Tuchel has lost five from his England squad in four days, and Spain arrive at Wembley on Saturday
Cole Palmer, Declan Rice, Marcus Rashford, Kobbie Mainoo and Tino Livramento have all pulled out of England’s four-game international window. Morgan Gibbs-White and James Garner have been called up in their place.
Sep 22, 2026
Thomas Tuchel named a 27-man England squad on 18 September. Four days later he is down to 22 of them, with Cole Palmer, Declan Rice, Marcus Rashford, Kobbie Mainoo and Tino Livramento all out and Spain arriving at Wembley on Saturday.
Five gone in four days
Two of the withdrawals came straight out of Sunday’s 1-1 draw at Craven Cottage. Rashford and Mainoo were both taken off late in that match and assessed by Manchester United afterwards. Rashford has been carrying a hip problem since the World Cup and was limping when he came off.
Palmer was the first to go. He had been recalled by Tuchel after being left out of the World Cup squad in the summer, a decision that started an argument which never really ended, and he pulls out instead with a minor injury. He is 24 and has now missed a tournament and the first window after it.
Rice played the full 90 minutes of Arsenal’s 3-0 defeat at Brighton on Saturday, the champions’ first loss of the season, and is unavailable too. Livramento is the least surprising name on the list. A calf injury kept the Newcastle full-back out of the World Cup after he had been selected for it, and having got back, he then missed Newcastle’s 2-1 win over Hull City at the weekend.
Gibbs-White and Garner come in
Tuchel has called up Morgan Gibbs-White of Nottingham Forest and James Garner of Everton, both of whom joined the squad on Tuesday. Neither is a like-for-like replacement for Rice, which is the gap that matters most in a window that opens against the world champions.
Four games in eleven days
This is an unusually long window. England play Spain at a sold-out Wembley on Saturday 26 September, kick-off 12.15am IST on Sunday morning, then travel to Prague to face Czechia on Tuesday 29 September, again at 12.15am IST. Croatia in Rijeka follows on Saturday 3 October, a 9.30pm IST start, before they return to Wembley to play Czechia again on Tuesday 6 October.
Spain are the reason the first of those looks different from a normal Nations League fixture. They beat Argentina 1-0 in the final at MetLife Stadium on 19 July, Ferran Torres scoring in the 106th minute, and they arrive in London holding both the men’s and women’s world titles.
The cost of a long window
Clubs have an obvious interest in getting players back intact from a three-week break, and Tuchel has an obvious interest in getting a look at the group he will work with next. Those two interests do not sit comfortably together, and this is the part of the calendar where they collide hardest.
For England the immediate problem is narrower. Rice has been the one genuinely settled piece of the midfield for years, and the man most likely to have taken the creative load off him in these games was Palmer. Both are out for the same fixture, against the side that won the World Cup in July.