular disappointment.
Euro 2024 took them further still: a final, in Berlin, against Spain, lost 2-1 in the sixty-sixth minute through a Oyarzabal volley. They had been one goal away from a first major tournament win in fifty-eight years. The pain of that loss — Bellingham’s equaliser not enough, Kane’s physicality not enough, Southgate’s caution not quite enough — was the pain of proximity rather than distance.
This tournament is different in one specific sense: the sixty-year anniversary is now exactly that. 2026, in the United States, exactly sixty years on from the last time England were champions of the world. There is weight to that number even for those who resist that kind of symbolism, because the generation of players who are about to represent England — Kane, Bellingham, Saka, Rice — grew up with that absence as inherited context, as something the country told itself about itself without quite understanding why it kept being true.
How England Win It
The path that ends with England lifting the trophy in New York or Los Angeles runs through a comfortable group stage, a round of sixteen that depends on the shape of the draw, and then two or three knockout matches against the elite of European and South American football. To win the tournament, England will almost certainly need to beat at least one of France, Spain, Brazil, Germany or Argentina along the way.
Tuchel’s system, if it works as designed, gives England structural tools that previous England managers did not have: a coherent press that suffocates possession, a defensive line that compresses space intelligently rather than dropping deep and inviting pressure, a midfield engine in Rice and Bellingham capable of dominating for ninety minutes against high-level opposition. The squad, shorn of some obvious names, has a collective clarity about its tactical identity that England sides of the Southgate era sometimes lacked even when the individual quality was higher.
The argument for England is: the squad is in the best collective form of any England group in twenty years, with Arsenal’s title-winning infrastructure feeding into the camp, Kane in peak form at thirty-one, Bellingham at twenty-two with tournament experience already behind him. The conditions — playing in the United States, which means familiar climate, huge English-speaking crowds, strong logistical infrastructure — are as favourable as England could hope for.
The argument against is: this is still England, and the departures from expected selection always carry the risk that Tuchel has misjudged what is needed. The absence of genuine depth in certain positions — the reliance on James staying fit, the question marks around Henderson’s legs — creates fragility that elite opponents will identify and target. And England, as a culture, have a long and detailed record of finding ways to depart from major tournaments at the worst possible moment.
The Verdict
Group L — Croatia, Panama, Ghana — should present no serious obstacle. England’s depth is sufficient to rotate across those three matches and emerge with nine points, or close enough.
The test begins in the knockout rounds. If the draw is kind, England could find themselves avoiding the very highest-ranked opposition until the semi-finals. If it is less kind — if France, Brazil or Spain appear in the quarter-final bracket — the margin between the squad as selected and the squad as it might have been becomes measurable rather than theoretical.
Tuchel’s selection is a bet. It is a bet that form in the twelve months before a tournament tells you more than reputation, that tactical coherence matters more than individual brilliance in isolation, that freshness and intensity from younger players in an embedded system will outperform the higher ceiling of players who are not currently operating at their absolute best. History, broadly, supports this view: the teams that win World Cups are usually the ones who go in with clear tactical identity and players who are genuinely running hot, not the teams that collected the biggest names regardless of form.
Whether this particular bet pays off is the question England’s next four to five weeks will answer.
What is not in question is that Harry Kane is thirty-one years old and may never be this ready again. Jude Bellingham is twenty-two and this is his tournament to announce himself on the global stage in the way that his talents demand. Declan Rice is the best defensive midfielder in the country, embedded in a system that asks the most of exactly the qualities he has.
Sixty years is a long time. The players available to end that wait are, arguably, the most talented England have assembled since the night it started.