The Elite Soccer Nation With An Underdog Mentality

After watching his England team toil to an underwhelming 0-0 tie with the USA at Qatar 2022 manager Gareth Southgate refused to be negative.

“I am actually happy with the mentality of the team,” the former Middlesborough coach said post-game.

“To come on the back of such a comfortable win, it is very difficult to find that sort of level again.

“The players are a bit down, but I’m not. I thought we controlled the game, our two center-backs with the ball were outstanding. We lacked a little bit of zip in the final third,” he added.

It was a curious interpretation of a performance where England was second best in almost every department.

The US had more shots, corners and a higher expected goals-the metric that measures the level of goal-scoring chances a team has.

England just about edged the possession stats, but when you dug a little deeper the finding that it was the two center-backs, John Stones and Harry Maguire, who had the most touches showed how futile this ball retention was.

Not that Southgate saw it that way.

“It’s a game you can lose if your mentality is not right,” he added.

If the performance by England felt eerily familiar, it’s probably because it was. At the country’s last major tournament a steely 1-0 win over Croatia was followed by a 0-0 against local rivals Scotland.

The ex-England defender turned pundit Gary Neville’s assessment of that game as “a really poor performance, underpinned by poor physical levels.” It could easily have described the USA game.

Although England eventually made it to the final of that competition, except for the Ukraine game, it would be hard to argue its journey there was a breeze.

From gilt-edged chances passed up by opposition strikers to injury-time penalty rebounds, a lot fell in the Three Lions’ favor that Summer.

Needing to ride their luck is hardly unexpected. Since winning the World Cup in 1966, England’s role in international soccer has been as a perennial underachiever. The path to a final is a distant memory.

Not that the nation hasn’t had the players to do it. Generation after generation of world-class talent has been produced and fallen short.

Although the domestic competition has had one of the highest standards of any league on the planet in at least the last 20 years, the 2018 run to the Semi Final of the last World Cup in Russia was the best performance by the nation since 1990.

Why is that the case? Well, I’d argue Southgate’s words inadvertently hit the nail on the head; it’s mentality. The problem is England is not a consistent performer.

For too long its elite talent has had the mentality of an underdog.

‘Golden Generations’

Qatar 2022 is not the first time an England team has traveled to the World Cup with a set of players considered to be amongst the best on the planet.

The crop of stars at the 2006 World Cup was part of a so-called ‘Golden Generation’ of talent at its peak when the Premier League was establishing itself as the highest level of competition around.

One of the members of that group, ex-Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher even went as far as to suggest they were better than the current crop and Southgate has achieved a lot with the player he has.

“He has not failed to get the most of a talented squad, as some argue,” Carragher wrote in his newspaper column. “He has overperformed with a very good bunch.”

The trouble is that generation failed too, not making it past the quarter-finals stage of any of the major tournaments they participated in.

Another player from the group, Wayne Rooney, suggested it was the manager, which for the majority of the time was Sven Goran-Eriksson, who held them back.

“If we had a Guardiola with that group of players, we’d have won everything, no doubt about it,” he claimed on his podcast.

“You look at our team ten years ago and arguably we had the best group of players in world football. Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Ashley Cole, [Steven] Gerrard, [Paul] Scholes, [Frank] Lampard, [David] Beckham, myself [and] Michael Owen.”

His club and international teammate Rio Ferdinand takes a different view; that club rivalries destroyed any chance of success.

“It overshadowed things. It killed that England team, that generation,” he was quoted as saying.

“One year we would have been fighting Liverpool to win the league, another year it would be Chelsea. So I was never going to walk into the England dressing room and open up to Frank Lampard, Ashley Cole, John Terry or Joe Cole at Chelsea, or Steven Gerrard or Jamie Carragher at Liverpool.

“I wouldn’t open up because of the fear they would take something back to their club and use it against us, to make them better than us. I didn’t really want to engage with them.

“I didn’t realize that what I was doing was hurting England at the time. I was so engrossed, so obsessed with winning with Man United – nothing else mattered.”

Both explanations are plausible but ring a bit hollow when you make the comparison with other nations.

The rivalry between Barcelona and Real Madrid is as intense as any in England, yet when Spain’s Golden Generation emerged the national team was able to overcome this bitterness. Their dressing room was even more divided than England’s, but it wasn’t an issue.

When it comes to coaches, from Germany’s Joachim Löw to Brazil’s Luis Felipe Scolari, world champions are rarely the best tacticians in the game at the time.

They tend to be people on the fringes, like Spain’s Vicente Del Bosque, who are moving towards retirement.

However, there is a thread that runs through Ferdinand and Rooney’s theories, that England didn’t know how to win. The explanation of why is different, but it’s the same issue at the core.

One problem is the solitary international success of 1966 is such a distant memory it offers almost no template for modern generations to follow.

All the teams that have followed are haunted by the knowledge it has been done before but are unable to change it.

One method might be to transpose the mentality some of the players have required at club level.

Manchester City and Liverpool players, know about being relentless in their quest for titles.

They would not accept a 0-0 draw because they won the previous game 6-2 and that is ‘hard to replicate’ the same would be demanded again.

If England is to ever be successful this needs to change.