Football Architects: The England DNA behind the pursuit of tournament-winning teams

New York Times

7 days ago

This is the fifth of a six-part series looking at figures who have played a pivotal role in a modern football success story. The first piece, on the rebuilding of Ajax, can be found here. Part two, on Belgium becoming No 1 in the FIFA Rankings is here. Part three, on the rise of Croatian football is here. And part four on the sport's data pioneers is here.
Each article comes with a related podcast, which can be found here on The Athletic FC Tactics Podcast feed.
The rationale is simple, John McDermott says: 'Under pressure, players often revert to type.'
He is explaining why, in December 2014, just six months after England had finished bottom of their World Cup group, Dan Ashworth and Gareth Southgate announced the 'England DNA' at St George's Park. Ashworth was the director of elite development at The FA and Southgate had just completed his first year as England Under-21s men's head coach.
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The DNA was an overarching term for their 'approach to elite player development' that applied to England age-group teams from under-15s through to the men's under-21s and women's under-23s.
It laid out the vision for future internationals to be exceptional across four 'corners' — technical/tactical, physical, psychological, social — and contained five core elements. Best practice for coaches was outlined, expectations for the 'future England player' were listed and the FA said holistic support would be provided.
They articulated how age-group teams should play, which would be 'the strongest demonstration of the England DNA'. A focus was placed on a two-way understanding of heritage and culture in an increasingly diverse country.
Over the next decade, England's senior men had their greatest spell of sustained success at tournament level, reaching successive European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024, and a World Cup semi-final in 2018.
The senior women went even better, winning the Euros on home soil in the summer of 2022, finishing as runners-up at the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, and then retaining their Euros title in Switzerland this summer. The notion of 'proper England' became a buzzword that powered them to the title.
Success in age-group football has been abundant: the women's under-17s were Euros runners-up last May; the men's under-21s won the Euros again this summer, like they had in 2023; the men's under-17, under-19 and under-20 sides have all won continental or world silverware since 2017.
The England DNA project was an important moment, comprehensively covering how to instil cultural change at the same time as catalysing technical and tactical evolution.
'Traditionally the Dutch, and more recently the Spanish, have very clear playing identities,' McDermott says.
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He has been the technical director at the FA since early 2021 — having been Les Reed's assistant previously — and first worked there in 1995.
McDermott coached the under-16 through to under-21 national teams in the mid-2000s, and worked in the academies of Leeds United, Watford, and Tottenham Hotspur.
'A player isn't going to change profile in a World Cup final into something which they aren't at their club,' he says. 'There's got to be a reflection (within England teams) of how they play at their clubs, in the Premier League, the Champions League.'
The DNA was intended as the foundation of the FA's quest for tournament-winning teams.
In 2014, though, England's senior men's side were on a run of eight major tournaments where their ceiling was the quarter-finals. The pressure kept compounding and players kept crumbling under it.
So where did they look for inspiration?
'I would think we're all probably magpies,' McDermott says. 'If you were to speak to Pep Guardiola, you'd hear about the influence that Johan Cruyff had on him, the influence Rinus Michels had on Cruyff, and the influence that Vic Buckingham had on Michels.
'There's not this ivory tower where somebody comes up with this formula that nobody's ever thought of.'
Consequently, Ashworth started close to home, visiting national training centres in France (Clairefontaine) and the Netherlands (Zeist).
'You speak to a lot of people. We're trying to get as many experiences as we can. You go to America, see what's happening in other sports, and ask: 'What do we do next? What's the evolution of the DNA?'.
'There's this curiosity where we're trying to look and then mould ideas into the English way, to make sure that's aligned with how the league is and where the playing system is.'
'I remember being at a FIFA conference and one of the speeches described how in senior football you're winning the next game or the next tournament, while in youth football it's about winning the next 10 years. I thought that was really clever, but there are subtleties.'
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As such, they were not prescriptive with formations like Belgium (4-3-3), the Netherlands (4-3-3) and Italy (4-diamond-2) can be.
'It's less about the specific system and more about how it looks and how the players perform, playing the style that we want — expansive football, dominating the ball, playing through the thirds.'
It is why the 'how we play' component of England DNA included transition as a phase of the game — counter-attacks and counter-pressing were given as much emphasis as build-up and defensive shape.
'The principles around in-possession, out-of-possession, transitions and set plays, I'm sure Alf Ramsey (England manager between 1963 and 1974) was talking about that. The examples and language changes.
'Have those principles been honed? Have they been better presented? Is the teaching better now with young players? Yeah, it probably is.
