{"id":788411,"date":"2026-07-08T14:44:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T14:44:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/788411\/"},"modified":"2026-07-08T14:44:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T14:44:09","slug":"world-cup-2026-the-stars-who-could-have-played-for-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/788411\/","title":{"rendered":"World Cup 2026: The stars who could have played for England"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Erling Haaland will be the man England fear most when they face Norway in the World Cup quarter-finals on Saturday (22:00 BST) &#8211; but things could have been very different.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The Manchester City striker was born in Leeds, so would be lining up for the Three Lions if he had opted to represent the country of his birth. But he isn&#8217;t the only one.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">There are a number of World Cup stars who could have played for England, but are representing other countries.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">And, interestingly, 20 of the 26 players in Thomas Tuchel&#8217;s squad for this World Cup were eligible to play for other nations &#8211; but committed to England. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">BBC Sport has selected a team of players from this tournament who slipped through the Three Lions&#8217; net &#8211; have your say and let us know if there is anyone you think we have missed in the comments section.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Erling Haaland will be the man England fear most when they face Norway in the World Cup quarter-finals&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-788411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}