{"id":34143,"date":"2025-07-31T04:45:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-31T04:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/34143\/"},"modified":"2025-07-31T04:45:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T04:45:11","slug":"football-architects-the-england-dna-behind-the-pursuit-of-tournament-winning-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/34143\/","title":{"rendered":"Football Architects: The England DNA behind the pursuit of tournament-winning teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the fifth of a six-part series looking at figures who have played a pivotal role in a modern football success story. The first piece, on the rebuilding of Ajax, can be found here<\/a>. Part two, on\u00a0Belgium becoming No 1 in the FIFA Rankings is here<\/a>. Part three, on the rise of Croatian football is here<\/a>. And part four on the sport\u2019s data pioneers is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Each article comes with a related podcast, which can be found\u00a0here on The Athletic FC Tactics Podcast feed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The rationale is simple, John McDermott says: \u201cUnder pressure, players often revert to type.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is explaining why, in December 2014, just six months after England had finished bottom of their World Cup group, Dan Ashworth and Gareth Southgate announced the \u201cEngland DNA\u201d at St George\u2019s Park<\/a>. Ashworth was the director of elite development at The FA and Southgate had just completed his first year as England Under-21s men\u2019s head coach.<\/p>\n

The DNA was an overarching term for their \u201capproach to elite player development\u201d that applied to England age-group teams from under-15s through to the men\u2019s under-21s and women\u2019s under-23s.<\/p>\n

It laid out the vision for future internationals to be exceptional across four \u201ccorners\u201d \u2014 technical\/tactical, physical, psychological, social \u2014 and contained five core elements. Best practice for coaches was outlined, expectations for the \u201cfuture England player\u201d were listed and the FA said holistic support would be provided.<\/p>\n

They articulated how age-group teams should play, which would be \u201cthe strongest demonstration of the England DNA\u201d. A focus was placed on a two-way understanding of heritage and culture in an increasingly diverse country.<\/p>\n

Over the next decade, England\u2019s senior men had their greatest spell of sustained success at tournament level, reaching successive European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024, and a World Cup semi-final in 2018.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Cole Palmer celebrates scoring in the Euro 2024 final (Photo: Eddie Keogh \u2013 The FA\/The FA via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The senior women went even better, winning the Euros on home soil in the summer of 2022, finishing as runners-up at the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, and then retaining their Euros title in Switzerland this summer. The notion of \u2018proper England\u2019<\/a> became a buzzword that powered them to the title.<\/p>\n

Success in age-group football has been abundant: the women\u2019s under-17s were Euros runners-up last May; the men\u2019s under-21s won the Euros again this summer, like they had in 2023; the men\u2019s under-17, under-19 and under-20 sides have all won continental or world silverware since 2017.<\/p>\n

The England DNA project was an important moment, comprehensively covering how to instil cultural change at the same time as catalysing technical and tactical evolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cTraditionally the Dutch, and more recently the Spanish, have very clear playing identities,\u201d McDermott says.<\/p>\n

He has been the technical director at the FA since early 2021 \u2014 having been Les Reed\u2019s assistant previously \u2014 and first worked there in 1995.<\/p>\n

McDermott coached the under-16 through to under-21 national teams in the mid-2000s, and worked in the academies of Leeds United, Watford, and Tottenham Hotspur.<\/p>\n

\u201cA player isn\u2019t going to change profile in a World Cup final into something which they aren\u2019t at their club,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s got to be a reflection (within England teams) of how they play at their clubs, in the Premier League, the Champions League.\u201d<\/p>\n

The DNA was intended as the foundation of the FA\u2019s quest for tournament-winning teams.<\/p>\n

In 2014, though, England\u2019s senior men\u2019s side were on a run of eight major tournaments where their ceiling was the quarter-finals. The pressure kept compounding and players kept crumbling under it.<\/p>\n

So where did they look for inspiration?<\/p>\n

\u201cI would think we\u2019re all probably magpies,\u201d McDermott says. \u201cIf you were to speak to Pep Guardiola, you\u2019d hear about the influence that Johan Cruyff had on him, the influence Rinus Michels had on Cruyff, and the influence that Vic Buckingham had on Michels.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s not this ivory tower where somebody comes up with this formula that nobody\u2019s ever thought of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Consequently, Ashworth started close to home, visiting national training centres in France (Clairefontaine) and the Netherlands (Zeist).<\/p>\n

