It seems almost miraculous, though not in a good way, for England to field a team featuring Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka and Harry Kane in attack and manage to score just four goals in regulation time during their first four games at Euro 2024.
Those players combined for 86 goals in 134 league games in their 2023-24 seasons. They aren’t combining for much, though, now that they’re all playing for Gareth Southgate and wearing the Three Lions on their jerseys.
England’s draw in group play could not have been friendlier, and the results of the group stage somehow managed to strand nearly all of Europe’s most powerful footballing nations on the same side of the bracket — away from England. And still they haven’t once scored multiple goals within 90 minutes.
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Here’s the good news, though: Playing like trash doesn’t mean a team can’t win a major tournament, so long as it doesn’t get you eliminated along the way.
“England will get beat on Saturday if they carry on, if they play like they are," former England right back Gary Neville said on Sky Sports. That’s an easy statement to make. And it’s mostly true. Mostly.
Lousy performances early in the World Cup or Euros make the pundits cranky and make fans so terribly uncomfortable, but recent history has shown the majority of eventual major-tournament champions do not overwhelm the opposition along the way.
How many champions go wire-to-wire?
It has been rare in the biggest tournaments for teams to dominate from beginning to end. Only three of 12 champions at the Euros and World Cup this century won all their group games, and of those only Brazil at the 2002 World Cup did not need extra time or penalties to advance.
There may be stylistic differences, more defensible performances in the champions’ records, but the dozen major champions of this century’s biggest men’s tournaments (six World Cups, six Euros) struggled in the following ways on the way to lifting those trophies:
– Only three of the 12, or 25 percent, won all their group games. The average point total through three games was under 7.
– The average goal differential through group play at the World Cup was plus-4. At the Euros it was plus-3. Euro champions Portugal 2016 and Greece 2004 had even goal differentials in group play. Portugal did not win a single group game, instead drawing all three times and advancing as a third-place team. Greece finished second in its group after going 1-1-1.
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– Only two of six World Cup champions scored 3 or more goals in a group game, and neither of the last two.
– Two of six World Cup winners lost their group opener, including reigning champion Argentina. Two of six Euro winners drew in their openers.
– A total of eight knockout games among the World Cup champions required penalties to decide the winner, and another six were won in extra time. That’s an average of more than one knockout-round game tied at the end of regulation for each champion. Argentina needed two penalty victories at Qatar 2022 to win their first World Cup in four decades.
Can England win Euro 2024 despite playing poorly?
None of this means England will overcome this series of moribund performances. England’s expected goals (xG) number for each of its group games was .87 or worse, and even with an extra half-hour in the round of 16 game against Slovakia, that rose to only 1.52. They’re not only failing to score, they’re failing to create opportunities to score.
However, “Teams and tactics evolve during tournaments,” English football journalist Henry Winter writes on his Substack site.
That was true for the United States women’s national team at the 2015 World Cup, when they played through the group stage with a dual-pivot midfield of Carli Lloyd and Lauren Holiday. That arrangement appeared to stifle Lloyd’s attacking ability, and the U.S. scored only four goals through group play.
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When Holiday was hit with a yellow-card suspension in advance of the quarterfinals, the team shifted to playing young Morgan Brian as a defensive midfielder and allowed Lloyd to enter the attack full-time. She scored five times in the three remaining games — including a hat trick in the 5-2 U.S. win in the final — and wound up as world player of the year.
Southgate already has tinkered twice with his lineup, first removing Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold from the midfield in favor of Chelsea's Conor Gallagher. That was a bust. England didn’t score at all against Slovenia in the final group game, and Gallagher earned the team’s lowest rating on FotMob.com.
The next attempt came against Slovakia, with Manchester United's Kobbie Mainoo replacing Gallagher. He brought more spark to the team, and was more comfortable than Alexander-Arnold advancing into attack. But England is sacrificing one of the world’s great free-kick artists by leaving Alexander-Arnold on the bench.
Southgate has yet to find the ideal England team, and the players have yet to find each other on the pitch. So long as they’re alive, though, they’re alive.