England v Croatia: Tuchel’s side open the 2026 World Cup in Charlotte, and the question isn’t whether they’ll qualify — it’s whether they’ll be any good

Thomas Tuchel had been in the job less than an hour — long enough to be photographed holding the badge, not long enough to know which names were still at their clubs — when he told reporters in November 2024 that the job was to make England "a team that nobody wants to play against." On Tuesday at 19:00 UTC, in front of a sold-out Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, he gets the first public test of whether the words mean anything: Croatia, the side that has ended England's last two tournaments and refuses, structurally, to behave like an underdog.

This is what the calendar gives him. England open the 2026 World Cup against Croatia in Group L, the match the Guardian's live feed flagged from Charlotte on 17 June, with Tuchel's pre-match television interview setting the tone — "This is what we have worked for," he told ITV — and the rest of the European field watching from hotel lobbies to see whether the Three Lions arrive in the United States with a coherent plan or merely another collection of individuals. The contest is not, on paper, unequal. The contest is whether Tuchel has solved the only question England's men have failed to answer since 1966.

The squad, the shape, and the players Tuchel trusts

England's group-stage path includes matches against Croatia, Ghana and Panama. The first fixture dictates the psychology of the next two; a draw here, and the noise begins before the team has left the Atlantic coast. Tuchel named a 26-man squad that blends the stalwarts — Harry Kane, Jude Bellingham, Declan Rice, Bukayo Saka — with younger choices from Newcastle, Brighton and Aston Villa, and a recall for Marcus Rashford after a season that began with his exile from Manchester United's first-team picture. The Guardian's player guide, published alongside the live blog, frames the squad as one built for in-game control rather than tournament daring.

The structural problem is older than Tuchel. England have reached the last four at three of the last four major tournaments and lost every one of those semi-finals by a single goal. The team Tuchel inherited averaged more than 60 per cent possession in those defeats and converted it into nothing. Asked on ITV what he wanted the team to look like in June 2026, Tuchel chose the verb carefully: he wanted them to look like a team. He was not talking about tactics. He was talking about the habit of competing for ninety minutes rather than appearing to.

Croatia, again

The opposition has its own historical grievance. Croatia knocked England out of the 2018 World Cup semi-final in extra time, then again at Euro 2020 — the match settled by a Bukayo Saka own goal in the group stage and a late winner in the round of sixteen at Wembley. Zlatko Dalić has been in charge since 2017, a tenure long enough to have made the manager a kind of national institution. The squad that travels to Charlotte is older than England's — Luka Modrić, now 40, is in the squad but unlikely to start; Mateo Kovačić, Marcelo Brozović and Ivan Perišić remain central figures — but the spine is the one that reached the 2018 final and the 2022 third place.

Croatia's structural advantage has never been talent. It is the willingness to retreat, absorb, and then punish mistakes at the moment the opponent decides the match is over. The dossier is long. Italy found it out at Euro 2012; Argentina found it out in Qatar. England's recent record against the side reads less like bad luck and more like a style mismatch that Tuchel, who inherited a Germany side that could not solve Italy at Euro 2016 and a Chelsea side that beat them in 2021 with a back three, may be the first England manager capable of correcting.

The tournament is bigger, and so are the variables

The 2026 World Cup is the first to be staged across three countries — the United States, Canada and Mexico — and the first to feature 48 teams. The expansion has widened the bracket and lengthened the calendar, which means the group stage no longer rewards a fast start quite as brutally as it did in 2022 or 2018. A draw against Croatia leaves room to repair. A defeat does not end the campaign but does mean the bracket's likely route — through a quarter-final against a seeded nation rather than a third — and a dressing room that has to manage the noise of a diaspora press more interested in personalities than patterns.

The match is also being played against a backdrop that the wire coverage has flagged but the football pages have largely declined to engage with: the United States is hosting a tournament in the middle of a federal immigration enforcement operation that has drawn protests outside the venues and criticism from migrant-rights groups. The Guardian's live blog noted the political temperature around Bank of America Stadium on Tuesday morning. Whether that context enters the broadcast or stays in the stand is a question for the broadcasters, not for Tuchel, who has so far declined to be drawn on it.

Stakes, and what we still don't know

A win does not solve England's deeper problem. It only postpones the conversation about whether Tuchel's possession-first model — the one that won the Champions League with Chelsea in 2021 — translates to a squad built, by its previous coaches, for transitions. A loss begins the conversation England has been avoiding for a decade. The truth, as the Croatia record suggests, is somewhere in the middle: this is a side that can beat anyone and lose to anyone, and the manager's job is to make the band of outcomes narrower than the squad's talent suggests it should be.

What the sources do not yet tell us is which version of Tuchel's England shows up. Pre-tournament friendlies against weaker opposition have produced the usual mixture of individual brilliance and structural vagueness. Croatia is the first team England have faced that will sit back, wait, and trust its central midfield to win the second ball. If Tuchel has solved that puzzle, Charlotte will be remembered as the night the project began. If he has not, the inbox begins to fill.

How Monexus framed this: the wire built the story around Tuchel's pre-match interview and the Charlotte venue; the structural story — the recurring Croatia problem, the wider tournament context, the federation backdrop — was ours to add.