England’s first game after the 2022 World Cup was a 2-1 win away over Italy. Their first game after the 2018 World Cup was a 2-1 defeat to Spain. Their first game after the 2014 World Cup was a 1-0 friendly win over Norway – and that was not the Norway of Erling Haaland, Martin Ødegaard and Antonio Nusa but of Joshua King, Håvard Nordtveit and Tarik Elyounoussi. The first game after the 2010 World Cup was a 2-1 friendly win over Hungary.
The Italy and Spain games perhaps had their appeal, but the sense of anticlimax was palpable. It’s inevitable, of course: how can a side or its supporters pick themselves to go again after the unparalleled drama of a World Cup? Major tournaments, whether a team does well or badly, are sport played with maximum emotion; there cannot be anything except a comedown, whether after glorious victory, thrilling defeat or ignominious exit.
Which is why the Nations League is such a boon. It is not a meaningless friendly, instantly forgotten amid the squadrons of paper airplanes swooping down from the bored masses at Wembley. It is not the start of a qualifying process for another, distant tournament. It matters as much as a team decides it does. A manager who wants to experiment can do so, safe in the knowledge that nobody will become too distraught about results.
But equally there is a purpose to winning, a prize at the end – even if it did sound a little desperate when Roberto Martínez defended his record as Portugal manager by pointing to his Nations League success in 2025. And as a quick test of just how relevant the Nations League is, ask yourself how many of its former winners you can name. In that sense, it occupies a similar role to the Carabao Cup, a competition that is not nothing but is not obviously something either. In the international calendar, it operates as a palate-cleanser.
Admittedly in part because of the breaking news in the Manchester City case, Saturday’s game between England and Spain arrived almost unnoticed. The Premier League paused. There was some mild relitigation of England’s World Cup exit to Argentina. And then suddenly there was the game: England against the world champions at Wembley, which soon became a contest that took on a life of its own.
In one sense, the outcome was much the same as it was for England against Argentina in Atlanta. England led the reigning world champions by a single goal with 55 minutes played, and then collapsed to concede twice. But in other ways, this was a significant improvement. Two of Spain’s three goals were the result of individual errors (both, oddly, by City players, which perhaps raises the question of how much the previous day’s revelations were playing on their minds). Harry Kane slipped while taking a penalty that would have made it 3-1 and slammed it against the bar. Although Spain missed chances and their margin of victory could have been greater, on another day England might easily have won by a couple of goals. And against a team as good as Spain, maybe that’s the best that can realistically be hoped for. England, perhaps no side, can hope to squeeze them out completely, but to make it a game either side could have won, even if Spain shaded it, is an achievement in itself.
Would English soccer suddenly have been redeemed had Kane converted and England won 3-1? Of course not: the frustrations of the Argentina defeat would still linger. But equally this was an opportunity for England to move on, for Thomas Tuchel to begin the process of learning from the mistakes of the semi-final. Perhaps England will achieve positive results against Croatia and Czechia and qualify for the quarter-finals next March; perhaps not. Far more important is that they continue the process of preparation for the Euros in 2028. But equally, it’s far easier to do that within a structure of at least semi-competitive matches that are simultaneously less important and more challenging than qualifiers.
That, admittedly, is the perspective of a nation like England, for whom qualification for major tournaments can be taken almost as read. But the Nations League has also helped smaller nations. Everybody benefits from playing opponents at roughly their same level. Nobody wants the likes of Andorra and Liechtenstein shut out of international competition, but equally defending desperately to avoid a hammering against even moderate opposition suits nobody. If smaller teams play each other, though, there is a chance of a proper game, with attacking and defending. And, thanks to the way Euros qualification is structured, there is a potential route to the Euros through playoffs, short-cutting for a gifted generation a process that might previously have taken a decade or more of gradual improvements to the coefficient.
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The Nations League was treated with a degree of skepticism when it was introduced in 2018, and not all of the adjustments to the format seem to have been entirely beneficial. But fundamentally it has worked, and serves as a welcome reminder that, sometimes, this sport’s administrators get things right.
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