Here we are then, at the gates of North America, 26 Englishmen tasked with winning a football tournament on 19 July. Cue two months of febrile debate, anxiety and at the end of it all, well, you know. Failure to repeat the World Cup success of 1966 has become such a feature of Englishness that you wonder why Thomas Tuchel is even bothering to name a squad. The subject is worthy of its own sociological canon, given its wide-ranging exploration and the complexity assumed. The latest expression of this phenomenon can be heard in David Baddiel’s podcast Sixty Years of […]

LONDON: The 2026 World Cup has bucked the trend of international football’s struggles to compete with the riches of the club game when it comes to securing some of the world’s…

As Thomas Tuchel prepares to name his World Cup squad, we asked our writers to work out who they would take if they were England manager