At Euro 2020, No Semifinalist Is an Island

LEEDS, England — Kalvin Phillips came home, for the first time, as a fully fledged England international with four jerseys as souvenirs. He had asked his new teammates to autograph one, destined to be framed and mounted on a wall at home. Two others were reserved for his mother and grandmother, as tokens of gratitude for years of support.

The final one he earmarked as a gift for the man who, he felt, deserved the bulk of the credit. A couple of years earlier, Phillips had been a promising but inconsistent midfielder in the Championship, England’s second-tier league. Now, despite having not yet played a minute in the Premier League, he had been called into a gathering of the country’s finest players.

Without the intervention of Marcelo Bielsa, the Leeds United manager, Phillips said, none of it “would really have been possible.”

Bielsa’s influence on the 25-year-old Phillips is not some woolly intangible. He did not simply encourage Phillips to believe in himself, did not merely allow him to become the player he was always going to be. Instead, Bielsa turned Phillips into the player he needed him to be.

Bielsa’s fitness regimen is infamous in soccer: “Mad,” was what Harry Kane, the England captain, called it when it was described to him. It incorporates one regular session that is known, simply, as “Murderball.” Phillips has had to cope not only with that, but with his own customized program, too, one to give him the precise mixture of strength and agility to orchestrate a Bielsa midfield.

The physical work is accompanied by intellectual demands, too: early deployments in central defense, to teach Phillips the mechanics of building play from the back; detailed video clips to show him how to operate in a deep-lying midfield role; long, frequent pregame meetings, for instruction in where he is meant to be and what he is meant to do at any given moment and in any given circumstance.

The result of that work was best demonstrated on Saturday. Three years ago, Phillips’s future at second-tier Leeds United was far from certain. Against Ukraine, Gareth Southgate, the England manager, removed Phillips early, to make sure he would be rested and available to start a Euro 2020 semifinal.

Phillips’s case is extreme — there is no other way, when Bielsa is involved — but it is also instructive. An international tournament is, unavoidably, a festival of unapologetic patriotism. National anthems provide the soundtrack, and national flags the backdrop, as teams compete for their country’s pride and honor.

But those countries that succeed are, by and large, those that have most fully embraced the benefits of soccer’s internationalism: the places that have looked beyond their borders for ideas and for inspiration; that have borrowed and adopted best practices, no matter their source; that have learned lessons, regardless of the language in which they are taught.

That is true of all of the semifinalists at Euro 2020, but it is true most of all of England. The Premier League is regularly cited — most often, admittedly, in research conducted on behalf of the Premier League itself — as one of Britain’s greatest cultural exports.

It is also, though, one of Britain’s great importers: of playing and coaching talent, most obviously, but also of ideas and systems and methods. It is the combination of those raw materials that is then concentrated and combined and sold back to the world as a finished product. That is what has allowed the Premier League to establish its dominance. And it is, now, at last, what has brought England’s national team to the cusp of international glory.

The Pep Effect

Kasper Hjulmand’s first senior managerial job did not end as he would have wanted. At the end of the 2008 season, Lyngby, the team where he had worked for a decade, was relegated. It might, for many, have signaled the end of a managerial career that had scarcely begun.

Hjulmand’s methods, though, had not gone unnoticed by F.C. Nordsjaelland, a bigger team that played nearby. “They were relegated, but he had made them play with some of the ideas of Johan Cruyff,” said Jan Laursen, the Nordsjaelland chairman. “That fit with the style of play we wanted, so we brought him in as an assistant manager.”

As Laursen tells it, Hjulmand has two coaching idols — Cruyff and his protégé and spiritual heir, Pep Guardiola. “He has a belief of how football should be played,” Laursen said, “and he will not compromise from it.” When Laursen watches Denmark, now under Hjulmand’s command, he sees glimmers of the same approach: Guardiola’s ideas, learned at Barcelona and perfected at Bayern Munich and Manchester City, adapted for a Danish context.

Denmark is not alone. All four teams in the semifinals carry with them Guardiola’s mark. It is clearest, of course, in the case of Spain, though Luis Enrique’s team is a little more chaotic, and a little less controlled, than Guardiola might wish. Nine members of Spain’s squad have worked with Guardiola at some point; all of them have been brought up in academies that espouse his central principles.

Spain’s opponent on Tuesday owes more than a little to Guardiola, too. Italy has been experimenting with what became known as Tik-Italia — a homage to the tiki-taka philosophy that helped sweep Spain to two European Championships and a World Cup title in the space of four years — since its defeat to the Spanish in the final at Euro 2012.

