Germany have not won the World Cup since 2014. They went out in the group stage in 2018, the most humiliating exit for a reigning champion in modern tournament history — beaten by South Korea while Mexico and Sweden qualified from the same group. They went out in the quarter-finals in 2022 to Japan in a result almost as shocking in the context of expectations. They hosted Euro 2024, reached the quarter-finals, and lost to Spain 2-1 in extra time — a defeat of genuine quality against the tournament’s best team that suggested, for the first time in several years, that Germany were moving in the right direction.
Julian Nagelsmann announced his World Cup squad on the twenty-first of May with a selection that confirmed several things simultaneously: that Germany are now organised around a clear tactical identity, that the transition generation of Musiala and Wirtz is ready to carry the senior programme, and that Manuel Neuer — forty years old, retired from international football for two years — is back. Because Nagelsmann asked, and Neuer said yes, and evidently the man still presents as the best option available.
The Group
Germany are in Group E alongside Ecuador, Ivory Coast and Curaçao. Ecuador, with Moisés Caicedo and Enner Valencia in what is likely the veteran forward’s final World Cup, will provide the genuine competitive test of the group — a physical, well-organised South American team with a specific threat from set pieces and on the counter-attack. Ivory Coast, with Sébastien Haller recovered and a generation of technically accomplished midfielders, cannot be dismissed. Curaçao represent the achievement of qualification more than the expectation of advancement.
Germany should top this group. The narrative question heading in is not whether they advance but whether the style and confidence with which they do so signals what the knockout rounds will look like.
Manuel Neuer at Forty
The selection of Manuel Neuer as Germany’s number one goalkeeper is the single most discussed decision in Nagelsmann’s squad. Neuer announced his retirement from international football in 2023, following the 2022 World Cup, where he played all four matches and Germany were still eliminated in the group stage. The retirement felt conclusive. He was thirty-seven. His injury history — the leg fracture suffered in December 2022 that kept him out for the entirety of 2023 — suggested a physical condition that would not support the demands of international tournament football.
He is now forty. He has spent the 2025-26 season at Bayern Munich, where Vincent Kompany’s radical attacking system has required goalkeepers capable of playing an extremely high line and acting as the first outfield player in the press. Neuer has functioned in this environment with a composure that has renewed debate about his standing, because the qualities that made him transformative in his prime — the sweeper-keeper’s ability to act as a central defender in transition, the distribution that begins attacks from the back — are the qualities Kompany’s system specifically depends upon.
Nagelsmann’s phone call came. Neuer accepted. Whether the decision is vindicated depends on what happens from the quarter-final onwards, if Germany reach it. The test of a goalkeeper in a tournament is not the group stage or the round of sixteen; it is the moments in the seventy-eighth minute when the opposition has a chance to equalise and Neuer is required to be what he was in 2014, in the Maracanã, in the World Cup final.
Oliver Baumann and Alexander Nübel provide backup behind him. Both are capable. Neither would generate the same discussion if deployed.
Musiala and Wirtz
The question of how Germany’s two most technically gifted attacking midfielders function together — and the connected question of how their best football at club level translates to an international context with fewer training weeks — is the central tactical puzzle of this squad.
Jamal Musiala, twenty-two, is the most naturally gifted footballer Germany have produced since Michael Ballack. His dribbling in tight spaces, his ability to receive in compressed situations and find the turn or the pass that no one else in the press of defenders anticipated, his goal threat from arriving late into the penalty area — these qualities have made him indispensable to Bayern and have been on display, in slightly reduced form, for Germany across the previous two years of competition. He is the player German supporters watch the most closely at the start of each game, looking for early signs of whether he is operating at the level his talent allows.
Florian Wirtz, twenty-three, was the most expensive signing in Bundesliga history when Liverpool paid one hundred and sixteen and a half million pounds for him in the summer of 2025. His first season in England — adapting to a Premier League system that runs at higher physical intensity than the Bundesliga without sacrificing the ball-play Jürgen Klopp’s successors have maintained — has produced fifteen league goals and eleven assists, numbers that confirm he has transferred. The question for Germany is whether his best work is done when he operates in the specific position Liverpool give him, or whether the flexibility to find his best game in a different system is also there.
Nagelsmann’s solution, across the internationals leading into the tournament, has been to play Musiala centrally as a shadow striker or advanced number eight, with Wirtz from a position that gives him the half-space on the left of an attack that has width from the left back and inverts from Musiala’s movements through the centre. The two of them combine naturally — the Dortmund background (Musiala’s early exposure to similar pressing environments) and the club-level chemistry that comes from being the two most prominent players in the same national conversation.
Deniz Undav and the Striker Choice
Deniz Undav had the best individual Bundesliga season of any German striker in recent memory in 2025-26 — nineteen goals for Stuttgart, finishing as the leading German scorer in the league, outperforming Havertz at Arsenal, outperforming the more celebrated forwards by the measure that ultimately matters.
His inclusion as the primary centre-forward option is the selection that most reveals Nagelsmann’s pragmatism. Undav is not a stylistically exciting forward. He is not a player whose movement generates gasps in the way that Gnabry in his best years could, or that a completely fit Leroy Sané offers from the wing. He is a composed finisher with good movement around the box, a quality hold-up player and a consistent presence in the penalty area across ninety minutes. He scored nineteen times in a Bundesliga season that featured significant competition for the Golden Boot. That is the argument for him and it is, based on the evidence available, a strong one.
