Austria are everything England are not – and never have been
Phil Foden’s role for England is heavily debated but a player of his standing should be able to do more than one thing. Photograph: Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters
Here’s a phrase you might not have heard since 1934. Hey, Austria look good. This is a new thing in many ways. What do we think of, traditionally, when it comes to Austria and international football? Indeterminate makeweights. The pre-war Wunderteam. A prosperous strudel repository. The Surrey of greater Germania. The 1990s pomp-rock target-man stylings of Toni Polster.
And now? Modernity. Energy. Grooved patterns. Austria finished top of a group that includes the teams ranked second and seventh in the world. They have been coherent, joined-up, even vibrant in a mannered kind of way, the only team in the final round of group games to score three goals, en route to a first victory against the Netherlands in 34 years.
Knockout football is something else. Talk of an easy run to the semi-finals seems optimistic, as is, for obvious reasons, the idea they may meet England there. Austria’s tournament may well come to an end against Turkey in Leipzig on Tuesday, although Ralf Rangnick’s team did beat their last-16 opponents 6-1 at the Ernst Happel in March.
Austria’s vigour in Germany feels novel and also significant. Specifically, it’s telling you things – and we are always hungry for these things – about England.
This is most obviously a tonal thing. Austria have been the most club football-adjacent team at these Euros. Other nations have seemed to be driven by patriotism, flag stuff, ancestral grudges. Austria have been playing with the fluency of a club team, their energy channelled into well-worn patterns and learned movements.
This is by design. In the game against the Netherlands, Austria fielded seven players who have spent time in the Red Bull franchise. Rangnick is the architect of that Red Bull style, installed early on as a kind of corporate tactics consultant. Those teams still play to his template.
It shows Austria play in planned swarms. High pressing, runners from midfield. Everyone knows their role. It is a method understood by the players who can riff on it or fall back into the structure in difficult moments.
While Rangnick has been described as working wonders in his time, he has been mining something that is already there. This is not “getting a tune out of the boy Baumgartner”, as though he is essentially a snake charmer or a confidence trickster. The hard work for this was done in the previous two decades, the results fruits of having a coherent system and players raised to understand it. Create a culture. Express that culture.
And by now the rustling in the treeline is getting louder. Culture, coherence, method. It is at moments like these that England come crunching down the drive, rattling at the door handle, muttering through the walls. Most obviously because Austria are what England are not and have never been.
While this may or may not be a bad thing, it is still necessary to point it out. If only because English lack of method is still, for some reason, a surprise every time.
As ever, the poor performances of the past two weeks have become a shared national psychodrama. The players, we hear, have become gripped with doubt. Fear stalks the camp. We crave conciliation, acts of leadership.
Mainly, there is rage at perceived acts of individual incompetence, the hate crime of Gareth Southgate’s tactical system, the abomination of his substitutions. Perhaps, who knows, what we’re seeing here is some wider cultural collapse. Can we get the election in? Or Brexit? Or post-imperial guilt?
The answer remains pretty much the same. The problem is the same problem and the problem is England have no tactics. They don’t have a method. But they know that, right? Germany, Spain and the Netherlands have ways of playing, shared characteristics that may not always work, but are there, as a base structure. There are patterns, models, texts, points in history where those methods seemed state of the art. Portugal has a way. Austria has a way.
Even in the Premier League era, with its imported intelligence and bolt-on systems, the Pep-mimesis, England football remains the last redoubt of something blunt and essentially anti-academic, a culture of celebrity, big players, entitlement.
Why are England an incoherent team? Because there is no English coaching school, no coaching culture, no love of knowledge and method, nothing to pass down. Here is an amazing but still oddly overlooked fact. The last three English coaches to lead a team to a European Cup, European Championship final were Joe Fagan, in 1985, Terry Venables, in 1986, and Gareth Southgate, in 2021 (Fagan, incidentally, fought in the second world war).
The last English manager to win a title in the top five European leagues was Howard Wilkinson, in 1991. Most seasons there are no English coaches in the Champions League.
England is a football superpower. England is also an intellectual vacuum. Instead, every manager of the national team must invent the team’s tactics on the hoof, must make up how they are going to play. No wonder it always looks so difficult.
This comes historically from English football’s innate anti-intellectualism. The first time Walter Winterbottom brought a chalkboard into a team meeting there was a near-mutiny. It comes also from the primarily commercial ownership. English football has been carved up between competing commercial bodies since the late 19th century, those interests almost entirely self-serving and financial.
But amazingly it still seems unclear. English pundits have asked why other nations seem to be able to slot players in effortlessly, how it is every player knows their role, to be comfortable with the culture, as though this is simply a matter of the correct fevered last‑minute instructions being shouted by a man in a suit on the touchline.
There was an interesting discussion on the BBC a few days back when the journalist Guillem Balagué was asked about England and he said the team had an imbalance of talent and energy, that it needs to be recalibrated towards a more coherent shape. Immediately afterwards, a very likable former England striker, who just didn’t seem to have heard any of this, insisted that all England need to do is unleash, unshackle, un-manacle their talent, to somehow just be more England, to run, shout, make noises, be good, put the ball in the goal with English goal power. Which is fine. But … what exactly should we unleash. How do we unleash? How do we remove this sword from the stone?
Why repeat this now? First, because this lack of method will always come out just as every spell of success is always a fix, a way of getting round it. Southgate’s best moments were built on a hyper-solid defensive system that also allowed England to keep the ball. What has happened this time is that he seems to have forgotten this, to have overestimated his own capacity to find way of playing on the hoof, to have picked a squad he doesn’t really understand.
For generations, the lack of coaching method came out in energy over technique. At this tournament it is there in technically skilled players who are uncomfortable outside of a carefully proscribed role. Phil Foden, we are told, must play in the same position as he does for his club or you’re “throwing him away”. Phil Foden cannot be expected to adapt to making slightly different runs. Phil Foden is one of the best players in Europe.
These statements can’t all be true. A player of Foden’s capacities should be able to do more than one thing. Square pegs in round holes is a problem we keep hearing. But why are the pegs so square?
The final reason for mentioning all this is the extreme reaction to Southgate, which has been visceral and full of rage. There is genuine hatred and frustration, as though he is responsible for every note of failure, every atomising aspect of modern life.
No doubt he could have run this team better. It has been poor. Mistakes have been made. The thing is, he is also a symptom of all this. You get the culture you deserve. Like it or not. Southgate is what England has, the best English manager out there. There is a choice to throw cups at him or, alternatively, to rail against the culture and try to change it.
Or perhaps to accept this is where we have always been, that this is England’s contribution to the spectacle. There is a tiny chance England could end up playing Austria, their direct antagonist. Who would you like to see win that game? Rangnick’s exercise in coherent intellectual programming? Or the mess of emotions, the vast and groaning cultural construct that is England football, with all its failings, its blind spots, its strange and maddening kind of beauty?