England fans are doing the thing again. The thing where they stare at the screen with the same expression you’d have if you found a hair in your takeout. The thing where they cycle through frustration, anger, disappointment and eventually a kind of bored resignation that sits somewhere between a shrug and a scream.
Three games into this tournament and England has produced maybe 45 minutes of watchable soccer. The rest has been a slow-motion car crash where players receive the ball, look around like they’ve never seen a football before, and pass it sideways at a pace that would get you honked at in a school zone. Thomas Tuchel stands on the sideline looking less like a manager and more like a man who just realized he left the stove on. He looks astonished. He looks wearily disgusted. He looks like he’s wondering if there’s a way to forfeit that doesn’t hurt his resume.
And yet. It’s all fine. It’s always fine. Because this is England.
The same cycle, different year
Here’s how it works. England plays badly. Everyone online says the same two things. One: the manager should have picked someone else. Two: it’ll be different against the next team. It never is. The lineup changes but the culture doesn’t. These players grow up in a system that rewards them for being good at Premier League ball, which is a different thing entirely from being good at international ball. The Premier League markets them as gods. They get paid like gods. They get treated like gods. Then they put on an England shirt and suddenly they’re just guys who can’t figure out how to move the ball forward.
David Baddiel did a radio series called “60 Years of Hurt” that gets at the psychology of this. The short version is that English fans believe their players are better than they actually are once you take away the non-English superstars they play with every week. It’s a kind of exceptionalism baked into the culture. You don’t choose to believe it. You’re born into it. And it takes real effort to see past it.
Maybe they just aren’t that good
The uncomfortable truth is that England players are good. Sometimes they’re even great. But they are not consistently good enough to win a tournament. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s been staring everyone in the face for decades. Even when England gets a friendly draw and stumbles into a final, it still ends the same way. The pattern is not a mystery. It’s a feature.
Tuchel is a German manager who came into this job thinking tactics could fix it. But tactics don’t fix culture. And England’s soccer culture has produced generations of players who are rich, idolized and fundamentally comfortable. Why would they change? The system works for them. Just not for the people watching.
The only way this changes is if the culture changes. And the culture won’t change until the Premier League stops treating its own hype as fact. Until then, maybe just enjoy the good moments when they happen. Turn the volume off if the commentary bothers you. Radio is better anyway. And stop expecting something different. The evidence is right there on the screen.
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