BfB

There seems to be a perverse pride in Thomas Tuchel’s selection of an England Squad without Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham that borders on fantasy.

Tuchel’s squad of October 2025 omits Bellingham from a midfield which contains two Nottingham Forest players, in Elliot Anderson and Morgan Gibbs-White, and a Brentford player in Jordan Henderson, and Milan’s Lotfus-Cheek with Delcan Rice and Morgan Rogers. Phil McNulty is breathless in his praise for this. “The days of automatic recalls for the biggest names by starstruck managers and coaches are over under Tuchel. Reputations count for nothing. Performances do.”

An iconoclast then, this Tuchel, and one who is sending a signal to the likes of Jude Bellingham, his teammate Trent Alexander-Arnold, Phil Foden at Manchester City, Harry Maguire at Manchester United, and the likes of Harry Kane, Jordan Pickford and Jordan Henderson who are in the squad. But what is that signal supposed to be?

Reality Bites

England play games that are of high value but low intensity most of the time. The last qualifying set saw a 5-0 win over Serbia which was very impressive, but mostly the games are going through the motions until they are not. The 2-1 win over Slovakia suggests itself as a time when the switch between these two modes of playing became obvious.

Tuchel has found this out in his selections against deep sitting Andorra sides who see small losses as victory. It is sobering for any coach to discover a limit to their abilities and while the peanut gallery might have told the England manager that all you need to do to win over a small side is to line up forward players between their defensive lines, reality bites, and bites hard.

Tuchel has discovered this limit to his abilities at his cost. Like every pub bore proclaiming the solution to not scoring to be more and more centre forwards, Tuchel has misjudged a situation as being within their control, unlike the pub bore he has some blame to carry, or rather, to shove onto his players.

“Repulsive”

So Tuchel insults Bellingham and players are dropped from the squad to nods of approval because having decapitated the England team to lose a manager who was enjoying the success of going deep in tournaments that was Southgate there must be a justification as to which the Snake Oil they sold is not working.

Make no mistake about it, the pitch for removing Southgate and bringing in a manager like Thomas Tuchel was that England had Elite Players and needed an Elite Coach, rather than an English Cone Putter Outer, who would know how to deploy Trent, to balance Jude and Phil, to not rely on Harry all the time. Eighteen months on and the Elite Players are sitting in Madrid and Manchester which the Elite Coach tries to work out how to get some Nottingham Forest players to put more past Andorra.

The World Cup is nine months away, and the England Manager to getting praised not for getting the best out of his Elite players, but for leaving them at home.

Note

A note here, because it seems to be forgotten. Phil Foden is not a player I am especially fond of, but he was the Premier League Player of the Season the time before the last award. Jude Bellingham signed for Real Madrid and until the Summer of 2025 shoulder injury ruled him out was considered widely to be doing very well.

I mention this because when the World Cup comes around, then idea that a player was having some good games for a middle Premier League team in September 2025 will seem a poor reason to leave players who were nominated for the Ballon d’Or cooling their heels at home.

Wider

Perhaps Tuchel though can be judged in a wider context of our era. A rejection of the established order in favour of something else which, while obviously worse, is not to be challenged.

The “Move On” Brexit, where were are told to forget about what we were promised, and what problems that could be solved, and instead presented with less than we had before.

Should Tuchel not win the World Cup in New Jersey in ten months this moment of national triumph of sorting out the Bellingham/Foden problem by dropping them both might just come up again.