\u201cYou speak to a lot of people. We\u2019re trying to get as many experiences as we can. You go to America, see what\u2019s happening in other sports, and ask: \u2018What do we do next? What\u2019s the evolution of the DNA?\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this curiosity where we\u2019re trying to look and then mould ideas into the English way, to make sure that\u2019s aligned with how the league is and where the playing system is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember being at a FIFA conference and one of the speeches described how in senior football you\u2019re winning the next game or the next tournament, while in youth football it\u2019s about winning the next 10 years. I thought that was really clever, but there are subtleties.\u201d<\/p>\n

As such, they were not prescriptive with formations like Belgium (4-3-3), the Netherlands (4-3-3) and Italy (4-diamond-2) can be.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s less about the specific system and more about how it looks and how the players perform, playing the style that we want \u2014 expansive football, dominating the ball, playing through the thirds.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is why the \u201chow we play\u201d component of England DNA included transition as a phase of the game \u2014 counter-attacks and counter-pressing were given as much emphasis as build-up and defensive shape.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe principles around in-possession, out-of-possession, transitions and set plays, I\u2019m sure Alf Ramsey (England manager between 1963 and 1974) was talking about that. The examples and language changes.<\/p>\n

\u201cHave those principles been honed? Have they been better presented? Is the teaching better now with young players? Yeah, it probably is.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the mantras we have is \u2018unearth, connect, develop and win\u2019. Again Howard (Wilkinson) would have had that, and Dan (Ashworth) would have that in different words, but it\u2019s updating the wallpaper, updating the furniture.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is an area where McDermott feels they have made progress but are still not perfect.<\/p>\n

He talks about \u201cfootballing culture\u201d and how players arrive at national team camps in the technical and tactical moulds of what their club coaches want. This was \u201cquite apparent\u201d to McDermott when he started his current role.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019d see the Leeds players under Marcelo Bielsa, the Manchester City players under Pep Guardiola, some of the Liverpool players under Jurgen Klopp, and they\u2019d want to do slightly different things \u2014 Leeds players going to man-to-man, Manchester City players wanting to stay on the ball, Liverpool players wanting heavy-metal football.\u201d<\/p>\n

England DNA was therefore not just a blueprint but also something to unite players, who might spend so much of their season playing in different systems and styles to one another.<\/p>\n

He points out that, with age-group teams \u2014 whom the DNA was actually for \u2014 players can come from different levels of the English footballing pyramid. Increasingly, they are venturing into other major European leagues too.<\/p>\n

McDermott is talking via video call from Slovakia, where he was with England\u2019s men\u2019s under-21s at the European Championship. He was speaking mid-tournament as Lee Carsley\u2019s side defended their title from 2023 with an almost completely different squad, beating Germany 3-2 in the final compared with the one that was victorious over Spain two years prior.<\/p>\n

Aidy Boothroyd once said that, if being the senior head coach was an \u201cimpossible job\u201d then being under-21s head coach was \u201cutterly impossible\u201d<\/a>. Trying to win tournaments and keep progressing talent to the senior side, he felt, were at odds with each other.<\/p>\n

For McDermott to say \u201cit\u2019s not win at all costs\u201d feels almost ironic, considering the relative recent success of the under-21s and other age-group teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a way in which we want to play and there\u2019s a way in which we want to get to those finals and win. It\u2019s finding that right balance between winning and developing \u2014 the two are very closely interlinked.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2008, England\u2019s men failed to qualify for the European Championship, and, the very next year, the under-21s were beaten 4-0 by Germany in the age-group final.<\/p>\n

Does the unreliability of memory mean that year is misremembered as the nadir from where change stemmed?<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was not one day when it all happened. To say that this all began in 2008 disrespects some of the brilliant brains we\u2019ve had in the past. It\u2019s definitely an evolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Success, as the saying goes, has many fathers.<\/p>\n

For McDermott, how you view the progression \u201cprobably depends on who you speak to. I guess I\u2019m steeped in FA history\u201d.<\/p>\n

