Tuchel's Bold England Squad Decisions for World Cup 2025
When England walk out on June 11, it will be a year and a day since Ivan Toney last pulled on the shirt. Two minutes off the bench in a grim friendly defeat to Senegal at the City Ground, then nothing. No call-ups. No cameos. Just radio silence.
Now, out of nowhere, Thomas Tuchel has dragged the 30-year-old Al-Ahli striker back into the fold as one of Harry Kane’s understudies at a World Cup.
A U-turn? It looks like one. A 40-plus-goal season in Saudi Arabia has finally forced Tuchel’s hand after 12 months of indifference. Toney has also made the case that he is better tuned to the heat of North America than most. Tuchel has listened. Or at least, he has decided he cannot ignore those numbers any longer.
The No.10 earthquake
The real shockwaves, though, have come from the No.10 position.
Everyone knew Tuchel would have to make at least one brutal call there. Morgan Rogers was essentially inked in, Jude Bellingham a certainty, so the knife had to fall somewhere among Eberechi Eze, Cole Palmer, Phil Foden and Morgan Gibbs-White.
Gibbs-White’s omission had been trailed for months. Despite his form, he was always framed as an outsider. His absence stings, but it doesn’t stun.
Leaving out both Palmer and Foden does.
Social media erupted the moment the names dropped, disbelief turning quickly into fury. Yet strip away the emotion and the logic is cold. Palmer’s season has been fractured by injuries; his England minutes since Euro 2024 have been minimal; only now is he beginning to resemble the phenomenon who ripped through his first two Premier League campaigns at Chelsea. Foden, meanwhile, has been adrift for club and country since those Euros two years ago, when his anonymous displays fuelled calls for him to be dropped.
Eze survives. A reward for a debut campaign with Arsenal that veered between promising and patchy, but contained enough flashes to convince Tuchel he could trust him as the lone specialist creator.
The argument will rage. Gibbs-White, Palmer, Foden – all three feel more likely to change a game from the bench than several who did make it. Tuchel’s response was blunt when asked about the playmakers he had left at home: he wanted a balanced squad, not “five No.10s” shunted into unfamiliar roles. Who benefits from that, he asked. The players? The staff? His answer was clear.
Mainoo’s resurrection
Few players have ridden a wilder arc this season than Kobbie Mainoo.
Midway through the campaign, his World Cup hopes were dead. Ruben Amorim simply didn’t fancy him at Manchester United, convinced Mainoo didn’t fit his back-three blueprint. A January move loomed. The academy graduate looked trapped.
Then Amorim went. Michael Carrick arrived as interim coach, and Mainoo walked straight back into the team. From there, his season caught fire. Calm, incisive, press-resistant, he played a major role in dragging United back into the Champions League and earned himself a new contract in the process.
Now he has edged out Adam Wharton and James Garner for the final central midfield berth in Tuchel’s 26. He will not dislodge Declan Rice or Elliot Anderson in the starting XI, but he is on the plane – a situation that felt unthinkable just a few months ago.
Trent shut out again
If Mainoo’s story is one of redemption, Trent Alexander-Arnold’s is the opposite.
The warning signs had been there for some time. Tuchel had already left the Real Madrid right-back out of his expanded 35-man squad for the March internationals. Even with injuries opening up space, the door never truly swung open.
This time, with Ben White ruled out and Tino Livramento only just returning to fitness, Tuchel still turned away from Trent and handed a spot to Tottenham’s Djed Spence instead.
For Alexander-Arnold, it caps a bruising first season in Madrid. He left Liverpool to chase the game’s biggest prizes and talk of the Ballon d’Or. Instead, he ends the year without an England appearance for close to 12 months and with his international future under Tuchel shrouded in doubt.
The decision will be pored over. Against deep, compact defences, few players in world football can match Trent’s passing range and creativity. But Tuchel has once again judged that the defensive trade-off is too great. In his world, the risk is not worth the reward.