Leroy Sané, now at Galatasaray in an unexpected late-career destination, provides the alternative wide forward option — pace and directness on the right flank, the ability to cut inside or get to the byline depending on the defensive shape — though his inclusion was not guaranteed and his form has been slightly inconsistent in the Turkish league environment. Maximilian Beier from Dortmund and Lennart Karl, the eighteen-year-old Bayern forward included as the tournament’s developmental prospect, complete the attacking depth.
Kimmich and the Spine
Joshua Kimmich leads this Germany squad as captain and as the midfield reference point. At thirty, he has been the most important German midfielder of his generation — a player who functions as a deep-lying playmaker, a high-intensity presser, and a tactical reader with the experience of multiple Champions League campaigns and three World Cups already behind him.
Aleksandar Pavlović, Kimmich’s Bayern teammate, provides the athletic midfield complement — a younger player whose recovery runs and ball-winning have made him increasingly essential to Bayern’s pressing structure. Leon Goretzka, similarly, offers the box-to-box energy that Kimmich’s more controlled distribution complements.
Angelo Stiller, from Stuttgart, is the most interesting inclusion in the midfield: a positional midfielder whose reading of the game and whose ability to maintain Germany’s structure when they do not have the ball gives Nagelsmann options around Kimmich’s role without simply replicating it.
Pascal Groß, from Brighton, represents something different — a player who has spent five seasons in the Premier League developing the kind of pressing intensity and physical adaptability that the German system, in its current form, uses for its midfield rotation.
The Defensive Picture
Antonio Rüdiger remains the most imposing centre-back Germany can field — physically dominant, aggressive in duels, capable of driving the ball out from the back in situations that require a direct solution. His partnership with Jonathan Tah, from Bayern, is the established first choice: Tah’s composure in possession and his ability to play as the left-sided ball-carrier in a back four that asks its defenders to initiate attacks, complementing Rüdiger’s defensive authority.
The fullback positions are where Germany carry the most uncertainty. David Raum on the left provides attacking depth — his crossing and his ability to overlap have been valuable in the Bundesliga — but the defensive commitment required in tournament knockout football may test him against wider, faster opposition. On the right, Nathaniel Brown from Frankfurt is a young, energetic option whose tournament experience remains limited.
Malick Thiaw, now at Newcastle United, provides the central defensive depth — his physical presence and his ability to compete aerially giving Germany a different kind of option if the match situation demands a more direct defensive approach.
The Ghost of 2014
Germany’s last World Cup triumph was in Brazil — the 7-1 against the host nation in Belo Horizonte, Toni Kroos and Mesut Özil threading it through a Brazilian midfield that had never quite imagined what was possible, then the 1-0 final win against Argentina in Rio with Götze’s volley in extra time. The team was built on a youth development revolution that Germany had begun in the early 2000s, producing the Khediras and Müller and Özil who sustained the programme through three tournaments.
That generation has retired or departed. Thomas Müller is done. Kroos came back for Euro 2024 and went again. The new generation is Musiala and Wirtz, who were children when Germany last won this trophy, who grew up watching the 7-1 on television and carrying the consequence of the impossible expectation it created.
The pressure on this generation is different from the 2014 generation’s pressure. They are not expected to simply win; they are expected to win in the right way — to express the kind of football that Musiala and Wirtz are capable of producing, at full function, against the world’s best. Germany are, historically, a nation that wins without necessarily producing the football it wants to be remembered for. Whether this squad can do both is the ambition that Nagelsmann has talked around without quite articulating directly.
How Germany Win It
Germany win this World Cup if Musiala and Wirtz find their best combination in the same team at the same time — if the training weeks between group matches and knockout rounds give Nagelsmann the time to embed the connection between them into something more reliable than it has sometimes been in competitive internationals, if Kimmich manages the squad’s collective discipline, and if Neuer makes the saves that only Neuer makes when the margin is thin.
They lose it if the forward line’s tactical complexity reproduces the kind of grey, effective-but-not-quite-sufficient football that characterised the 2022 group stage, or if an injury to either Musiala or Wirtz — the two players around whom the whole offensive system is most dependent — removes the quality that their partnership provides.
The Verdict
Germany are, by the measure of the squads available, the third or fourth best team in this tournament. Below Spain and France in the European hierarchy by recent evidence, but with the individual quality in Musiala and Wirtz, the goalkeeper quality in Neuer, and the tournament experience in Kimmich and Rüdiger that makes a run to the final entirely plausible.
The group stage will be formality. The quarter-final — likely against a South American or Asian qualifier — will be the first real test. The semi-final, if they reach it, will be the defining match.
Forty years old and still the first choice. Manuel Neuer walking out for Germany at the World Cup tells you something about what this programme has and what it lacks simultaneously. It tells you that Germany have great history and the uncertainty of the present. It tells you that this tournament is open in a way that no single squad can quite close.
The generation of Musiala and Wirtz has been building to this. The tournament has arrived. What happens next is what football is for.