The management of England’s World Cup semifinal against Argentina should have cost Thomas Tuchel his job. The FA has chosen not to make that change, and that decision shifts the conversation. If Tuchel is going to lead England forward, the task now is to review the project honestly and constructively — beginning with the team he built for this World Cup.
I gave Tuchel considerable deference over several controversial selection decisions because there appeared to be a deliberate tactical plan behind them. Given how the tournament ended, and especially what happened when England led Argentina with a place in the final within reach, that deference can no longer prevent a proper examination of those choices.
Once that conclusion is reached, several decisions for which I had previously extended Tuchel the benefit of the doubt have to be reconsidered, starting with the construction of the squad. If England had intentionally sacrificed some of its most gifted footballers in order to create a tactically precise tournament team, what exactly had that team been engineered to do? If the answer in the defining moment was to put six defenders on the pitch and surrender the initiative, the original logic becomes considerably harder to defend.
That question leads inevitably to Cole Palmer and Phil Foden, two of the most technically gifted attacking players available to England. Form matters, and neither had enjoyed an ideal club season. I understand why a national-team manager might weigh current form differently from accumulated reputation, and I do not know everything that went into Tuchel’s thinking. Personality, tactical fit, training, chemistry and psychology all matter at tournament level.
Still, Palmer in particular is the sort of footballer I believe England should be building around. He can alter the geometry of a match. He can receive the ball in an area that appears harmless and make a defender move somewhere he does not want to go. Those qualities become more valuable, not less, when knockout matches tighten and conventional attacking patterns stop working.
Palmer had already shown that capacity for England. He came off the bench repeatedly at Euro 2024 and scored the equaliser in the final against Spain. Then, at the 2025 Club World Cup final in the United States, with Chelsea facing Paris Saint-Germain, Palmer scored twice and created another goal. I remember watching it and thinking that this was a player I expected to be there for England at the World Cup: young, fearless, technically exceptional and seemingly energised rather than diminished by a major occasion.
Maybe his omission really was entirely footballing. I don’t know, and I have no interest in inventing a personal conflict for which I have no evidence. But after watching England against Argentina, it is impossible for me not to revisit the decision. When England desperately needed someone capable of keeping the ball, beating a man, creating an outlet and forcing Argentina to think about something other than attacking, one of the most obvious candidates in the entire English talent pool was watching from somewhere else.
The same broad argument applies to Foden. This does not mean a manager must select every famous player or somehow fit every creative midfielder into the same starting eleven. It means tournament squads need alternatives, especially alternatives capable of changing the character of a match.
Harry Kane is an important part of this discussion. A core element of Tuchel’s conception of England was understandably built around perhaps the most prolific number nine the country has produced in generations. Kane remains an extraordinary goalscorer and an unusually gifted passer for his position, and that approach delivered to a degree during this World Cup. I hope he remains prolific for years to come.
But age inevitably becomes part of the calculation. England cannot construct its future simply by assuming that the same architecture will remain intact indefinitely. A centre-forward, even one as accomplished as Kane, is also naturally limited in how much he can alter the entire geometry of a match when his team can no longer progress the ball toward him. Creative players can change that geometry. Palmer can. Foden can. Bellingham can. England left two of them at home.
Some reimagining of the project is therefore both necessary and appropriate. It does not require discarding Kane or everything Tuchel has attempted to build. It means recognising the extraordinary young talent around him and beginning to establish the next England team around players who can define its identity for years to come. Jude Bellingham should be one of those foundations. Anthony Gordon emerged from this World Cup as another. Cole Palmer should be central to the conversation despite his omission from this squad. There are others, of course, and more will emerge before 2030, but England already possesses the beginnings of a young core capable of playing brave, technically ambitious football.
England’s 6–4 victory over France in the third-place match does not retroactively sanitise Argentina. Third-place matches are strange events, and both teams entered that one carrying the physical and emotional exhaustion of missing the final. But there were encouraging things in England’s performance, including the willingness to continue attacking when the match became chaotic. Bukayo Saka scored a hat-trick, and Bellingham capped an extraordinary individual tournament with another late goal. If there are pieces of England’s future contained in that performance, they should be embraced.