Chelsea’s unexpected bonus
While England fans pick over the omissions, one man in west London will be quietly delighted.
Xabi Alonso, who starts work at Cobham on July 1, will have almost his entire English contingent to himself in pre-season. Reece James is the only Chelsea player in Tuchel’s World Cup squad. Palmer is out. So too Levi Colwill and long shot Trevoh Chalobah.
Given Palmer’s fitness problems this year and Colwill’s long lay-off with an ACL tear, the break might be exactly what Alonso wanted, even if he would never admit it publicly.
With Brazil boss Carlo Ancelotti also overlooking Joao Pedro, Andrey Santos and Estevao, Chelsea’s World Cup contingent is likely to be limited to James, Marc Cucurella, Jorrel Hato, Enzo Fernandez, Moises Caicedo, Pedro Neto and Nicolas Jackson. For a new manager trying to install ideas and reshape a squad, that is a significant, if accidental, advantage.
Maguire’s fall
Harry Maguire thought he was back.
His recall for the last international window, allied to a strong second half of the season at Manchester United, seemed to have restored his place in the pecking order. The World Cup looked like a formality.
Tuchel saw it differently.
The German had been frank in March, insisting that his view of Maguire had not changed and that the defender remained down the list. Now he has acted on that stance, cutting the centre-back from his 26 entirely.
Behind the scenes, concerns have swirled. Some reports pointed to Maguire’s ego and an unwillingness to accept a back-up role. Others suggested Tuchel doubted his ability to play out from the back at the level required.
The reaction from Maguire’s camp did little to dispel those whispers. On the eve of the squad announcement, he and some family members voiced their anger publicly. “I was confident I could have played a major part this summer for my country after the season I’ve had,” he wrote on social media. “I’ve been left shocked and gutted by the decision.”
Tuchel, clearly, was not swayed.
O’Reilly’s rise and the left-back gamble
If Maguire represents the old guard being ushered towards the exit, Nico O’Reilly is the face of something new.
The 21-year-old has been England’s breakout star of 2025-26, an attacking whirlwind from the left side of Manchester City’s defence. Fifteen goal involvements from left-back is a staggering return at any age, let alone for someone still finding his feet in senior football.
Now he is heading to the World Cup as England’s presumptive starter on that flank.
Tuchel was widely expected to bring at least one of Lewis Hall or Myles Lewis-Skelly to compete with O’Reilly. Instead, both stay home. The City man has a clear run at making the role his own, with Spence likely to provide cover.
There is risk baked into that decision. O’Reilly is, by trade, a midfielder. There is no orthodox, specialist left-back in the squad. Spence is more at ease on the right. Tuchel is betting that O’Reilly’s dynamism and intelligence will outweigh any positional rough edges when the stakes rise.
Tuchel’s defining bet
From the moment he walked into the job, Tuchel promised he would not manage by committee. He would pick his players, his way, even if it meant outrage and uncomfortable headlines.
This squad is the purest expression of that stance yet.
The spine is strong. Kane, Rice, Bellingham, Anderson, James, the core that underpins the best version of this England side, is intact. On paper, the starting XI almost picks itself, with the possible exception of that No.10 slot, where Bellingham and Rogers may share duties.
The real argument lies beneath the surface. Without Jarrod Bowen, Palmer, Alexander-Arnold, Gibbs-White, Wharton and Maguire, the bench looks lighter, less imaginative, less proven. Jordan Henderson, Spence and Noni Madueke do not stir the same belief among supporters that the omitted names would have.
Yet Tuchel has gained something he craves: clarity. No endless debates about squeezing Palmer in. No weekly referendum on Foden’s form. No tactical tug-of-war over where to use Alexander-Arnold. The noise that has haunted previous tournaments around England is, for now, muted.
What remains is risk. Anything short of a semi-final will be branded failure, and if that happens, the inquest will begin with this squad list and the choices that shaped it. Tuchel has built a World Cup campaign in his own image.
Now he has to live with it.
