Jude Bellingham Reflects on Euro 2024 and England's Future
Jude Bellingham does not sugar-coat Euro 2024. England reached the final, came within one game of ending decades of hurt, yet inside the camp something felt broken.
Two years on, standing in a very different environment on the other side of the Atlantic, he is blunt about it.
“At the Euros I think we got a few things wrong off the pitch, I don’t feel the group connected as well as it could have for a number of reasons,” he said from England’s World Cup base in the United States.
England arrived in Germany as one of the favourites. They left with a runners-up medal and a lingering sense of underachievement. Bellingham’s verdict explains why.
“We weren’t playing well, which doesn’t help, so even when we were winning, we didn’t get the feeling that we were as happy as we should be.”
A final reached, but never owned
Gareth Southgate’s team stumbled rather than surged through Euro 2024. Spain beat them in the final, yet the warning signs had flashed long before that night.
They needed Bellingham’s outrageous, last-gasp overhead kick to drag Slovakia into extra time in the last 16. They needed penalties to squeeze past Switzerland in the quarter-finals. They needed another late winner to edge out the Netherlands in the semi-finals.
On paper, it looked like resilience. Inside the dressing room, Bellingham remembers something else: a group that never quite felt at ease with itself.
His acrobatic equaliser against Slovakia instantly joined the canon of great England tournament moments. He doesn’t revel in it.
“I still remember how I was feeling at the time. It always makes me feel a bit uncomfortable because it was such a bad situation,” the Real Madrid midfielder said.
“We weren't playing well. I remember as a kid watching World Cups and Euros where we crashed out against teams we shouldn’t have gone out to and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I’m about to be a part of one of those moments’. It shakes up the whole of English football.”
The goal changed the narrative of that night. It did not change how he felt about the campaign as a whole.
Tuchel’s ‘brotherhood’ and a new England
Now comes a reset. Thomas Tuchel, the man charged with taking England one step further at the World Cup this summer, has been clear about his priority: build a “brotherhood”.
If Euro 2024 was defined by a talented squad that never quite clicked off the pitch, Tuchel wants the opposite – a group that feels tight, connected, and aligned before the pressure of knockout football bites.
Bellingham’s reflections underline why that message matters. He has lived both sides of it: the soaring individual moment in a struggling team and, at club level with Real Madrid, the power of a united dressing room driving towards trophies.
This England camp, he suggests, already feels different. The aim is that the emotional disconnect of Germany is not repeated on American soil.
A fight for the No.10 – with a friend
Bellingham’s own role in Tuchel’s plan is not guaranteed. Remarkably for a player of his stature, he faces a genuine battle just to start England’s World Cup opener against Croatia on Wednesday.
Tuchel appears to have cast it as a straight shootout for the No.10 position between Bellingham and Morgan Rogers – a contest layered with personal history.
The pair grew up in the same area of the West Midlands. They played junior football together. They know each other’s games and personalities inside out.
As competition goes, it is as intimate as it gets.
Bellingham strengthened his case with a commanding display in Wednesday’s final warm-up win over Costa Rica, a performance that looked every inch like an audition for the role behind the striker. He insists the rivalry with Rogers has no edge to it.
“As a person, he is a top guy, he can get along with anyone, can have conversations with anyone,” Bellingham said. “He can be a bit loud. We have debates that turn into arguments a lot. But we get on like brothers, to be fair.”
Tuchel has not hidden the fact that they are vying for the same spot.
“The manager has made it very clear in a lot of the times where he has spoken that we are playing for the same position,” Bellingham explained. “I know that has eased up a bit more now that he sees me playing more positions and Morgs playing more positions, but I honestly have no ill feelings when he is playing and I’m not playing.”
That last line matters. England’s last major tournament run was haunted by a sense of emotional distance, even as the team advanced. This one may hinge on whether stars of Bellingham’s stature can accept rotation, rivalry and sacrifice in the name of something bigger.
The talent is not in doubt. The question, once again, is whether the “brotherhood” Tuchel talks about holds when the World Cup starts and the pressure hits.
