| Andrés Martinez
Spain are the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup worthy champions, and Argentina its villainous (or heroic, depending on your worldview) runners-up.
But what about England? What’s the verdict on their third place performance?
The question is worth asking, even for those of us who are not English and weren’t rooting for the team. Because of the rise of the English Premier League, and some of the lessons it offers about globalization, how England fared in this tournament was always going to be one of the more consequential storylines.
Among the world’s major football leagues, the English Premier League undoubtedly won the World Cup. The EPL had 154 players in the tournament, 60 more than the second most represented league, Germany’s Bundesliga. Of the 22 players who started in the World Cup’s final between Spain and Argentina, EPL clubs fielded nine of them, two more than Spain’s own La Liga. And when you look at the 44 players who started the World Cup final and the 3rd place match, the EPL’s dominance is even more pronounced. Twenty-two of those players are in the EPL, as compared to eight in La Liga, and four each in France’s Ligue 1 and Italy’s Serie A.
But what to make of the English national team’s performance? In the immediate aftermath of its semifinal against Argentina, the team’s head-scratching second half collapse felt like an absolute catastrophe, not to mention a spectacular missed opportunity to make the final. But this was only the second time England’s men made a semifinal since winning the World Cup in 1966; Russia 2018 being the other. And England’s men have been consecutive European runners-up – in 2020 and 2024 – after being absent from a Euros semifinal since 1996, and before that 1968 (they have never won the continental cup).
So, despite the massive disappointment over its loss to Argentina and dashed expectations that this might have been the year “it’s coming home,” England’s national men team remains on an ascendant trajectory. The point would have been more emphatically made if they had won the World Cup, of course, but it’s still undeniable that the nation’s level in international play has been lifted by the globalization of its domestic league.
And, as I argued in The Great Game: A Tale of Two Footballs and America’s Quest to Conquer Global Sport (published by Bloomsbury in advance of the tournament), England’s improved fortunes resulting from its radical globalization offer a powerful case against sporting (and other) protectionists.
Here is an excerpt from The Great Game’s Chapter 4, “England’s Conundrum: Homegrown vs. #1”:
The nation’s conflicting attachments to its multicultural reality (the United Kingdom has a larger share of people born elsewhere than the United States, and you only need to spend a day in London to realize this is diversity on a different level) and to a strong isolationist nostalgia play out every weekend in the shared ritual of football. The game has broadened many fans' worldview and cultural empathy. The Egyptian striker and prolific goal scorer Mo Salah has been a hero in Liverpool for years, where fans love to chant that if he scores a few more, they will become Muslims too. A multiracial English national team projects to the world (and to English youth) a profoundly diverse version of the country. But at the same time, the game is bedeviled by frequent racist abuse of players on the part of some fans who are more and more emboldened to resurrect behaviors we had hoped were left in the past.
With all its radical and counterintuitive openness to the outside world in the Age of Brexit, English football also offers up fascinating metaphors and case studies of globalization and competing economic ideas. Mirroring debates in plenty of other nations (including Mexico), those we might call “football protectionists” have long argued that bringing in many foreign stars to raise the level of your domestic league ends up hurting your homegrown players, as you diminish the opportunities available to them, literally crowding them off the field and lessening your reliance on developing future generations of English talent. Indeed, when I attended an Arsenal vs. Manchester match at Old Trafford in March 2025, Manchester United did not start a single English player on the day, and no one seemed to notice. Across the Premier League’s ten matches that weekend, English players accounted for only 29.5% of starting line-ups.
Football protectionists believe this level of globalization might help the Premier League improve its standard, but at the expense of English football itself. England, they’d argue, has ended up with the world’s best league but a second-tier national team, still a step below the game’s perennial powers of Spain, Italy, Germany, France, Argentina, and Brazil, many of whose stars are now paid a fortune to play in England and keep English talent sidelined. The argument is akin to that of domestic steelmakers or carmakers seeking high tariffs to shut out foreign competition.
But the idea that England is being hurt by so many foreign players has lost much of its potency since the “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union in 2016, as English national teams in 2017 won the U-20 and U-17 FIFA World Cups for the first time. In 2018, England’s senior team made its first World Cup semifinal since 1990, and they were runners-up in both Euro 2020 and Euro 2024. Losing back-to-back finals of Europe’s championship might seem like nothing to boast about, unless you’re England and hadn’t even made a final previously.
England has an abundance of talent like never before, and each time the national team is selected, fans are upset some star or another has been left out of the squad. England managers have struggled in recent years with too many good choices at too many positions (international football’s version of a first-world problem). There may be fewer English players starting in the Premier League than ever before, but a higher proportion of them are world-class, because every week they must compete alongside and against the best from all over the world, while being coached by the world's best managers.
It's interesting to again resort to the Premier League’s own website description of itself – under that “What We Do” tab – to see this theme addressed squarely, if not defensively:
“The global stars attracted to the Premier League help raise the playing standards of young English talent such as Phil Fodden, Bukayo Saka, Jordan Pickford, Trent Alexander-Arnold, and Marcus Rashford. Our clubs are producing excellent players, who take their place alongside international superstars on merit.”
If young Nick Hornby was dazzled in another era by the glimpses he caught during World Cups of the world’s best playing an exotically different game from what he was accustomed to from watching Arsenal, today’s fans don’t have that experience. They’re watching those South American and continental stars play week in and week out in their English league, whose tactics and style are no longer insular, but rather a synthesis of all these foreign influences.
Brexit provided an opportunity for football’s protectionists to re-open debates about the game’s openness because players from EU countries no longer had an automatic right to work in Britain. The league could have re-imposed earlier limits on foreign players; but instead, buoyed by the direction of travel, it doubled down on globalization by making it easier to sign foreign non-EU talent as well.
In short, if the NFL invites us to rethink and revisit socialism, the EPL is quite an advertisement for neoliberalism.
Eventually, it does feel like football, in the form of its ultimate trophy, will have to “come home,” as the English fans like to chant, for all this radical globalization to be fully vindicated. Hence the hopes and pressure placed on this “golden generation” of English players leading into the 2026 North American World Cup.
All the best to them, and to their German manager.