Perhaps the oddest place to begin an article about the England football team is Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.
I grew up in New England during the final years of the Curse of the Bambino. The Red Sox had not won the World Series since 1918, and by 2003 that history had become almost mythological. That year Boston won 95 games and reached Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Yankees, one victory from the World Series and further than the franchise had gone in quite some time. Boston led 5–2 in the eighth inning with Pedro Martinez on the mound. Martinez had been magnificent, but he was visibly fading. Manager Grady Little had the opportunity to remove him and chose not to. The Yankees tied the game, and Aaron Boone eventually ended Boston’s season with a solo home run in the 11th inning.
Little had gotten the Red Sox to Game 7. He had gotten them within one victory of the World Series. None of that saved him, nor should it have. In an iconic match, against an iconic opponent, in an iconic moment, the manager made an iconic blunder. There are times in sport when the manner of a failure tells you more than the achievement that preceded it. In all my years of watching sports, that is the closest comparison I can find to what Thomas Tuchel did against Argentina in the World Cup semifinal.
My relationship with international football makes this personal in ways that go considerably beyond simply wanting England to win. My father was born in England and brought his love of football, along with considerable talent for it, to the United States at a time when there was relatively little opportunity here for that talent to find expression. I grew up as a coach’s son, playing the game, inheriting something of his gift for dribbling and poaching goals, and dreaming, as boys do, of becoming a professional player myself. Life eventually carried me elsewhere, but football remained one of the great continuities between my childhood, my father and me.
Some of my fondest memories came at the 1994 World Cup in the United States. I attended Argentina’s 2–1 victory over Nigeria, which became Diego Maradona’s final match for his country. Claudio Caniggia scored both Argentine goals, one after a characteristically alert quick restart involving Maradona. I was also at Foxboro Stadium for one of the defining matches of Roberto Baggio’s career, when Nigeria seemed poised to eliminate Italy in the Round of 16. Italy was down to ten men and almost out of the tournament when Baggio equalized in the 88th minute, then scored the extra-time penalty that sent Italy through. It was the beginning of his extraordinary knockout run on the way to the final against Romário’s Brazil.
My support at World Cups has never operated according to a rigid rule in which one country must always be supported above every other story. Football does not work that way for me. The way a team plays, the personalities involved and the history unfolding in front of us can all pull you emotionally toward a side. For a long time, Argentina did exactly that.
I had identified strongly with Lionel Messi and Argentina well before the 2010 World Cup. By the time Qatar arrived, it felt as though much of the football world had suffered with Messi to varying degrees. There had been the heartbreak of the 2014 World Cup final, the successive Copa América final defeats, the missed penalty against Chile in 2016 and the extraordinary moment afterward when Messi, overwhelmed by another failure with the national team, announced his international retirement. He came back, of course, and the pursuit continued.
My attachment was never only about Messi. I loved Ángel Di María, El Fideo, a wonderful big-game player whose career with Argentina had its own long arc of frustration and redemption. Paulo Dybala has long been one of my favorite footballers, and I spent years wishing Argentina would find more opportunities to use him. Emiliano “Dibu” Martínez became a critically important piece of the story as well. His three penalty saves against Colombia in the 2021 Copa América semifinal helped propel Argentina toward the breakthrough trophy that preceded the World Cup triumph. I was in Miami during the 2022 World Cup, and supporting that Argentina team was tremendous fun.
Messi has his World Cup now, and that story reached the ending so many of us had wanted for so long. This time, my heart was fully somewhere else. I wanted to watch England win a World Cup with my dad.
England has always mattered to us, through World Cups, European Championships and all of the familiar disappointments in between. My frustration has never simply been that England does not win every tournament. No serious observer of knockout football can judge a national team that way. Too much can happen in a single match. A referee’s decision, an injury, a penalty, a deflection, an extraordinary individual moment or a goalkeeper guessing correctly in a shootout can separate a champion from a team flying home the next morning.
There is a broader principle here that I believe English football has repeatedly gotten wrong. The fact that a manager has taken England “further than we have been in years” should carry almost no independent weight in judging his performance. Decades of English underperformance should neither raise nor lower the standard applied to the manager standing on the touchline today. History provides context and emotion. It should not provide a discount on accountability.
Tournament football makes that distinction especially important because results are unusually dependent on variance. The luck of the draw matters enormously. So does the timing of an injury, a refereeing decision, a deflection, the bounce of a ball or the outcome of a penalty shootout. Two teams can produce almost identical performances and leave the same match with completely different historical legacies because one penalty struck the inside of the post and another struck the outside. Judging a manager primarily by the round in which his team happened to be eliminated therefore mistakes an outcome for an evaluation.