There is also a cultural question around Tuchel’s England, although I regard it as supporting evidence rather than the central case. The public episode involving Bellingham after the Norway match bothered me from several directions. Gabriel Clarke’s handling of the interview, taking Tuchel’s criticism and putting it to Bellingham in a way that stripped away much of the surrounding context, was irresponsible in my view.
That does not excuse Bellingham’s reaction. However brilliant or influential a footballer is, publicly dismissing his manager’s criticism creates what I would call a cultural ultimatum. A healthy sporting organisation cannot simply allow a moment like that to disappear. There has to be some reaffirmation of the hierarchy, whether through an apology, a private reckoning, discipline or an unmistakable restoration of mutual respect. Otherwise the rest of the team learns that managerial authority is conditional on whether its most important players feel like accepting it.
This is where my experience watching Bill Belichick’s New England Patriots inevitably informs my thinking. Great sporting cultures do not happen accidentally. Leadership has to establish the standard, but the organization above the coach also has to support legitimate authority rather than quietly erode it. My belief that Robert Kraft ultimately undermined Belichick and helped destroy the very culture that had produced the Patriots dynasty is an argument for another day, but the underlying lesson applies far beyond American football.
None of this makes the England question Tuchel versus Bellingham. It is not. Bellingham stays. He had an extraordinary World Cup, repeatedly producing decisive moments and ultimately adding another spectacular goal against France despite not starting the third-place match. His greatness belongs to him, and I have no interest in constructing some convenient psychological story in which tension with Tuchel somehow deserves credit for how brilliantly he played.
Bellingham is a player England should build around, just as Gordon and Palmer should be major parts of the future. But great players can be empowered while also being expected to operate within clear cultural boundaries. Those ideas are not contradictory. If the FA is moving forward with Tuchel, it now has a particular responsibility to reinforce the integrity of his dressing room. Players, however important, cannot be permitted to believe that openly challenging the manager in a fundamentally disruptive manner carries no consequence.
That responsibility belongs to Tuchel as well. Retaining a manager does not mean pretending his mistakes did not happen. The errors against Argentina should be identified clearly and learned from. Managerial accountability cannot become managerial impotence, however. If the FA has decided that Tuchel remains the man, then it should demand that he learn from his mistakes while simultaneously giving him the institutional authority necessary to lead.
The Bellingham episode tells us something about the culture. Palmer’s absence tells us something about the footballing vision. Neither is the central reason I believe England should have dismissed Thomas Tuchel. Argentina is. Strip away everything else and look at the arc of Tuchel’s tournament. England played down to several lesser opponents and survived a series of tight matches. It produced one particularly stirring backs-to-the-wall victory over Mexico in circumstances that genuinely required that mentality. It reached a World Cup semifinal, took the lead against one of the great football nations and then retreated into precisely the kind of football Tuchel had been hired to replace.
That is what makes the defeat so damning. Thomas Tuchel was supposed to be the reaction to Gareth Southgate’s England. Instead, at the defining moment, his England became almost a caricature of the criticism aimed at Southgate: score first, become frightened of losing what you have, surrender the initiative and hope the clock rescues you.
England should have sacked Tuchel because of what that moment revealed, not because replacing him would have guaranteed a trophy. There are no guarantees in tournament football. England’s talent pool is good enough to compete with every major footballing nation, which also means that the decisive matches will often be against teams good enough to beat England. Chance will always be involved.
The FA’s responsibility was not to predict the future with certainty. It was to evaluate the evidence it had and determine whether the project deserved to continue. I believe Argentina provided enough evidence to make a change. My own preference would have been to simplify the idea of what England was trying to achieve. I would have looked for a British manager with the tactical ability required at this level but also a deep understanding of what representing the country means, someone with genuine patriotic pride and a fire in the belly to project that confidence through the team.
By national identity, I do not mean nostalgia or a rejection of tactical sophistication. England should learn from the best ideas in world football. But an England team should also look recognizably like England: brave, disciplined, physically and mentally resilient, confident in its ability to compete with anyone and willing to attack rather than shrink when the stakes become greatest. The extraordinary performance with ten men at the Azteca showed one version of that identity. The retreat against Argentina showed its opposite.
