Power of the Premier League gives Tuchel a winning hand

A curiosity that might, in a certain light, look like a crisis: before Saturday’s quarter-final with Norway, not a single Premier League player had scored for England at this World Cup. All but one of Thomas Tuchel’s team’s goals had been scored by Bayern Munich’s Harry Kane or Real Madrid’s Jude Bellingham. The exception had been delivered by Marcus Rashford, registered to Barcelona.

At various points in the not-too-distant past, this could have been the sort of thing that would have drawn out one or other of England’s rich array of insecurities: interpreted as a damning indictment of English football’s ability to satiate its most illustrious talents, maybe, or otherwise to keep hold of them in the face of the intoxicating allure of Europe’s superclubs.

In the current light, though, it seems nothing but a vivid sign of strength, proof not just of the quality of player now being forged in England’s academies but the esteem in which the Premier League, in particular, is held. Its primacy is accepted, only a little resentfully, across Europe. It has long been the league all the others aspire to match economically; that is now true in a sporting sense, too.

It was telling, for example, that when Barcelona decided they did not wish to pay the fee they had agreed with Manchester United to make Rashford’s loan move to Camp Nou permanent, the player they signed to replace him was also English; Anthony Gordon duly followed Trent Alexander-Arnold, of Real Madrid but not England, in delivering his first press conference partly in Spanish.

Tuchel’s predecessor, Gareth Southgate, spent much of his reign trying to find a way for the England team to stand apart from the Premier League; a slightly more hard-headed interpretation would be that he wanted the national team to emerge from its pitch-black shadow. The Football Association knew full well that club loyalties had undermined England for years; Southgate worried that his players did not have a sense of what playing for their country meant. He wanted it to represent something that transcended tribalism and commercial opportunity.

The German has taken an approach that is almost diametrically opposed. That should not be a surprise: his very appointment was made with what can only be described as the Premier League’s dominant mindset, which is to identify any particular problem and then pay as much money as it takes to get a foreigner to solve it.

Tuchel has made no secret of the fact that his bond is (obviously, what with him being German) less to England and more to the Premier League; he took the job, he said last year, at least in part because he wanted to be “close” to the league where he once worked. He has made it plain that he does not see his role as speaking out on social issues; he does not regard his position as one that comes complete with a moral duty, as Southgate did.

It is, instead, his job. He relished the freedom it brought him over the last 18 months, allowing him to enjoy his life in London in-between scouting missions and training camps, and he has relished the intensity it has delivered in the last eight weeks, from the moment he and his squad touched down in Florida to begin the exercise that was always the sole purpose of his presence. He is not being gauged on the human beings he shapes. He has succeeded only because he wins. 

This is pure, uncut Premier League thinking, an ideology that the Football Association – at least as it pertains to the senior men’s team – has embraced wholeheartedly. Southgate spent his eight years as England manager painstakingly building a bespoke culture. By replacing him with Tuchel, the FA was acknowledging that the Premier League is now the centrepiece of England’s footballing identity. It was just saying the quiet part out loud.

That same logic infuses the football that Tuchel has encouraged his team to play, an intense, aggressive, physical style – none of these words are pejoratives – that borrows from the dominant aesthetic of the Premier League.

After years, maybe decades, of dabbling with non-native ideas, principles borrowed from whichever of its peers happened to be in the ascendancy at any given point, England now take an approach that is not only instantly recognisable from the domestic game, but increasingly regarded as the gold standard.

The rest of Europe does not envy everything from the Premier League: the Champions League’s referees spent most of last season making it very clear that they would not tolerate the set-piece battle royales that had come to engulf England’s penalty areas; their global counterparts have taken an equally hard line.

But the presence of Bellingham – and Alexander-Arnold – at Real Madrid, of first Rashford and now Gordon at Barcelona, of Kane at Bayern Munich indicates the esteem in which Europe’s aristocrats how English football in general and the Premier League in particular, with its precise brand of muscular industry and hyper-coached tactical sophistication.

They have recognised that to beat England’s cash-soaked elite, it is necessary to some extent to join them: to some extent, like England, they have internalised the Premier League rationale that any problem can be solved with enough money to import a solution. 

This is an inversion of a pattern that had become so established that it felt like the natural order of things; it is now England that is exporting players, and in far greater volume, ideas around the rest of Europe. They did not arrive at the World Cup hoping to do a passable impression of one of their rivals, but for the first time in a long time with others aspiring to be a little more like them.

Photograph by Maddie Meyer /FIFA via Getty Images