The better standard is both simpler and more demanding. Judge the performance of the team relative to the quality of the players available to its manager – not merely the players he ultimately selected, but the talent available throughout his selection pool – and relative to the quality of the opponents encountered along the way. Then pay particular attention to the decisions the manager actually controlled: his team selection, tactical approach, substitutions and response to changing circumstances within matches. Those decisions should be evaluated on their merits, independently of whatever lucky or unlucky bounce occurred afterward.
By that standard, Gareth Southgate’s England consistently underperformed. The objection was never that reaching a semifinal or two European Championship finals was somehow a bad achievement. It was that England repeatedly possessed a level of talent that should have produced better football than we actually watched, often while traveling unusually favourable routes through tournaments. The further England advanced, the final placement increasingly became the defence of the manager. But “he got us further than we used to go” is not an answer to whether he maximised the players and opportunities he actually had.
I was one of the many people who criticised Southgate while he was England manager. By Euro 2024, my frustration had reached its boiling point. England beat Serbia 1–0, drew 1–1 with Denmark and 0–0 with Slovenia, then came within seconds of being eliminated by Slovakia before Jude Bellingham produced his extraordinary overhead kick. Switzerland took England to penalties. Only against the Netherlands did we finally see a sustained stretch of the kind of football the talent in that squad suggested England should have been capable of producing all along.
Meanwhile, the other side of the bracket contained Spain, Germany, France and Portugal. This was hardly the first time Southgate’s England had benefited from a favourable tournament route. In 2018 they needed penalties to get past Colombia, beat Sweden, then took a 1–0 lead against Croatia in the semifinal and gradually surrendered the initiative before losing 2–1 after extra time. At Euro 2020, England’s 2–0 victory over Germany at Wembley deserves genuine credit. Whatever one thinks of that particular German side, the history of England-Germany gives such a match a significance that should not be dismissed. England then met Ukraine in the quarterfinal and Denmark in the semifinal, where they again needed extra time, before facing Italy in the final.
Luke Shaw scored almost immediately against Italy. England had the lead at Wembley with an opportunity to seize the moment, but the familiar retreat began. Italy grew into the game, equalized and eventually won on penalties. Southgate received enormous criticism for his choice of penalty takers, and I would have made different decisions myself, but that has never been the central issue for me. England could easily have won that shootout. One kick going inside the post rather than outside it would not have retroactively made the preceding 120 minutes better managed.
Some England teams that did not advance as far as Southgate’s teams remain more meaningful to me. I think of 1990 and Gary Lineker equalizing against West Germany in the semifinal before England went out on penalties. I think especially of 1998, when England went toe-to-toe with Argentina, lost David Beckham to a red card, played for so long with ten men and still took the match to penalties. Even England’s 2–1 quarterfinal defeat to France in 2022 left me feeling better about the team than some tournaments in which England went further. They went after the defending world champions. They played well. Harry Kane missed a late penalty that could have equalized. That happens.
The greater criticism of Southgate was the eye test and, increasingly, the mentality his decisions appeared to project. England too often played major matches as though avoiding defeat had become more important than pursuing victory. They would score, retreat, surrender initiative and invite a talented opponent to spend the rest of the match asking questions. Croatia and Italy were the most obvious examples.
Southgate eventually read the room and stepped aside gracefully. I appreciate him for that, and I have no interest in rewriting his tenure as though nothing good happened. A World Cup semifinal and consecutive European Championship finals will understandably grow in stature as the immediate context fades. I also have no doubt that Southgate wanted desperately to bring England success and gave the job his best effort. But by the end, England needed something different, and Thomas Tuchel appeared to understand exactly what that something was.
The controversy surrounding the appointment of a German manager to lead England did not greatly trouble me. I was more interested in what Tuchel was saying. He spoke about England lacking identity, rhythm, clarity and freedom. He recognized the fear of losing that seemed to have infected the team’s football. He spoke about hunger, excitement and expression, about a side going into matches with the desire to win rather than merely trying to avoid losing. It sounded like a direct diagnosis of the disease many of us had been watching for years, and that is why I liked him.
There was one uncomfortable precedent in the back of my mind. In the 2024 Champions League semifinal against Real Madrid, Tuchel’s Bayern Munich held a late lead before he made defensive-minded substitutions, most conspicuously removing Harry Kane. Real Madrid scored twice and Bayern went out. I remembered it, but it would have been unreasonable to define his England tenure before it began according to one match he had managed for another club.