The Red Sox fired Grady Little after 2003. The following October, they found themselves facing the Yankees again in the American League Championship Series, this time falling behind three games to none. No Major League Baseball team had ever overcome a 3–0 postseason deficit. Boston won four straight, completed the first such comeback in baseball postseason history, then swept the St. Louis Cardinals to win the franchise’s first World Series in 86 years.
That history does not prove that England would have won anything by dismissing Thomas Tuchel. To claim that it does would contradict everything I have argued about the unpredictability of knockout sport. The lesson is narrower and more useful: sometimes an organization has to recognize that getting further than it has in years is not, by itself, sufficient reason to retain the person who got it there. Sometimes the defining moment reveals more than the final placement does.
Grady Little got Boston to within one victory of the World Series. In an iconic match, against an iconic opponent, in an iconic moment, he made the decision that told the organization it had seen enough. Thomas Tuchel got England to within one victory of the World Cup final. Then, against Argentina of all teams, with England ahead and history within reach, he bottled it. I believe England should have decided that it had seen enough too.
It did not, and that changes the purpose of this argument. For all intents and purposes, England and the FA are moving forward with Thomas Tuchel. That is a different decision from the one I would have made, but the conversation now has to become constructive. Like Southgate before him, I have never doubted that Tuchel meant well. I liked him when he took the job, I wanted him to succeed, and if he is leading England at the European Championship, I will be rooting for England and rooting for him to succeed as well. The purpose of identifying what went wrong should not be to spend the next two years waiting to say, “I told you so.” It should be to make sure the same mistakes are not repeated.
Constructive support, however, cannot require pretending that what happened against Argentina did not happen. In fact, the opposite is true. Moving forward successfully has to begin with a sober appraisal of what we just witnessed: an epic managerial blunder. That means reimagining parts of the project as Kane gets older and England’s next generation takes greater responsibility. It means building around talents such as Bellingham, Gordon and Palmer. It means developing a national footballing identity that does not disappear when England takes a lead against an elite opponent. And it means establishing a strong dressing-room culture in which England’s great players are empowered without ever becoming bigger than the authority necessary to manage the team.
There is every reason for optimism. Nothing that happened against Argentina changes my belief in the quality of English football. England can enter the next European Championship with as legitimate a chance of winning it as almost anyone. France and Spain may begin slightly ahead in my estimation, but England belongs immediately in the conversation beneath them. There is equally no reason this generation cannot develop toward another serious challenge for the World Cup in 2030.
That is ultimately the spirit in which I offer these thoughts. I believe Thomas Tuchel bottled the biggest match of his England tenure. I believe his management of the semifinal against Argentina, with a place in the World Cup final within reach, should have cost him his job. The FA disagreed, and its decision has been made. Acknowledging the magnitude of that failure is not rooting against Tuchel. It is the necessary starting point for making sure England does not repeat it.
So learn from it. Reimagine the project where it needs reimagining. Build around the extraordinary talent England already possesses. Reinforce the integrity of the dressing room. Establish an identity that survives the pressure of the biggest occasions. And if England finds itself thirty-five minutes from a major final again, make certain its first instinct is not to become frightened of losing it.
I wanted England to make a different decision about Thomas Tuchel. They didn’t. I liked him when he arrived, I believe he genuinely wants to bring England success, and now that he remains the manager, I hope he does exactly that. Everyone who cares about English football should be able to debate these questions openly and constructively, because there is too much talent in this generation, and too much opportunity ahead of it, for the lessons of Argentina to be wasted.
England cannot change what happened in the semifinal. It can make sure it learns from it.
Interesting read. I liked the point that reaching a semifinal shouldn’t automatically protect a manager from criticism if the key decisions in that semifinal were poor. The discussion around Palmer, Bellingham and England’s identity going forward was especially interesting.
England’s long wait for another major international trophy gives this debate even more context. I’ve been tracking that drought here as well: https://trophydrought.com/countries/england/