Thomas Tuchel has officially named his 26-man England squad for the 2026 World Cup, and it has not taken long for the debate to start. With England among the more fancied sides in the FIFA World Cup betting, every name on the list is under scrutiny. The omissions of names like Trent Alexander-Arnold, Phil Foden, Cole Palmer, Luke Shaw and Harry Maguire have led the conversation, but several of the inclusions are just as hard to justify on the numbers. Here is a look at the picks that have left supporters struggling to find a rationale.
Djed Spence
One of the most confusing names in the squad is Tottenham’s Djed Spence, a player who has not been a regular starter for a team deep in a relegation fight this season. He has failed to score any goals and has not registered any assists across those 29 appearances.
He featured in the 1-1 draw with Uruguay in March, but was substituted off before the hour mark and did not start the 0-1 defeat to Japan four days later. Lewis Hall, who was left out entirely, started regularly for a Newcastle United side who finished considerably higher in the table.
Dan Burn
Burn has made 28 Premier League starts for Newcastle United this season and contributed one goal and three assists. He also picked up a red card and nine yellow cards, the second-highest bookings tally of any outfield player in the squad.
He was also not called up for eiter of the March friendlies. At 33, he has not been capped at senior level before this squad announcement and spent the majority of the season as a squad option rather than a guaranteed starter.
Jordan Henderson
Henderson played 31 times for Brentford in 2025-26, starting 21 of those games, and contributed one goal and three assists across. He is 35. He has now appeared in four successive major tournament squads, covering Euro 2020, the 2022 World Cup, Euro 2024, and now this summer’s competition. He did not play a single minute in either of the March friendlies.
The players with stronger output in central midfield this season who were left out include Morgan Gibbs-White, who scored 14 goals and registered 18 goal contributions for Nottingham Forest from that position.
Noni Madueke
Madueke made 35 appearances for Arsenal this season, starting 25 of them, and scored two goals with one assist. He featured in the 1-1 draw with Uruguay in March, but failed to make a real impact.
The comparison that has drawn most scrutiny is with Jarrod Bowen, who scored eight league goals and contributed ten assists for West Ham United this season, yet did not make the squad. Tuchel has been open about preferring Madueke’s profile, but on output alone, the decision is hard to justify.
Jarell Quansah
Quansah joined Bayer Leverkusen from Liverpool for £35m in the summer and made 30 Bundesliga appearances this season, scoring three goals. Those numbers suggest he held his own in Germany, but he spent much of the campaign competing for a starting place rather than commanding one at a club that finished well outside the top four in the Bundesliga.
He was not involved in either of the March friendlies, and several centre-backs with more settled seasons at club level were not included in the squad.
Tuchel has been consistent in saying trust and tournament chemistry matter as much as form, even if that logic is hard to square with any World Cup predictor built purely on this season’s numbers. Whether the players who have benefited from that approach can deliver across eight games in 33 days in the summer heat of North America will go a long way to deciding how this squad is remembered.