Tuchel also earned a particularly significant check in my book by speaking admiringly of Bill Belichick. Growing up in New England gave me the privilege of watching the Patriots dynasty firsthand. Whatever revisionism has arisen since, I saw what a genuine winning culture looked like when it was created, installed and maintained over an extraordinary period. I also saw what happened when that culture was eventually undermined. My views on Robert Kraft’s role in destroying his own dynasty belong in another article, but those experiences inevitably shape the way I judge leadership in sport.
So when Tuchel selected a World Cup squad that raised obvious questions, I resisted the temptation to attack it. The group was clearly not simply an attempt to collect the 26 most talented English footballers. There seemed to be a deliberate design, almost a militaristic one: this player will perform this function, that player will solve that problem. Jordan Henderson was there at 35. Ivan Toney returned while playing in Saudi Arabia. There were legitimate questions around the fullback positions, although Djed Spence ultimately had an excellent tournament. Most strikingly, Phil Foden and Cole Palmer were left at home.
I did not love those choices, but I was prepared to give Tuchel the benefit of the doubt because his rhetoric had earned it. Perhaps this was exactly the point of appointing an elite tactical manager. Perhaps he was sacrificing some talent on paper in order to construct a more coherent team, one built so specifically that when the decisive tactical moment of the World Cup finally arrived, Tuchel would have precisely the pieces he needed.
England’s opening 4–2 victory over Croatia offered encouragement, particularly in an excellent second half in which the team played with some of the aggression and freedom Tuchel had promised. After that, however, the tournament became much less convincing. A 0–0 draw with Ghana was followed by a 2–0 win over Panama, then a 2–1 victory over DR Congo, 3–2 against Mexico and 2–1 after extra time against Norway. England was advancing, and that matters, but these were often tight and underwhelming matches. Several could easily have turned the other way.
Mexico was the exception, not because England suddenly produced beautiful football but because the circumstances made survival itself admirable. At the Azteca, in the altitude, surrounded by a fiercely hostile home crowd and eventually reduced to ten men, England found itself in a situation where retreating was entirely understandable. Watching it, I made essentially the same calculation Tuchel did: my God, this is horrible; we have to survive this.
They did, and there was something distinctly English about the performance, every player seemingly fighting for the man beside him while Mexico came forward. It had an almost Battle of Dunkirk quality to it: backs to the wall, no pretending the situation was anything other than desperate, hold the line and get out. It was one of the most powerful England victories I can remember, precisely because the circumstances justified the mentality. But what works when you are down to ten men at the Azteca cannot become a national footballing philosophy.
England survived Norway as well, with Bellingham again central to the result, and reached the World Cup semifinal. Giving Tuchel a passing grade simply because England reached that semifinal, however, would repeat precisely the mistake made during the Southgate years. A revealing question is what this tournament would look like in retrospect had Norway not eliminated Brazil before England ever had to face them. England was hardly convincing in surviving Norway itself. Change one result elsewhere in the bracket and the supposedly self-evident accomplishment of reaching the semifinal might have required defeating an entirely different calibre of opponent. That does not mean Brazil necessarily would have beaten England. It demonstrates why the name of the round cannot substitute for examining the road that led there.
Measured against the opposition England actually faced and the talent Tuchel had available, this team once again underperformed. There were important exceptions, most memorably the extraordinary ten-man victory over Mexico, and there were individual performances that deserve tremendous credit. But taken as a whole, England did not consistently play at a level commensurate with its talent. It advanced through a series of tight matches before arriving at the first truly defining test of Tuchel’s management: Argentina, with a place in the World Cup final at stake.
There are opponents, and then there are opponents whose names carry history with them. England-Argentina is one of those fixtures. There is 1986 and the Hand of God. There is 1998, David Beckham and Diego Simeone. For me there is the additional personal memory of having watched Diego Maradona’s final Argentina match as a boy. None of that determines the tactics of a football match, but it undeniably gives the occasion an emotional weight that England-Panama or England-Ghana can never possess.
More importantly, this was simply the biggest match Thomas Tuchel had managed for England. The reigning world champions stood between his team and England’s first World Cup final since 1966. Anthony Gordon, one of the brightest revelations of England’s tournament and someone who looks capable of becoming a major part of the team’s future, scored in the 55th minute. England led Argentina 1–0 with roughly half an hour separating them from the World Cup final. Everything Tuchel had said about identity, bravery, hunger and playing to win was about to be tested in the most consequential circumstances imaginable.
