Can you guys stop talking about Argentina and focus on Nations League and Euro 2028 now? Too many Argentina posts around.

England have lost generational talent like Haaland and Olise to rival countries and I think it would be a shame if England were lose an up and coming talent like Luiz Munoz to Spain, a country he's the technically eligible represent. This kid seems to have a lot going for him trained with the Arsenal first team.

Everyone was giving him shit for leaving Palmer, Foden and Gibbs-White at home. Well, England didnt struggle in attack during this tournament, so that decision didn’t seem to backfire at all…Gordon and Rogers made some key contributions actually. Madueke didn‘t, but he also didn‘t do anything wrong either.

Spence fully justified his selection and Burn did a great job in that Mexico game when he came on.

Tuchel made a horrible strategic choice in the semi, but he fully justified his squad selections overall.

Edit #1: In response to those who say our attack struggled...they didn’t against Croatia and Mexico, the two games when the team played the way Tuchel instructed. We struggled against teams who play a low block, as we always do and always will because low-blocks are very hard to play against at this level. And even then, we won all of those games except Ghana.

In response to ”We only did well offensively because Bellingham and Kane had blinders!”…Tuchel’s conduct in the qualifiers for the AM spot is partly why Bellingham played the way he did. He had a chip on his shoulder and something to prove because Tuchel communicated clearly that he wasn’t undroppable.

WB and CM are valid points, but we didn’t go out of the tournament because of those deficits. We went out because the certified England choke-factor came good once again, as it usually does.

Happy to be proven wrong - but I am getting fed up of people claiming England can host a FIFA World Cup tomorrow.

We cannot.

This used to be the case when fans and football were put first. However, it is money that is put first now and that means the majority of England's football stadiums actually require significant changes in order to be eligible.

Guess who pays for those changes!

I'm not talking about capacity. Villa Park is getting a fabulous upgrade ahead of Euro 2028. This is a good example of a fan and football friendly change. We're happy about that.

I'm talking about digital advertising hoarding being installed across 3 levels of every stadium. Remember those Powerade hydration breaks? Do you think St James's Park can have them? How about the huge TV screens that are required - also for advertising, but yes, replays too - where are those going to go at Anfield?

England can host a World Cup tomorrow. They cannot host a FIFA one.

Who are your top positive surprises from this England squad and who are your ones not to pick again?

For me, Spence to play more, Madueke to not get picked again.

I would like to start off by saying that when VAR was first announced I was actually quite ecstatic! At the time I thought it was silly that football was so stuck in the past and I found its refusal to adopt modern technology was incredibly stubborn. However a decade on and clearly it didn’t pan out how I thought!

The thing I failed to realise back then was that the rules of football are incredibly subjective. Unlike in other sports, there is a lot of inherent subjectiveness to the rules which makes it one of the most difficult sports to referee. What one referee considers a foul another might not and that makes it incredibly difficult to have consistent decisions across matches and is something that no amount of technology can fix.

So this is what I would do moving forward. Firstly I would only have an external VAR team for offside and goal line decisions. Thats to say the only time a VAR official could change an on field decision is in the event of a miss called offside or if the ball did or didn’t cross the goal line. Now there are also a few things I would change about the offside rule but thats not relevant as I do believe overall VAR has done a good job in that department because by its nature offside is a clear cut rule with no interpretation.

So that would mean everything else from fouls to dives ect is back to being exclusively decided by the on field referees which I think would result in a much better viewer experience and more consistency. However there is one more thing I would add, challenges!

Practically every other big sport has whats called a ‘challenge’ where either team can decide to challenge the on field decision and force the referee to have another look at what happened and make a more informed decision. Whats great about challenges is two things. 1. They are limited which means a team may only challenge a call once or twice maximum which means it wont break the play up and 2. It forces the referee to clearly explain why he did or did not give a foul. This is much better than having some external VAR team which never interacts with the teams and can sometimes make calls without explanation.