He namechecks Bobby Robson, who managed England\u2019s men\u2019s side for 95 games and took them to the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup in Italy.<\/p>\n

Dave Sexton also gets credit from McDermott. He was twice England men\u2019s under-21s coach and led them to Euros wins in 1982 and 1984, back-to-back winners like Carsley\u2019s teams.<\/p>\n

McDermott traces things all the way back to Walter Winterbottom, England\u2019s first ever men\u2019s coach from 1946 to 1962. \u201cFollowed by Allen Wade and then I worked under Charles Hughes. They all had their principles of play or how they saw the game being played,\u201d McDermott says.<\/p>\n

He is not sequentially listing England coaches, but figures who were inspirational in shaping \u2014 for better or worse \u2014 English footballing identity.<\/p>\n

Wade became the FA\u2019s director of coaching in 1963 and wrote The FA\u2019s Guide to Training and Coaching in 1970; Hughes was Wade\u2019s assistant \u2014 he\u2019d later hold the role himself \u2014 and coached the Great Britain Olympic football team for a decade from 1964-1974.<\/p>\n

\u201cCharles was probably epitomised quite wrongly,\u201d he says while squinting, as though digging into his subconscious to remember correctly. \u201cHe wrote a book called The Winning Formula around direct play. He probably didn\u2019t sell his ideas as well (as he could).\u201d<\/p>\n

Hughes is best known now for building on the work of Charles Reep, who was one of the earliest statistical analysts in English football. Reep collected data by hand in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

It must be remembered that this was innovative at the time, even if by modern standards the notational methods were simplistic and the findings over-reductive.<\/p>\n

Reep identified that most goals were scored from sequences of fewer than four passes<\/a>, half of all goals were following opposition-half regains, and one in 10 shots were scored.<\/p>\n

The problem, as future research showed<\/a>, was he did not adjust for frequency in a low-scoring sport. There were fewer goals from long passing sequences or deep build-ups because these happened less.<\/p>\n

Hughes, lauded by Robson in his autobiography, spun this into a concept he called the position of maximum opportunity (POMO); this stressed the importance of flooding the box with crosses and always having a player in line with the back post.<\/p>\n

Hence English football developed a reputation as direct and agricultural, perhaps cemented by the poor-quality, muddy pitches that it was often played on, which did little to facilitate intricate, short passing.<\/p>\n

McDermott describes 1997 as \u201ca landmark,\u201d with Howard Wilkinson, four months after being sacked as Leeds United manager, becoming technical director at the FA. He says it \u201cturbocharged\u201d the development of English football.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was the start of the academies, starting to get full-time coaches. Before that we had centres of excellence. Howard was very much about the facilities and the time spent (coaching).\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilkinson authored the Charter for Quality, a 90-page document of 32 aspects<\/a> that outlined how the FA would maximise player potential, with specific demands on facilities and coaching, and proposing an action plan for small-sided games programme for players aged seven to 10.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter Howard, there was Trevor Brooking. Trevor concentrated around improving techniques that built upon Howard\u2019s work. He brought in a document called The Future Game.\u201d That technical guide, published in 2010, was three-times as big as the Charter for Quality,<\/p>\n

In it, Brooking outlines a vision of developing players who are technically excellent and innovative coaches who train them into existence. The backdrop of the time was England\u2019s age-group teams underachieving compared with European counterparts, with game-time for English players in the Premier League on the decline.<\/p>\n

McDermott explains that developing technicians was Brooking\u2019s \u201cpassion,\u201d owing to Brooking himself being physically lacking but two-footed and technical \u2014 he made over 500 appearances for West Ham between 1966 and 1984, twice won the FA Cup, and played 47 times for England.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe EPPP (Elite Player Performance Plan) came in around that time (2012) within the academies. It turbo-boosted the initial work that Howard did<\/a> \u2014 more investment came into clubs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wilkinson, McDermott feels, built the foundations for Brooking to try and improve players from. From that, \u201cDan (Ashworth) came in and brought the DNA we now work off. Maybe because I\u2019ve been around a long time and I\u2019ve known a lot of the players, I don\u2019t see milestones.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crowning moment for the England DNA on the men\u2019s side was at Wembley in summer 2021, nearly seven years after it was announced.<\/p>\n

