Why do international teams just pick the best players?
The case for team selection around organization over quality
TL;DR: I propose that by England prioritizing an XI of players who play together at club level we can (1) improve on-pitch performance, (2) maximize available coaching time, and (3) improve the quality of our second XI for greater tournament rotation.
While the output sounds good, the methods aren’t intuitive. I’ll make my case…
International football is weird.
It’s common to see teams of superstars slump while plucky underdogs go on great runs.
Iceland, Denmark, Greece, Wales, Senegal, South Korea… dare I say Italy?
All these teams have overperformed in tournaments I can remember. And while Senegal might be showing my age, it’s not uncommon for this to happen.
In fact, it’s almost guaranteed for one or two teams each tournament to vastly outdo their expectations.
The common denominator between them is typically organization combined with great squad morale.
Organization at the international level is a powerful competitive advantage. We’ve seen it with England - a settled group that has been together for a while has resulted in a consistent gameplan and only small variations in tactics and setups.
The big reason why organization is so powerful at the international level is the lack of coaching time. Great coaching is a multiplier for talent that’s exacerbated by so many other teams being under-coached. The lack of contact time is there to be exploited.
We’ve seen some of the impacts of this already. International football is much more set-piece-oriented than club football; something England has taken great advantage of.
If you can only spend x hours on the training pitch, what activity gives you the biggest returns? Set pieces directly contribute to about half of all international goals, and they can be revised and worked on in non-physical sessions meaning you don’t have to sap the little fitness your players have in the quickfire run of tournament football.
The more organization you can take into international football with you, the more you can focus those limited hours onto the activities which will give you a competitive advantage.
From this perspective, why are so many top international teams staffed with players who never play with their colleagues? It means everything must be learned from scratch. All the relationships, the interplay, the pressing patterns - everything must be coached and standardized fresh.
If you’re a small nation that can barely string together 11 decent players, none of them play together, and you don’t have a strong domestic league, then you need to pick the best players to ever have a chance.
But what if your nation has one of the strongest leagues in the world, a depth of talent, and most players are normally coached by the world’s greatest managers and cutting-edge tacticians?
Reader, I think England should pick their team based on organization rather than picking the best players.
What if England picked players who play together?
Let me sketch out a hypothetical 11 for you that you might not like.
City, Liverpool, Brighton. Playing a heavily possession-based high-pressing system like a club side, not an international one.
Ramsdale
Lamptey - Dunk - Webster - Burn
Elliott - Henderson - Jones
Sterling - Foden - Grealish
Because you’re a football snob, you’re aghast at the notion of Dan Burn being in the England team.
But defense is a game of organization.
Brighton is a strong defensive unit in the league from an xG perspective, and their real numbers are good too. Last season’s stats are better: 37.7 xGA, 3rd only to City (31.4) and Chelsea (32.8) according to Statsbomb data via Fbref. Their xGA numbers for this season have been less secure; currently 9th in the league - but they’ve lost Burn, White, and many Bissouma minutes.
Burn can play this role defensively, allowing you to sit as more of a back three where Lamptey bursts forward and adds width to the attack. He’s also a major asset in both defending and attacking set-pieces. And he’s a chaos factor when bursting into midfield or up the line on one of his runs.
Brighton isn’t just a good defensive unit. They play a high line with patient passing play and strong progressive passing, particularly from Dunk - or Ben White, if you’d rather include him.
More than this, a Liverpool midfield in front of them means you’re combative all over the pitch, and that Liverpool midfield three system is drilled to fill in for fullback spaces when it needs to, as well as pressing high to keep the game mainly up the other end of the pitch.
Brighton is a drilled defensive unit that knows what it’s doing and when and how it’s going to do it. If xG decided results they’d have finished 5th last season. Their problem is lacking individual talent up top; not their backline.
With this XI, you could play progressive attacking football while being defensively sound - pressing hard and being able to build up in possession. You’d also be dominant in set-pieces at both ends.
More importantly, you gain valuable coaching hours.
If you want them to press, you might need to spend 1/4 of the time on it, as each player brings their system with them and knows the patterns for attackers collectively and midfielders collectively. You just need to knit them together and you’ve combined the ranks of two of the best pressing teams on the planet - with Brighton behind them being a team well versed in a mid-press.