IMO this would lead to a more satisfying viewer experience because now the on field referee has much more power and importantly the blame for a ‘bad call’ isn’t some anonymous VAR team hidden away. I would also force the referees to have a post match interview just like the players because I think having their input after a game would help with transparency and overall viewer satisfaction. Of course this wouldn’t ‘fix’ the game but I do think it would lead to a more satisfying viewer experience. There will always be 50/50 calls in the sport that both teams will swear is a clear cut call one way or the other. Having VAR intervene in these doesn’t help at all and instead just results in more dissatisfaction when the call doesn’t go the way you expect.

TLDR: My biggest issue with VAR is that the rules are very subjective and that in turn results in VAR being very inconsistent with many calls. So instead of VAR helping correct decisions it much more often than not leads to more confusion and disdain for certain calls ON TOP of completely killing the flow of the game. Removing VAR for any non offside calls is a good first step to fixing this and then additionally I would add a challenge system so that for big calls where a team does feel cheated they at least get to have the ref give it another look AND clearly explain why he gave a call one way or the other.

People were flooding social media with false reports that English people/fans were attacking Italians after the match as revenge and people were spreading it without any due diligence.

I'm at a loss for words to describe the level of delusion involved

The only reason that England has only hosted one world cup is because of the FA's arrogance.

Infrastructure? Yes. Including transport.

Stadia? Yes. Amongst the best in the world.

History? C'mon man. Football's history IS England.

The biggest mistake that England ever made was that the FA thought they were bigger than the rest of the footballing world... Otherwise Chelsea would have been in the first European cup and England might have actually competed in the World Cup in the years that Uruguay blagged their stars!

But the FA put a block on it.

They represent a very different idea of what sport itself is supposed to be, and that's why we can't stand them.

Viveza criolla: the belief that cleverness means finding every advantage, exploiting every weakness, and doing whatever it takes to win. In that mindset, deceiving officials, unsettling opponents, and pushing the boundaries are not seen as shameful, but as signs of intelligence and competitive instinct.

This isn't unique to Argentina, but they push it to the absolute limit in practice, and they go a step beyond:

"The result matters more than the legitimacy of the contest."

That is where our moral objection comes from. When an advantage comes from deceiving the game's authority rather than beating the opponent within the contest, the Argies celebrate it as a moral good.

Meanwhile the roots of modern British sport are completely antithetical to this. The Victorian ideal of sport was that it was a test of character as much as ability. The point wasn’t just about winning, it was about discipline, honour and self-control while competing. You were proving you were the better person as well as the better player. Winning through deception or unfair advantage was seen as making the victory less meaningful.

The World Cup final felt like the ultimate clash of those two ideas. After years of pushing the boundaries and benefiting from a certain amount of tolerance, Argentina finally found themselves punished for that style. And when the game turned against them, the violent scenes we saw after the final whistle exposed their principles to the world - victory is something to be achieved at all costs, and defeat is something to resist rather than accept.

It's an ugly philosophy, and one that preys on poor enforcement of the rules, and more importantly, lack of enforcement of the spirit of the rules. Sport is not merely a contest of outcomes. It is a contest conducted under a shared moral framework. Winning by exploiting weaknesses in that framework can be considered a failure to respect the purpose of the contest itself. To allow Argentina to continue to pursue their negative sporting philosophy at the world cup denigrates and destroys the very purpose of it.

Now the World Cup is over, of course feelings are still raw but I think we should start afresh and move on from the Argentina bashing (and I know I’ve been a part of that with my posts of late).

What are your thoughts on how we move forward and look to Euro 2028?

They gave you fangs, dear Harry, and a lair,

The number nine, to hunt the center pair.

But hunting bored you. Nobler to explore:

The passer, the professor, the Fake Four.

You gorge on farmers all through winter's night,

A hundred goals that no one holds as tight.

