England’s World Cup secret weapon? Bin bags

Some fun facts about bin liners. The bin liner was invented in 1950 by Canadians Harry Wasylyk and Larry Hansen. The global market for bin liners was worth £10.3 billion in 2023. There is, to date, no Museum of the Bin Liner, even in Canada, but Wasylyk enjoys a place on the official list of Memorable Manitobans.

I got all this off the internet so it’s definitely true.

And, of course, the first football club to rip arm-holes in Wasylyk’s invention and use them as sweat-suits for the shifting of surplus pounds during pre-season training was… I don’t know, in fact,  but I bet it was Leeds under Don Revie. He’d have been hot on bin liners, one feels. And definitely hot in one.

I found bin liners coming to mind when I heard that Thomas Tuchel’s England squad were out in Spain last week, undergoing extreme heat performance testing, ready for the rigours of an American summer in 2026. Break out the black bin bags!

Except not. England were in what the FA announced as a secret location but which was actually (thanks again, the internet) the Camiral Golf and Wellness Resort in Girona. And the heat testing was happening in a tent.

What kind of tent? No idea. It was secret. Could have been a festival-ready two-person pop-up (definitely scope for a coach to get to know a player thoroughly in one of those). Could have been a fully-furnished glamper’s yurt (much more England, one senses). But you can be sure that, in terms of synthetic heat generation for training and evaluation purposes, we were significantly beyond the bin bag.

Was this testing, a year out from the World Cup, productive? Again, no idea. But it certainly helps the FA’s mission to make the role of England manager look like a serious full-time job rather than something which could easily be accomplished in somebody’s spare time, like a paper round. And that mission needs help after the damage inflicted on it a few months back, when Tuchel (salary: £5 million) was accused of shirking his perceived game-attending duties.

Now, personally, I couldn’t get especially worked up there. If Tuchel had been WFH during actual England games, maybe. But failing to schlep to Newcastle to cast an eye over Callum Wilson, or whoever, in a game which was on the telly… well, what was he missing? He’s an international football manager, not a dad at sports day.

I love as much as anyone the romantic idea that the England team are the product of the manager shrewdly narrowing his eyes one afternoon in the posh seats at Ipswich. But this is 2025 and Tuchel will be the owner of a laptop stuffed with constantly updating feeds of data on his eligible players – including now, one assumes, a granular file on how they all perform in hot tents. It’s probably not a big deal if he skips the odd Monday nighter in Bournemouth.

Still, as well as promoting Tuchel as a value-for-money option, the FA must also fight the prevalent view of international camps as dangerously backward places for players.

Remember Roy Keane complaining about cheese sandwiches? It was all he was offered at a camp with the Republic of Ireland at a time when back home at Manchester United, no doubt, everyone had their own omelette chef. Suddenly the gulf between club and country opened in front of you – how, by contrast with the burgeoning club game, international football had effectively become an experiment in arrested development; a test to find out what happens to a thriving culture when you arbitrarily eliminate immigration.

And so it remains. Of course, England (like Brazil) are presently corrupting that experiment by using a non-national manager. And perhaps also by training in Spain. Shouldn’t they be getting hot somehow in Bognor? Or even St George’s Park? No matter. The point is, leaked news of detailed performance testing in secret locations is a big PR win for the FA. And good luck to them.

At the same time… Price of  a night in a “deluxe room” at the Camiral Golf and Wellness Resort: £342.13. Price at my nearest Sainsbury’s of a roll of 20 tie-top refuse sacks: £2.75.

Photograph by Eddie Keogh/The FA/Getty Images