If you want to construct patterns of play in and around the box, you analyze their club systems during club football time and invite the players to play the same patterns and movements - needing only to knit together the different familiarities. Can you save half the time you would have to spend normally?
Why all this matters - if you haven’t clocked on
Organization and coaching are two related factors that are heavily influential in the output of international teams due to the severe time constraints on coaches.
More coaching can produce better organization. Equally, more in-built organization can create the time and space for more, and better, coaching.
What are the realizable benefits of having 50% more coaching time with your team?
Well, if you need to spend less time on x, y, and z then you have gained yourself n% more coaching time because you have created efficiencies.
Efficiencies that are not accessible to almost any other team: most teams don’t have the raw materials and conditions to attempt this.
To come at this from another angle, what teams have historically had organizational advantages over others?
Germany: Every now and then the Bayern team and the German national team become almost indistinguishable. We’ve seen them win trophies recently with exactly this approach, even if a number of the Bayern players don’t qualify for Germany. The structure and organization was simply imported.
Spain: Barca’s setup was mirrored onto the Spanish national team to bring them a sustained period of trophies. As good as the Real Madrid team of that period was, many of those players were sidelined for the Barca DNA.
South Korea: Obvious corruption aside, South Korea rescheduled their national league for months prior to the tournament to give time for Gus Hiddink to instill a system and style into that team that could compete on the international stage. Whatever you think of Moreno’s refereeing decisions, South Korea put up a great fight in every game; well-drilled and cohesive.
Italy: In the most recent international heartbreak for English fans, the Italians emerged as the villains. They had one or two organizational bonuses. They had a real world-class coach rather than a newbie or pretender. And had a coaching staff of Vialli and more. Plus, in the centre of defense, they had the most experienced and gelled centre back pairing in football. Getting past those two was a mean feat.
We know the benefits in-built organization can bring. We see it all the time in club football. Players often need half a season or more at their new club to find their feet and deliver their best work. Having a settled team is one of the most overlooked factors in deciding club success.
It’s not all about Brighton: other potential combos
The use of an entirely Brighton back four was as much to illustrate my point as it was to propose a starting XI.
Other defensive combos include:
Walker & Stones
Trent & Gomez
Maguire & Shaw
Much of the Villa backline
Trent, Gomez, Phillips, Milner (Hmm…)
James & Chalobah
But just because a combo is English doesn’t make it a good choice.
The first three points are serious - the fourth one could be depending on team performance.
When we see organizational structures at club level that could be easily and seamlessly transferred to international level, we should take notice of them.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to realize that points one and three in the above list collectively form one of Southgate’s preferred defensive lineups. He’s already doing some of this.
But are there more gains out there?
When the best clubs in the world play in your league staffed with English players it seems remiss not to try to pull their power into the national team.
Take the Liverpool midfield. Hendo, Ox, Milner, Jones, Elliott, and (at a stretch…) Trent:
Hendo is England’s best midfielder on paper.
Ox had a Renaissance earlier this season and was in the conversation briefly for being in Liverpool’s best midfield (See Grace Robertson’s tweet from November)
Elliott started the season in the starting lineup with only injury taking him out of that, and he’s been looking pretty sharp since returning.
Jones is a very well-rounded midfielder who can do everything from single-handedly smashing Porto one game to play holding midfield in the cup the next.
Milner is the leader you bring on late in the game to see it out. With his 20 years of experience, he knows when to take the tactical foul, when to run it into the corner, and when to crunch someone. He’s football’s hyper-fit utility man.
And Trent has played such a free-flowing positional game this season that you could consider him in the line up too - though it kind of goes against the ethos of the article…
Add to this that Man City front three. All of them can press, they’re all possession players, and every one of them contributes without the ball. And they can all score.
This doesn’t mean we can’t include players from other teams. Just that ideally, we start with those players who play together all the time.
By maximizing the effectiveness of these players in the first XI, it means you free up the second team to be absolutely stacked. Imagine rotating a whole fresh team of basically the England starting line up from the last Euros:
James - Walker - Stones - Maguire - Shaw
Phillips - Rice
Saka - Kane - Mount
And we haven’t even started on Jude, Jadon, etc…
This approach can maximize your on-pitch performance, the coaching time you can spend with them, and your choice of substitutes and rotated XIs during tightly-packed tournament schedules.
Tell me I’m wrong.