'One of the mantras we have is 'unearth, connect, develop and win'. Again Howard (Wilkinson) would have had that, and Dan (Ashworth) would have that in different words, but it's updating the wallpaper, updating the furniture.'
It is an area where McDermott feels they have made progress but are still not perfect.
He talks about 'footballing culture' and how players arrive at national team camps in the technical and tactical moulds of what their club coaches want. This was 'quite apparent' to McDermott when he started his current role.
'You'd see the Leeds players under Marcelo Bielsa, the Manchester City players under Pep Guardiola, some of the Liverpool players under Jurgen Klopp, and they'd want to do slightly different things — Leeds players going to man-to-man, Manchester City players wanting to stay on the ball, Liverpool players wanting heavy-metal football.'
England DNA was therefore not just a blueprint but also something to unite players, who might spend so much of their season playing in different systems and styles to one another.
He points out that, with age-group teams — whom the DNA was actually for — players can come from different levels of the English footballing pyramid. Increasingly, they are venturing into other major European leagues too.
McDermott is talking via video call from Slovakia, where he was with England's men's under-21s at the European Championship. He was speaking mid-tournament as Lee Carsley's side defended their title from 2023 with an almost completely different squad, beating Germany 3-2 in the final compared with the one that was victorious over Spain two years prior.
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Aidy Boothroyd once said that, if being the senior head coach was an 'impossible job' then being under-21s head coach was 'utterly impossible'. Trying to win tournaments and keep progressing talent to the senior side, he felt, were at odds with each other.
For McDermott to say 'it's not win at all costs' feels almost ironic, considering the relative recent success of the under-21s and other age-group teams.
'There's a way in which we want to play and there's a way in which we want to get to those finals and win. It's finding that right balance between winning and developing — the two are very closely interlinked.'
In 2008, England's men failed to qualify for the European Championship, and, the very next year, the under-21s were beaten 4-0 by Germany in the age-group final.
Does the unreliability of memory mean that year is misremembered as the nadir from where change stemmed?
'There was not one day when it all happened. To say that this all began in 2008 disrespects some of the brilliant brains we've had in the past. It's definitely an evolution.'
Success, as the saying goes, has many fathers.
For McDermott, how you view the progression 'probably depends on who you speak to. I guess I'm steeped in FA history'.
He namechecks Bobby Robson, who managed England's men's side for 95 games and took them to the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup in Italy.
Dave Sexton also gets credit from McDermott. He was twice England men's under-21s coach and led them to Euros wins in 1982 and 1984, back-to-back winners like Carsley's teams.
McDermott traces things all the way back to Walter Winterbottom, England's first ever men's coach from 1946 to 1962. 'Followed by Allen Wade and then I worked under Charles Hughes. They all had their principles of play or how they saw the game being played,' McDermott says.
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He is not sequentially listing England coaches, but figures who were inspirational in shaping — for better or worse — English footballing identity.
Wade became the FA's director of coaching in 1963 and wrote The FA's Guide to Training and Coaching in 1970; Hughes was Wade's assistant — he'd later hold the role himself — and coached the Great Britain Olympic football team for a decade from 1964-1974.
'Charles was probably epitomised quite wrongly,' he says while squinting, as though digging into his subconscious to remember correctly. 'He wrote a book called The Winning Formula around direct play. He probably didn't sell his ideas as well (as he could).'
Hughes is best known now for building on the work of Charles Reep, who was one of the earliest statistical analysts in English football. Reep collected data by hand in the 1950s.
It must be remembered that this was innovative at the time, even if by modern standards the notational methods were simplistic and the findings over-reductive.
Reep identified that most goals were scored from sequences of fewer than four passes, half of all goals were following opposition-half regains, and one in 10 shots were scored.
The problem, as future research showed, was he did not adjust for frequency in a low-scoring sport. There were fewer goals from long passing sequences or deep build-ups because these happened less.
Hughes, lauded by Robson in his autobiography, spun this into a concept he called the position of maximum opportunity (POMO); this stressed the importance of flooding the box with crosses and always having a player in line with the back post.
Hence English football developed a reputation as direct and agricultural, perhaps cemented by the poor-quality, muddy pitches that it was often played on, which did little to facilitate intricate, short passing.
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McDermott describes 1997 as 'a landmark,' with Howard Wilkinson, four months after being sacked as Leeds United manager, becoming technical director at the FA. He says it 'turbocharged' the development of English football.
'That was the start of the academies, starting to get full-time coaches. Before that we had centres of excellence. Howard was very much about the facilities and the time spent (coaching).'