England were 2-1 up in extra time against Denmark. Nothing says pressure like being one goal ahead in the 116th minute of a European Championship semi-final on home soil.<\/p>\n

They had been dropping deeper and deeper and restoring to defending the box \u2014 reverting to the England type of old.<\/p>\n

But then something clicked. Denmark had used their subs and had to chase the game with 10 men when an injury hit.<\/p>\n

Raheem Sterling picked up a loose ball after England cleared a Denmark corner, and the two and a half minutes that followed were everything Brooking once dreamt of.<\/p>\n

England did not score. They did not have a shot. They did not cross the ball. What they did do was stitch together 53 passes, the longest possession of the tournament.<\/p>\n

\"\"\/<\/p>\n

An exhausted Denmark were pulled left and right as England went up and down the pitch and from side to side. There were one-twos, triangles, even an audacious switch from centre-back Harry Maguire to marauding right-back Kieran Trippier.<\/p>\n

England captain Harry Kane said \u201cthat was a great sign of what we\u2019re about, that shows the unselfishness of the team. We ended up keeping it for a good few minutes and killed Denmark off. It was our night tonight.\u201d<\/p>\n

They ended up being penalty kicks away from becoming a tournament-winning team, losing against Italy in the final.<\/p>\n

That England team, managed by Southgate (he stepped up to the senior team in 2016<\/a>) manifested into the very blend of everything that he and Ashworth explained the DNA was in 2014.<\/p>\n

Parts of Southgate\u2019s team were stereotypically English, being so defensively strong and compact \u2014 they only conceded twice in seven games and neither were from open play \u2014 and yet they made a first tournament final for nearly 60 years by keeping possession.<\/p>\n

They were, to borrow McDermott\u2019s term, \u201ccosmopolitan\u201d. England\u2019s player of the tournament, Sterling, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Wembley. McDermott says that there are some age-group teams that can have a majority of players with multiple nationalities.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t remember really having competition on recruitment,\u201d he says of the early 2000s. \u201cCompeting for young talent (now) is probably more similar to competing for talent at a club than it was 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe question also becomes an ethical one as they get a bit older. What I\u2019m always aware of is giving somebody one or two caps, but they might have got 50 or 60 caps for another nation. Making good judgements in the interest of the player becomes a dimension.\u201d<\/p>\n

But despite England\u2019s age-group success, McDermott still thinks of those who might have slipped through the net. One mention of Belgium\u2019s futures teams<\/a> \u2014 which run parallel to their age-group sides and are for late-developing players \u2014 prompts him to bring up the relative age effect.<\/p>\n

That is the term to describe the overrepresentation of players born earlier in the year (academic year in England, calendar year elsewhere in Europe), because they tend to be the first to physically develop.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s always fascinated me. Quite early on, I didn\u2019t see the talent of Ashley Young when I was at Watford, we didn\u2019t offer Ashley a contract at under 16. Thankfully he stayed on. That was a near miss that I had very early in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are trying to get our coaches to be aware of that \u2014 it\u2019s something we do within all of our recruitment meetings. I don\u2019t want our coaches to be frightened of playing a younger player or a physically immature player just in case we lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

He cites stats from the under-19 Euros where just 17 per cent of players were fourth-quartile babies (i.e. the youngest in their year groups). \u201cThat includes a lot of countries that have been looking at futures projects for some time,\u201d McDermott points out.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt probably balances off a little bit as you get older and sometimes those August birthdays are probably more resilient because of it, because they\u2019ve survived. We had quite a few when I was at Spurs: Kane, (Ryan) Mason, (Andros) Townsend were all late in the year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had a magic wand that\u2019d be one thing I would probably look to address, especially in this country but across world football as well \u2014 it\u2019s everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton \/ The Athletic; Richard Sellers\/PA Wire; Koji Watanabe; Matthew Ashton \u2013 AMA; Lars Baron\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is the fifth of a six-part series looking at figures who have played a pivotal role in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,1208,596,18943,1614,13198,85],"class_list":["post-34143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-england","tag-football","tag-international-football","tag-premier-league","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}