Phil Foden would join teammates Bukayo Saka and Paul Scholes in the top 40 of the Three Lions’ all-time goal scorers if he could duplicate his strike rate for Manchester City while wearing an England shirt. To find him on the list, one must instead dig through the archives, past players whose images are in black and white, or even from a time when photography existed.
With just four goals from his 45 caps, Phil Foden is all the way down in joint-140th place, behind defenders like Tony Adams, Stuart Pearce, and Gary Cahill (who each have five goals) and former Liverpool winger Nicky Barmby, who played half as many games as him. In sharp contrast to his 104 goals and 64 assists in 333 games for City, he is ranked 409th in terms of goals per game.
While Phil Foden’s most recent competitive goal came against Wales at the 2022 World Cup, the midfield player has not scored for England since the friendly victory over Scotland in September 2023. His only goals for his nation prior to that were two goals against Iceland in a closed-door Nations League game during the 2020 coronavirus outbreak. Only one of his nine assists has occurred since the previous World Cup.
Phil Foden is by no means the only player who shines far more for his club than for his nation, but when he switches from the light blue of City to the white of England, the decline is much more noticeable than for any other player of his caliber. And as he gets ready to play for England for the first time in eight months in their final two 2026 World Cup qualifiers against Serbia and Albania, it is worth looking at again.
“Simply apparent”
Phil Foden’s inability to score for England has been an unsolved mystery for the majority of the five years since he made his senior debut for the Three Lions, though it was a problem that Thomas Tuchel could conveniently ignore for the last six months or so. Foden requested that he not be selected for the June matches against Andorra and Senegal due to burnout at the end of last season, and he was injured for the September World Cup qualifiers against Andorra and Serbia.
He was getting back to his normal self before the October camp, but Tuchel decided not to call him up for the games against Wales and Latvia in order to build on the positive energy from the previous camp. As a result, he also dropped Jude Bellingham from his most striking squad list to date. However, with Phil Foden in unstoppable form for a reviving City and Bellingham playing regularly for Real Madrid again following his recovery from shoulder surgery, the coach could no longer ignore the knock on his office door and called up both players last Friday.
“Big names, big personalities, big, big talents,” Tuchel declared when revealing his team. “It’s great to see that they both contribute goals to significant victories for their teams, are in rhythm, and are in shape and form. It made perfect sense. To bring out the best in both of them, we will have key roles. Recently, they have made a huge contribution to their clubs. They frequently and significantly contribute to City and Real. We are thrilled that they are in good form.
Discordant with Bellingham!
But with both players’ simultaneous returns to the squad, Tuchel faces the same dilemma that Gareth Southgate did: how to start both of these great players in the same lineup when they want to play in similar positions and put their own stamp on the game?
Many commentators and supporters questioned whether Southgate would have been better off dropping one of Jude Bellingham or Phil Foden rather than playing them together in all seven games as England laboriously made their way to the Euro 2024 final by playing unimpressive football and squeezing through each match via extra time, penalty shootouts, and stoppage-time goals. Many were calling for Foden to be left out after Bellingham scored twice, including an overhead kick that prevented England from suffering a humiliating loss to Slovakia in the round of sixteen.
Throughout the tournament, Phil Foden was mostly used on the left of England’s 4-2-3-1 formation, but he also struggled while playing as a No. 10 with Bellingham in a rearranged 3-4-3 against Switzerland. Following that game, Phil Foden’s terrible stats went viral, showing that he had lost the ball 19 times, had no shots on goal, and had failed to create a chance.
Position dissatisfaction
Even though it was the role where he first excelled between 2019 and 2023, Foden seemed to blame Southgate for playing him in a position he had stopped playing for City months later.
In January 2025, he told the Manchester Evening News, “I feel frustrated I didn’t get out what I wanted to get out of it.” “It was really hard for me to affect the game from my position on the left. I do believe it was challenging to adjust to the position after finishing the previous season as the top player in the Premier League and playing center midfield.
It’s also important to note that Phil Foden had to leave the England camp during the Euros to attend the birth of his third child; he quickly returned to make sure he didn’t miss any games. It must have been difficult for him to leave his family so soon after such a significant event and to miss his newborn’s first few weeks of life.
Foden was positioned behind Harry Kane on the right side of the attack in Tuchel’s first match as manager against Albania, while Bellingham once more started at number ten. But a few days later, Foden was benched against Latvia before being substituted for Bellingham in the second half. Foden set up Eberechi Eze’s goal to complete the 3-0 victory, demonstrating how well the substitution worked.
‘Not a winger’
Tuchel didn’t take long to outline where he saw Foden and Bellingham playing after bringing them both back in for this week’s games: “Jude returns as a No. 10. He is in the best position there. His ability to score from this position is one of his main advantages. I think he was strongest in Phil, where he recently played for City. He is near the opponent’s box. Phil’s role in the middle of the pitch is what matters most. He doesn’t seem like a winger to me. He’ll be a very fluid nine and a half or ten and a half.
The most important thing for Tuchel, though, is to avoid making the same mistakes as Southgate and believing that Phil Foden and Jude Bellingham cannot be dropped, as well as the mistakes made by Sven-Goran-Eriksson and Fabio Capello when they tried to force Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard into the same midfield. In that regard, it is encouraging that Tuchel did not include both players in his previous squad; however, dropping a star player for a World Cup qualifier is one thing, but doing so at a major tournament is quite another.
Team needs to come first
When he excluded Jude Bellingham and Phil Foden last month, Tuchel emphasized that great players don’t always make a great team. “The radical statement is that we don’t collect the most talented players,” he stated. “We collect the guys who have the glue and cohesion to be the best team, because we need to arrive as the best team.”
In order to see if he can get a tune out of Bellingham and Foden together, Tuchel has this camp and two friendlies in March. If he is unable to do so, he must remind himself of those remarks and, if he believes it will benefit his team the most, remove one of them from the starting lineup.
Speaking shortly before Tuchel was scheduled to announce his November squad and following Phil Foden’s double against Borussia Dortmund, Pep Guardiola encouraged the German to do what was best for his team while simultaneously setting the bar high for Foden to continue getting better.
“Thomas is so smart and wise and knows exactly what the national team needs, and I think Thomas knows Phil perfectly,” the city manager stated. “England is so lucky to have a mountain of good players, so in this position there are a lot, and that’s why Phil Foden has to push himself to be better and better and better.”
New Coach, Different Mentality!
Phil Foden may not be able to repeat his heroics for England this week or at the World Cup, but he has reverted to the player he was two seasons ago when he was named Premier League Player of the Season. The ball is in his court under a different manager, and since he is once again playing with a smile on his face, he is also in a different frame of mind than he was during both Euro 2024 and the previous season.
However, he is also playing for a coach in Tuchel who is unfaithful to anyone, possibly with the exception of Kane, and who won’t think twice about disciplining Phil Foden if he doesn’t perform. The Man City player must eventually achieve the same success with England as he has consistently done for his team.
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