Wilkinson authored the Charter for Quality, a 90-page document of 32 aspects that outlined how the FA would maximise player potential, with specific demands on facilities and coaching, and proposing an action plan for small-sided games programme for players aged seven to 10.
'After Howard, there was Trevor Brooking. Trevor concentrated around improving techniques that built upon Howard's work. He brought in a document called The Future Game.' That technical guide, published in 2010, was three-times as big as the Charter for Quality,
In it, Brooking outlines a vision of developing players who are technically excellent and innovative coaches who train them into existence. The backdrop of the time was England's age-group teams underachieving compared with European counterparts, with game-time for English players in the Premier League on the decline.
McDermott explains that developing technicians was Brooking's 'passion,' owing to Brooking himself being physically lacking but two-footed and technical — he made over 500 appearances for West Ham between 1966 and 1984, twice won the FA Cup, and played 47 times for England.
'The EPPP (Elite Player Performance Plan) came in around that time (2012) within the academies. It turbo-boosted the initial work that Howard did — more investment came into clubs.'
Wilkinson, McDermott feels, built the foundations for Brooking to try and improve players from. From that, 'Dan (Ashworth) came in and brought the DNA we now work off. Maybe because I've been around a long time and I've known a lot of the players, I don't see milestones.'
The crowning moment for the England DNA on the men's side was at Wembley in summer 2021, nearly seven years after it was announced.
England were 2-1 up in extra time against Denmark. Nothing says pressure like being one goal ahead in the 116th minute of a European Championship semi-final on home soil.
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They had been dropping deeper and deeper and restoring to defending the box — reverting to the England type of old.
But then something clicked. Denmark had used their subs and had to chase the game with 10 men when an injury hit.
Raheem Sterling picked up a loose ball after England cleared a Denmark corner, and the two and a half minutes that followed were everything Brooking once dreamt of.
England did not score. They did not have a shot. They did not cross the ball. What they did do was stitch together 53 passes, the longest possession of the tournament.
An exhausted Denmark were pulled left and right as England went up and down the pitch and from side to side. There were one-twos, triangles, even an audacious switch from centre-back Harry Maguire to marauding right-back Kieran Trippier.
England captain Harry Kane said 'that was a great sign of what we're about, that shows the unselfishness of the team. We ended up keeping it for a good few minutes and killed Denmark off. It was our night tonight.'
They ended up being penalty kicks away from becoming a tournament-winning team, losing against Italy in the final.
That England team, managed by Southgate (he stepped up to the senior team in 2016) manifested into the very blend of everything that he and Ashworth explained the DNA was in 2014.
Parts of Southgate's team were stereotypically English, being so defensively strong and compact — they only conceded twice in seven games and neither were from open play — and yet they made a first tournament final for nearly 60 years by keeping possession.
They were, to borrow McDermott's term, 'cosmopolitan'. England's player of the tournament, Sterling, was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and raised in Wembley. McDermott says that there are some age-group teams that can have a majority of players with multiple nationalities.
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'I don't remember really having competition on recruitment,' he says of the early 2000s. 'Competing for young talent (now) is probably more similar to competing for talent at a club than it was 20 years ago.
'The question also becomes an ethical one as they get a bit older. What I'm always aware of is giving somebody one or two caps, but they might have got 50 or 60 caps for another nation. Making good judgements in the interest of the player becomes a dimension.'
But despite England's age-group success, McDermott still thinks of those who might have slipped through the net. One mention of Belgium's futures teams — which run parallel to their age-group sides and are for late-developing players — prompts him to bring up the relative age effect.
That is the term to describe the overrepresentation of players born earlier in the year (academic year in England, calendar year elsewhere in Europe), because they tend to be the first to physically develop.
'It's always fascinated me. Quite early on, I didn't see the talent of Ashley Young when I was at Watford, we didn't offer Ashley a contract at under 16. Thankfully he stayed on. That was a near miss that I had very early in my career.'
'We are trying to get our coaches to be aware of that — it's something we do within all of our recruitment meetings. I don't want our coaches to be frightened of playing a younger player or a physically immature player just in case we lose.'
He cites stats from the under-19 Euros where just 17 per cent of players were fourth-quartile babies (i.e. the youngest in their year groups). 'That includes a lot of countries that have been looking at futures projects for some time,' McDermott points out.
'It probably balances off a little bit as you get older and sometimes those August birthdays are probably more resilient because of it, because they've survived. We had quite a few when I was at Spurs: Kane, (Ryan) Mason, (Andros) Townsend were all late in the year.
'If I had a magic wand that'd be one thing I would probably look to address, especially in this country but across world football as well — it's everywhere.'