Under its current coach, Roberto Mancini, the style has crystallized: his midfield personnel — Jorginho, Marco Verratti and Nicolò Barella — carry with them a Spanish imprimatur, with one regularly dropping deep to retrieve possession and build play; one fullback will drift into midfield, at times, too, to create a numerical advantage; his wide players tend to drift inside, narrowing the field. At times, Mancini has even experimented with playing without a specialist striker.

There is nothing especially remarkable about that. Soccer does not keep secrets well. Ideas are copied no sooner than they are formed. And Guardiola, for a decade or so, has stood at soccer’s conceptual cutting edge.

But it is his influence on England’s team that is, perhaps, the most pronounced. Guardiola has helped to hone John Stones as a refined, cultured defender. He has harnessed Kyle Walker into a tactically adept fullback. Phil Foden, Manchester City’s most promising young star, has been under his wing since he was 16. Raheem Sterling, Southgate’s most valuable player, has been reimagined on some fundamental level since coming under Guardiola’s tutelage.

That England now stands as close as it has ever been to ending its long wait to win a second international trophy is not exclusively down to Guardiola, of course. He is only one of many outside influences who have shaped the Premier League and the soccer culture that sits downstream of it. As England prepares to take on Denmark on Wednesday, it is that mix that has proved decisive.

Imported Ideas

The phrase Golden Generation is, to English ears, a pejorative one, referring most immediately to the team that England possessed in the first decade of the 21st century, the side of Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard, of Rio Ferdinand and John Terry, of late-stage David Beckham and early-onset Wayne Rooney.

It was, at the time, determined to be the best squad England had ever produced. It would become, in the years that followed, possibly the most disappointing.

At a time when the Premier League was regarded, domestically, as the best league in the world, and when its clubs were a force to be reckoned with in Europe, England (the team) remained reliably deflating. There were defeats on penalties and defeats in normal time. There were embarrassing group-stage exits and devastating quarterfinal collapses. There was one tournament England did not qualify for at all.

In some years, it was felt that the team was not sufficiently disciplined, too much of a circus. In others, it was felt that it was, if anything, too disciplined, not enough of a circus. It was, eventually, a Goldilocks Generation, veering endlessly between too hot and too cold. It had to be something, after all, because everyone could see that, for once, the players were good enough.

Southgate’s squad is the first in a decade or so to stand comparison with that generation. The depth at his disposal is best illustrated, perhaps, by those who are not here, not least Trent Alexander-Arnold, the Liverpool fullback, and Mason Greenwood, the prodigious Manchester United striker. He has so much talent at his disposal that he has been criticized, at various points, for omitting Jadon Sancho, Jack Grealish, Mason Mount, Marcus Rashford and Foden.

But what marks this squad as different — what may explain the fact that it has reached the semifinals in its last two major tournaments — is not the weight of talent.

England, with the possible exception of the early 1990s, has always produced players. Where it has always fallen short is in how to use them. It has, invariably, arrived at a World Cup or a European Championship and found itself outwitted by teams using systems it did not fully understand, or outfoxed by sides with greater tactical flexibility, or outwitted by players with superior technique or greater fitness.

That has changed, and it has changed because all of Southgate’s squad, at one point in their young careers or another, have been exposed to imported ideas.

Some of that is direct: Kane was crafted into one of the world’s best strikers by an Argentine coach, Mauricio Pochettino, with a largely Spanish staff; Jordan Henderson has matured into a natural leader under the watchful eye of Jürgen Klopp; Sancho and Jude Bellingham went to the Bundesliga to finish their educations; Bielsa has done for Phillips what Guardiola has done for Walker, Stones, Foden and Sterling.

But the majority of it is indirect. Jordan Pickford, the goalkeeper, has been encouraged to work on his distribution because that is what elite European soccer demands. Harry Maguire is comfortable marking a zone, not a player, on set pieces because that approach was popularized in England 15 years ago by European coaches.

The whole bright crop of promising young stars that litters Southgate’s squad was brought through academies where the coaching — if not always the coaches themselves — were in line with European, and especially Spanish, thinking. England’s great youth development revolution, the clumsily titled Elite Player Performance Plan, was designed in part to mimic the hot-housing of talent that happens in France and, again, Spain.

Its products have been drafted into teams that, invariably, play a style and use an approach that is inflected with internationalism. Not just in the way they play, but the way they train, and even what they eat: It is only a little more than 20 years, after all, since Arsène Wenger arrived at Arsenal and — as far as English soccer is concerned — invented pasta.

Phillips has been shaped, in the figurative sense and the literal one, over the last three years by Bielsa’s intense, unrelenting attention. This is the end result: from a backwater to the semifinals of Euro 2020. His story is a remarkable one, but it is not an exception. It is the rule.

What has happened to Phillips is just an accelerated version of the same journey English soccer, as a whole, has been on over the last two decades. Two more wins and England will have the national glory it craves. The roots of the triumph, though, will spread across Europe.