Thursday 18 June 2026 7:00 am
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Wednesday 17 June 2026 4:14 pm
England carry the weight of expectation and much more at every World Cup
England are being asked to win the World Cup, yes, but the absurdity is that they are required to do so much more in the process, both commercially and politically, writes Ed Warner.And so they’ve begun. Our boys, Tom’s 26. Their world is in motion, three lions on their shirts, out to erase 60 years of hurt. Heavy, those shirts. Their future a missed penalty in a Pizza Hut advert, star character in an award-winning stage play, a knighthood, or all three perhaps. Footballing canvasses on which a nation projects its hopes and dreams; as yet unmarked cards on which we can all play cliche bingo over the coming month.An England World Cup campaign is never just about football. It is about money, politics and a nation’s bad habit of dressing up its national team as something of greater nobility and significance than logic says it warrants. That is not a criticism of the players but of the machinery of which they constitute a part, albeit an essential one. England is not merely a football team at a World Cup. Yes, it is obviously a commercial juggernaut, fuelled by a media which it returns revenue to in an ad industry’s perfect circle. More insidiously, this attention economy allows the team to become an image amplifier for those seeking to borrow a little of its dazzle – and hoping in the process to blind a national audience to their true natures. That shirt and its three lions is expected to do much that is wrong, and far too much of it.Those companies that have made a business of tracking player valuations across the globe reckon Thomas Tuchel’s 26 yeomen have a combined transfer value of around £1.25bn. That makes them the most valuable squad in the World Cup. But I’d say – subject to the length of the remaining terms on each player’s contract – one might be able to squeeze to nearer £2bn if the England team makes a decent fist of this tournament.No reason to feel sorry, then, for this squad of young men? After all, market value brings with it chunky signing-on fees, fat wages and juicy bonus potential. Easy, though, to fall into the trap of judging elite footballers differently to us mere mortals with our poor co-ordination and sluggish twitch muscles.Witness the furore in France whipped up by zealots in response to Kylian Mbappe’s comments about the rise of the far right. Why shouldn’t he have a voice? But why too should we assume we can project our political hopes onto players whose talents warrant selection to represent the nation?
