Anthony Gordon has spent a year watching Spanish footballers up close, and he has come back with an opinion England may not want to hear. Keeping the ball the way Spain keep it, he says, is not something English players can simply be taught. Speaking at St George's Park before Saturday's meeting with the world champions at Wembley, the Barcelona winger argued that the Three Lions would be better served leaning into what they already do well.
"We can't keep looking at other countries and trying to be like them, because we're not them," Gordon said. "We're English and we have our own strengths which they don't have, so maybe we start playing the way we're good at."
A year in La Liga changed how he sees it
Gordon joined Barcelona from Newcastle in the summer for 69.3m pounds, and the move has given him a vantage point few England players have. He trains with Spanish internationals. He plays against them most weeks. And what he has concluded is that the gap is not one of quality but of instinct.
"I know we have just as good players, but they have different qualities, so why are you trying to make those players the same as the Spanish players?" he said. "Because the Spanish players lack the things that we have and vice versa." He went further when asked whether possession football could be coached into an English side. "It's not in the English DNA. I even look at some of the decisions they take on the ball sometimes and think I'm not sure how you've seen that. They're definitely built different."
The evidence for Spain's method is hard to argue with. They won the World Cup with 65 per cent of the ball in the final and held an Argentina side built around Lionel Messi to two shots across 120 minutes, neither of them on target. England, by contrast, have lost two European Championship finals in a row and been knocked out by France and Argentina at the past two World Cups, and the same question keeps landing at their door.
The semi-final still stings
Gordon scored in the semi-final against Argentina and was taken off 17 minutes later, with Thomas Tuchel switching to a back five. Enzo Fernandez equalised, Lautaro Martinez won it in stoppage time, and a 25-year-old who had just put his country ahead in a World Cup semi-final said afterwards he had never felt worse.
He was surprised by the substitution, though he was careful to put it in context. "As a winger, to be honest, I come off most games. Obviously that substitution was different, but in general as a winger I expect it a lot of the time." After scoring, he said, he plays off adrenaline and goes into "an untouchable mode of confidence", which made the timing harder to take.
He is not blaming the manager
What Gordon would not do is hand the defeat to Tuchel. The players, he said, had the ball and the platform in the closing 20 minutes and did not use them. He also pointed back to the last-16 win over Mexico at the Azteca, where England held on with 10 men for more than half an hour after Jarell Quansah's red card, and suggested that memory shaped how the squad approached the closing stages against Argentina.
"We shouldn't try and blame one man who's obviously trying his best," he said. "For me, we had the best team, we had the best players on the pitch in that semi-final, and in the last 20 minutes we didn't play the best football. That's something the manager can't really affect from the sideline." The scar, as he put it, does not have to be a negative one. Spain at Wembley on Saturday will offer an early reading on whether England have learned anything from it.
Context: Anthony Gordon, 25, has 25 England caps and four goals. He moved from Newcastle to Barcelona for 69.3m pounds this summer. He started five games at the 2026 World Cup, scoring in the 2-1 semi-final defeat by Argentina and adding four assists. England beat France 6-4 in the third-place match, their best World Cup finish since 1966, and host Spain at Wembley on Saturday.
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