We have the stadiums and the infrastructure. I remember the FIFA president saying back in 2014 that there are countries capable of hosting a World Cup with just two days' notice, and England was one of them. So why aren't we even trying to host one?

It's pathetic seeing countries who call it soccer getting World Cup so frequently , while England won't get one. Just give us one already.

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!

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.

I'm a neutral fan coming into this cup. My country NT is not good enough to qualify, but there are football fans paying attention to premier league, champions league throughout the year. And of course, the world cup is pretty huge.

In previous euros & world cup, england seemed just a team with 20~30 stars randomly selected together, so they were not that likeable. But as this world cup proceeds, it's fair to say that this england wins many neutral fans' heart in my country, especially after the great battle in azteca. The team has that "fight together as a team, as a family until the last moment" vibe. It is not the strongest team, but the players fight their heart and soul out, and not play dirty football. Even after the heartbreak semi-final, we still applaud the players who give it everything.

Another thing is the disgrace of the Argentina team. I don't hate messi and I'm not even interested in ronaldo & messi debate, but after qatar world cup, Argentina and messi fans dominate the football community in my country. They appear in every football topic even if it's unrelated to Messi and Argentina, trying to insert "Messi is GOAT". And because Argentina keep winning in 2021,2022,2024 and before this year's final, you just can't fight these fans back. It is satisfying they finally lose on and off the pitch and the noise can finally disappear.

Years later, the memories of this world cup may not be the match's win or loss, but will be the moments when england players and fans sing the wonderwall together in azteca, in Miami, will be England and France players huddling together after the 3rd place match. And of course, we will not forget the dirty, ugly and disgusting behavior from that argentina.

Finally I hope it can come home in Wembley two years later, and in 2030 you can have a better shot at the world cup.

Was just watching a Jude edit on YouTube from the England v Argentina semi final, and it is utterly baffling how many fouls Argentina committed. Why did the ref do nothing, repeatedly?

No less than 8+ times when Jude had the ball, masterfully dribbling it across the pitch, that the Argentinian mafia literally sandwich him and trip him, grip onto his jersey. They scramble madly at all costs to dispossess him of the ball. It’s absurd and I think Tuchel / Kane / the players who had multiple, egregious fouls committed on them should have kicked up a bigger fuss with the ref.

Just absolutely disgraceful to see. We admire and watch football for its artistry - Jude’s footwork and athleticism are really marvellous - so a game like this is really disjointing the name of football.

Seeing Jude get tripped by these gangsters time and again, with no yellow card or even free kick awarded to England, was so upsetting I couldn’t even finish watching the edit …

Importantly, the times where he was tackled were really critical moments as well, where he would have had a very high chance of scoring had they not unfairly tackled him. We see in the France game how good he is when both sides play fairly.

I really think this should be reviewed and a complaint lodged with FIFA - even if they don’t end up doing anything about it, England should stand on principle. I think many other countries’ teams would have something to say about Argentina’s dirty playing as well, so these fouls that went unpunished should be compiled and sent to FIFA, an official complaint on record. Just disgraceful

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.

You've got to wonder what on earth the FA and their lawyers were thinking. Their demands were such that, if we'd beaten Argentina, Iceland would have to take down these shows of support in the run-up to the final.

Respect to Iceland for giving them the old Arkell vs Pressdram response though.

I truly believe that this factor is hugely overlooked.

I coached kids ages 5-11

The idea that we could be practicing tiki-taka all year round is laughable.

Our practice pitches were lumpy mud baths for at least two months of a season. Occasionally frost hardened. Matches regularly called off due to unplayable conditions.

So many people say “look at the Spain passing system - they all know how to pass the ball and move”

Obviously it’s very simple. But the mindset comes early. The best players in England have learned techniques to get around the fact that playing 20 neat flat passes is often impossible.

We can’t learn to pass like Spain because for 99% of kids that style of play does not work between December and February.

France scored shortly after so there was no in game replay.

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.

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.

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

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

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?

With the World Cup over and the Club football season kicking off soon, I wondered how you guys "follow' England when there isn't an international break or tournament?

I suspect the vast majority of people have a club they follow, for context I follow and support my local non-league club.

After Euro 2024 I really struggled to keep a handle on the England squad, which players were playing well and might be on line for a call-up. I'd often seen the squad and say "I don't know who X, Y or Z is."

Are there specific sites you visit, football round ups/matches you watch or other methods you use to keep up with the impact and potential England squad?

I'm sure watching it the PL would cover a lot of ground, but a lot of the narrative and stories are (rightly) focussed on what it means for their club.

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.

🦁🦁🦁

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!

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.

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?

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.

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

Which players do you think we missed the most during this WC?

I’ll start. I think with Trent could have been great when chasing a game and Wharton would provide a bit more stability and balance in midfield. Maybe ngumoha based on the pre tournament friendlies as a wildcard.