Argentina responded, as any great team would. There are always two teams playing the match. Lionel Scaloni was making decisions too. Argentina’s players were fighting to preserve their title defense. Momentum began to change and England increasingly found itself pushed backward. That was not in itself evidence of managerial cowardice; sometimes an elite opponent simply takes control of a phase of a match.
What followed is what condemns Tuchel. He removed Gordon, the goalscorer and one of England’s meaningful attacking outlets, and replaced him with Ezri Konsa. England moved to a back five. More defensive changes followed. By the closing stages, Tuchel had six defenders on the pitch, including four centre-backs. Rather than giving Argentina something new to worry about, England progressively removed the things Argentina had needed to worry about in the first place. That was the moment Tuchel bottled it.
I do not use that phrase because England eventually lost. If Tuchel had introduced Bukayo Saka or another attacking player, attempted to wrestle the initiative back, pushed England ten yards higher and still watched Argentina score twice, the historical result would be exactly the same: Argentina 2, England 1. My assessment of the manager would be dramatically different. The process is the issue.
England had only 12 percent of the possession between Gordon putting them ahead and Argentina taking the lead. They were not controlling the game defensively; they were disappearing from it. Six defenders in a World Cup semifinal in which England already had the lead was not courage. It was not the front-foot football Tuchel had promised. It was an attempt to make the remaining minutes disappear, and elite football does not usually allow that.
Argentina no longer had to devote the same attention to what England might do in transition. Pressure became increasingly one-directional. Enzo Fernández equalized in the 85th minute, Lautaro Martínez scored the winner in stoppage time, and England went from standing on the threshold of a World Cup final to going home.
This is where the distinction between outcome and management becomes devastating to Tuchel’s case. I do not condemn him simply because Argentina scored twice and England lost 2–1. Football does not work that way. I condemn the decisions he made before those goals were scored. England took the lead, Argentina began applying pressure, and Tuchel responded by progressively dismantling England’s ability to threaten them. Gordon came off. Defenders came on. England retreated until Argentina had virtually nothing left to fear in the opposite direction. The goals that followed do not make those decisions bad; the decisions were bad before the goals ever went in.
Tuchel himself acknowledged afterward that England had become too passive. He explained that the move to a back five was intended to close gaps and deal with Argentina’s repeated crosses. I understand the tactical reasoning. I simply believe it was catastrophically wrong. England’s inability to retain possession or threaten Argentina was already the problem; adding defenders treated a symptom while making the underlying disease worse.
Perhaps Tuchel was privately instructing his players to push forward. None of us was in the conversations on the touchline. But managers are judged by the observable decisions they make, and the observable decisions were unmistakable. Gordon came off. Defenders came on. England’s attacking outlets disappeared, and Argentina was invited to keep asking the same question until England finally gave the wrong answer.
There is also an irony in treating England’s eventual third-place finish—and the country’s first World Cup medal in 60 years—as the vindication of Tuchel’s tournament. Tuchel’s own approach to the third-place match demonstrated how much value he placed on it. He rested key players, most notably Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham, players who unquestionably would have started had England been preparing for the World Cup final instead. The match itself was something of a spectacle: exciting, open and full of attacking football, but with a striking lack of defensive intensity and focus from both sides. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the medal, but it cannot be used to transform the tournament into something it was not. If anything, England’s ability to attack and score so freely in that environment only further condemns the atrocious tactical choices Tuchel made when it actually mattered, with a place in the World Cup final on the line.
That is the sober appraisal this tournament requires. Tuchel did not merely suffer an unfortunate semifinal defeat. In the biggest match of his England tenure, with the team leading the reigning world champions and approximately half an hour from its first World Cup final since 1966, he committed an epic and iconic managerial blunder. Against Argentina, Tuchel managed England into defeat. Under a serious culture of accountability, I believe that was an unequivocally fireable offense.
It appears, however, that The FA is not going to make that move. In our next article, we will explore how Tuchel and this England team can- and should – move forward toward winning a major international tournament, something this group of players is certainly capable of doing.
The second part of this article will be available in the coming days.
Interesting article. The comparison with the Red Sox and the focus on judging the manager by his decisions rather than simply by how far the team went made it a really engaging read. England’s long wait for another major international trophy makes debates like this even more interesting.
I’ve been tracking England’s trophy drought here as well: https://trophydrought.com/countries/england/