Post-World Cup debrief on England’s Three Lions

By Tom Hancock

Were England even that bad at the 2026 World Cup?

“I still think we can show how good football players we are,” said England boss Thomas Tuchel after the deeply frustrating semi-final defeat to Argentina – when the Three Lions led, only to sit far too deep and invite pressure which ultimately paid for their great rivals, who turned the game on its head late on. “I think that is still in us as I see it in training and in every camp.”

For all Tuchel’s belief, and for all the evidence of how slick this England team can be under him, the Three Lions were rarely at their fluid best during the 2026 World Cup – until they let the handbrake off in the third-place play-off against France (a sign they had, up to then, been playing under intense, perhaps internally stemming, pressure?).

But for all their lack of fluidity, England were, on the whole, one of the most potent attacking threats in the tournament. Only five teams finished with more Expected Goals (xG) per game, with England going along at an average of 1.78 across their eight matches – and, even if we ignore the anomaly of the third-place play-off, only two other teams who made it as far as the semis (France and Argentina) scored more goals per game than the Three Lions (2.0). 

And, scoring 20 goals from 14.3 xG overall, England were statistically the most clinical side in the competition. Their star duo of Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane rose to the occasion as one would expect, finding the net seven (the most by any England player in a single World Cup) and six times respectively. Their combined output made history: never before had multiple Three Lions players scored four or more goals at the same World Cup.

Creating and finishing chances wasn’t the issue for England; the issue was how difficult they made it for themselves by giving them up at the other end.

Tuchel’s side gave up 9.3 xG (the most at the tournament outright) at an average of 1.17 per game – placing them joint 18th out of 48 teams on that metric. They faced 12.38 shots per game, ranking 25th.

England were porous, keeping only two clean sheets – in the group draw with Ghana and win over Panama – and conceding at a rate of just over a goal a game up to and including the semi-final loss to Argentina. Twice they let in the first goal (albeit they battled back to beat both DR Congo and Norway 2-1 in the last 32 and quarter-finals respectively) and three times they surrendered a one-goal lead (twice in the opening 4-2 victory over Croatia and once more, ultimately to far greater cost, against Argentina).

That evident defensive vulnerability both vindicates Tuchel’s decision to shut up shop against Argentina and justifies the intense criticism of it.

On the one hand, Tuchel had seen his side hold out for one of England’s greatest wins with a brilliantly resilient, backs-to-the-wall job against Mexico at the Azteca in the last 16 – playing with 10 men for most of the second half, no less. England enjoyed similar success in the quarter-finals as they completed their comeback from 1-0 down to lead Norway 2-1 early in extra time then shut up shop to see the game out. An integral figure in both triumphs was new Three Lions cult hero Dan Burn, who was thrust into the action to put his body on the line once more in the semi (though he eventually found himself playing as a makeshift target man after it had all gone horribly wrong in Atlanta).

Two one-goal leads successfully defended in two very different sets of circumstances – so why wouldn’t Tuchel do the same after Anthony Gordon had fired the Three Lions in front against Argentina?

Well, for starters, despite the positive outcome on both occasions, England had ridden their luck to hold on in each of the previous two rounds. And it should have been obvious Argentina – who had mounted an epic recovery from 2-0 on 79 minutes to beat Egypt 3-2 in the last 16, inspired by a typically talismanic Lionel Messi – would throw far more at them than Mexico or Norway.

And so it proved as Enzo Fernández and Lautaro Martínez made England pay for their negativity. Tuchel said after the game that controlling possession was “not in our DNA like it is in the Spanish DNA or the Argentinian or Brazilian DNA” – but to have only 12% of the ball between Gordon’s deadlock-breaker and Fernández’s equaliser took things to an opposite and catastrophic extreme. 

“We were not active enough,” Tuchel lamented when asked about the move to sit in a low block. “We just became too passive, and Argentina, by the way, found another gear and they found the total flow.”

England might at least have come close to finding that “total flow” themselves if Tuchel had taken different decisions both in that game and throughout the tournament – not least making much more use of Bukayo Saka, who had Three Lions fans tearing their hair out as to why he’d seen so little game time – despite, by his own admission, being fully fit – with a hat-trick against France. In Bellingham and Kane, England had two of the world’s very best in their respective roles at the sharp end of the pitch – think what more they could have done with Saka consistently in support.

But we could analyse and scrutinise from now and England’s next shot at glory, Euro 2028. Let’s answer arguably the biggest question of the moment.

Would England have won the 2026 World Cup anyway?

Even if everything had gone perfectly – the right-back position hadn’t been seemingly cursed; Tuchel had been able to settle on his best line-up to a greater extent; they’d pushed on against Argentina – and England had reached the final against Spain, would they have won the World Cup? In a word: no.

And the reasons are twofold: first, Spain proved themselves this summer to be on another level, dominating their way to a second World Cup crown, conceding a solitary goal along the way and restricting their opponents to a mere 10 shots on target.

Second, even in its most ideal and settled state, this England team is still flawed. It’s a work in progress (though to be fair, it has been for the last 60 years). Now, it’s about building on the positives and learning from mistakes ready to do it all again in two years’ time. That desire to end the hurt never goes away – and that’s got to count for something eventually, hasn’t it…?

(Images from IMAGO)

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