Youth football only counts for so much. While most enjoyed watching Paul Simpson’s U20s capture the World Cup in South Korea, others were quick to dampen the enthusiasm - after all, unless those players replicate their success as adults, their achievements cannot be held up as evidence of sustainable progress.
Undeniably true that may be, but it rather ignores the time lags involved. England’s long habit of failure has understandably toughened the cynicism, but it seems unfair to judge an initiative before it's had the opportunity to succeed or fail - and it seems particularly short-sighted to cast Dan Ashworth, Gareth Southgate and the rest of the technical staff at St George’s’ Park as street-level snake oil pushers
After reaching the European Championship semi-finals over the summer, Aidy Boothroyd’s U21 team have begun their next mammoth qualifying campaign. Boothroyd took his squad as far as they could go in Poland, succumbing eventually to a vastly superior German side.
That talent gap has closed since, though. At the start of this new cycle, his side already includes more than a dozen players who featured in winning England teams over the summer. Dominic Solanke, Jonjoe Kenny, Dael Fry, Kieran Dowell, Ademola Lookman, Lewis Cook and Dominic Calvert-Lewin all made their debuts at this level during their 1-1 draw with the Netherlands, while Tom Davies, Fikayo Tomori, Seyi Ojo, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Kyle Walker-Peters were all awarded first caps during the 3-0 win over Latvia.
Migration between the age groups is natural, but in this instance it’s telling that Boothroyd immediately has access to a new raft of difference-makers. Not just new players, feeling their way into a higher classifications, but genuinely effective footballers. The Dutch may have earned a point in Doetinchem, but nearly all of England’s debutants were prominent; no reticence whatsoever, despite facing by far the toughest test their qualifying group poses.
The same was true against Latvia. England set out in their now familiar 4-3-3 and structurally looked similar to the side they were over the summer. The difference, though, was in the new parts: Liverpool’s Ojo and Alexander-Arnold formed a quick understanding on the right side, with the former in particular dancing beyond or inside his marker at will. At the base of midfield Cook and Davies took slightly longer to settle, but eventually found a nice balance between protecting the defenders behind them and supplying the forward players in front.
The Latvians were certainly limited and the scoreline didn’t do justice to their inferiority, but the detail was never likely to be in the result. Instead, the value was in noticing - across both games - England’s continuity in spite of the great flux. New players have joined this group, but have done so without encountering the usual barriers to entry.
Of all the qualities that the FA is trying to manufacture, that one is probably the most commonly misunderstood. While the “England” problem is often viewed solely as a talent issue, the last two decades and the nature of the failure within show it to be a far broader deficiency.
Ultimately, the reason for the stress on identity is because that’s the characteristic at the heart of almost every successful team: players are no longer individuals to be accommodated within teams, instead becoming components to be adapted into a pre-existing mechanism. There’s a big difference between the two: one encourages dependency on each generational harvest, the other promotes embedded tactical understanding from the moment a player enters the international system.
Of course it does - playing for England at any level is much easier if, at every level, the coaching expectations remain roughly the same.
Ability may have been behind the FA’s successful summer, but it would have been impossible to watch those respective teams without being struck by the similarities between their styles and shapes. It’s also not tenuous to suggest that the ease with which these players now move between those age groups is determined by that familiarity.
Improvement won’t be seen in the senior team for some time - partly because it’s currently filled with players who haven’t grown up within this system and haven’t had its benefits. Most of them played for England’s representative teams before the current structure was in place.
Additionally, until as recently as a year ago, the full international side was treated as a separate entity. As the coaching appointments prior to Southgate attest, there was no intent to make it conform to what existed below. For whatever reason, Roy Hodgson and Sam Allardyce were both allowed to patch their own belief systems over the native culture, minimising the effect of what was happening below.
Those decisions are hard to justify, but they do help to explain why even now - five years in - the senior team show no obvious signs of progress. Southgate is often mocked for his meagre club management record and his lack of obvious credentials, but those are misdirected snipes: he represents the extension of a particular way of thinking, rather than a Fabio Capello/Sven-Goran Eriksson saviour-lunge.
The continuity matters. Other variables remain in play, naturally including the role of Premier League clubs in player development, but nothing matters more than increasing the ideological alignment of all the FA’s teams. That’s what has animated the recent run of success and what will also, eventually, determine whether the needle moves at senior level, too.
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