Seven of Tuchel’s England squad play abroad, and Anthony Gordon says Barcelona see what England never did
Harry Kane, both Bellinghams and Anthony Gordon are among the seven players in England’s November squad whose clubs are outside England, and the FA’s technical director is all for it.
Nov 15, 2026
Count the clubs in Thomas Tuchel’s November squad and the Premier League still wins comfortably. Count the players England actually build around, and it looks rather different.
Seven of the 25 players Tuchel named on 6 November play their club football outside England: Harry Kane at Bayern Munich, Jude Bellingham and Trent Alexander-Arnold at Real Madrid, Anthony Gordon at Barcelona, Jobe Bellingham at Borussia Dortmund, Jarell Quansah at Bayer Leverkusen and Djed Spence at Inter. Two of those seven were at the centre of England’s summer.
The summer’s goals came from abroad
England’s World Cup run ended in the semi-finals in Atlanta on 15 July, when Argentina scored twice late on to win 2-1. The goal that had put England ahead came from Gordon, who tapped in Morgan Rogers’ cross ten minutes into the second half.
Two weeks earlier it was Gordon again, off the bench against DR Congo in the round of 32. England were a goal down with a quarter of an hour left. He set up Kane twice, in the 75th and 86th minutes, and England went through 2-1. Kane finished the tournament with six goals and, in October, became the first Englishman since Michael Owen in 2001 to win the Ballon d’Or. Owen won his at Liverpool. Kane collected his as a Bayern player.
On Thursday he won his 126th cap against Croatia at Wembley, passing Peter Shilton’s record. He is England’s captain, their record scorer and now their most-capped player, and he has not played in the Premier League since 2023.
Gordon’s complaint
Gordon’s move is the newest and the most pointed. Barcelona signed him from Newcastle at the end of May for a fee Sky Sports put at about £69.3 million with add-ons, on a deal to 2031.
Since then he has been happy to say England had him wrong. In an interview with ITV he said people at home valued his pace and his pressing but never respected “the quality and IQ that I play with”, and that playing in Barcelona’s style has made those things visible. Newcastle fans will have their own view on that. What is harder to argue with is that he now lines up regularly alongside Lamine Yamal and Raphinha.
Tuchel is careful not to turn it into a rule. Speaking about his three stars abroad, he said he does not see why a Premier League player cannot step up and be decisive for England too.
What the FA thinks it gets
The FA’s technical director, John McDermott, told BBC Sport that 43 English players in European football are on the FA’s radar, and called it a “huge positive”. His argument is about workload as much as anything. A player on the Continent, he said, is not necessarily playing 55 games, and has time between them for gym work and technical practice that the English fixture list does not always allow.
He also pointed to the other direction of travel. Quansah and Jobe Bellingham both came through the EFL before moving to Germany, and McDermott said there is no single right path. About 26 to 27 percent of Premier League players are English-qualified, by his figure, and he wants more of them.
Where this goes
None of this is new. Jadon Sancho went to Dortmund as a teenager in 2017, and Jude Bellingham followed from Birmingham in 2020 and has still never played a Premier League game. What has changed is who is going. Sancho went to get games. Gordon went at 25 as an established England starter, for one of the biggest fees Newcastle have ever received.
My guess is the list gets longer before it gets shorter. England’s captain won the Ballon d’Or at Bayern, and the man who scored their goal in a World Cup semi-final plays for Barcelona. A young English player weighing an offer from Madrid or Munich no longer has to wonder whether going will cost him his England place. It has not cost Kane or Gordon theirs.