The record swells, the ledger reads sublime,

A broken record, padding out the time.

Then June arrives, the stage goes bright and wide,

And somehow you have wandered off to hide.

Deep in the build-up, tidy, never lost,

The one man missing where it matters most.

The fattest stats, the thinnest night that pinned

A trophy to your chest and called you king.

Top scorer of the games that mean nothing.

Long story short, I lost a bet with my Spanish coworker, and my punishment was to rewatch the entire Euro 2024 final with him. As you can imagine, it was pretty painful, but I gained some new insights that are relevant today.

1. Spain never got out of second gear: It's honestly scary how good this Spain team has been over the last several years. The final stats from the match don't reflect how comprehensively they outplayed us. They were knocking the ball around us as if it were a training match and only showed a little weakness after Palmer equalized.
2. Different individuals, same problem: After the Argentina match, there's been a lot of noise in the media and among fans about certain technical players being left on the bench or at home. Well, the central midfield that started against Spain was Rice, Mainoo, and Foden. For some reason, Bellingham was shunted out to the left wing. You would imagine that, with Mainoo and Foden, we would have a better time controlling the ball, right? Nope. Spain dominated possession with 63%, and Foden had an absolute stinker (just as he did throughout the tournament). Meanwhile, Mainoo was largely ineffective.
3. Overreliance on Bellingham: I'm going to be frank: Bellingham did not have a great Euros by his standards. However, he was clearly England's best starter against Spain, and the match ratings back that up. His dribbling and movement are miles above everyone else's. I'm getting increasingly concerned about how reliant we are on him, even more so than on Kane now.
4. The players stopped attacking after the equalizer: Despite Spain being all over us, Palmer equalized in the 73rd minute. Over the next 5-10 minutes, we had all the momentum, and for the first time in the match, Spain started to falter a little. However, instead of capitalizing on that and pushing forward, we went back into our shell, just as we did against Argentina. The players stopped taking risks and became more and more passive. Spain regained their composure, and Oyarzabal scored the winner.

Based on these observations, it's clear that our problems go beyond the manager and debates about individual players (e.g., Mainoo vs. Anderson or leaving Foden at home). I believe there's something fundamentally wrong with the team's psyche.

In the past, I've only ever watched the World Cup and Euros. Is the Nations League interesting/important?

I've only ever been to one England game back in 2012 and I'd like to go to one of the nations league games coming up.

Realistically I'm not going to get tickets for the Spain game but would I have a chance of getting tickets for one of the away fixtures?

It's been that long I don't really know how to go about getting tickets now. I know England+ is a thing, is it worth me signing up for that anyway or am I still going to struggle?

Any advice on where I could buy two tickets for the November game that would be in the England away section? I’m English but live afar. I’ve no experience in buying outside of the us.

Thanks

This is ridiculous, we haven’t hosted since 1966.

Just saw this post on X, and couldn't believe it. Bellingham can't even congratulate his teammate and lifelong friend without getting hate. I don't even think it's racism anymore, it's a mental illness.

Hello! As the title reads, I’m looking to purchase tickets for the England VS Spain game at Wembley. I’m from the US, and I noticed that the England Supporters Travel Club have early access to tickets, so was wondering if that was worth it. Additionally, I saw a posting for tickets on the website LiveFootballTickets, which I wasn’t entirely sure if it was reliable/real, and was thinking about just buying tickets off there instead. If anyone has info about either, that would be awesome, thanks in advance!

Hello everyone,

Not sure if we’ve moved past the World Cup already but I’ve left a part of myself in Mexico City. Did all the locations with England but Mexico was an experience I’ll never get over.

Took a picture, I think this was just into the 2nd half maybe after some fireworks. The night sky and the residue smoke made it look moody as hell.

All the best!

Of the players named, can you guess which of them have scored for the Three Lions at a World Cup?

Selecting three wrong answers will end the quiz prematurely.

🦁🦁🦁