Have England ever had this many prolific attacking players to choose from?

When four of the best club teams in Europe faced off in the Champions League quarter-finals earlier this month, it could have been argued that, for each one, their player of the season so far is English.

For Manchester City, Phil Foden has taken on the mantle of their ‘go-to’ attacker, with Erling Haaland struggling for goals (only two in his last nine for club and country) and Kevin De Bruyne a little below his mercurial best. At Bayern Munich, Harry Kane has enjoyed a stellar, record-breaking debut campaign, ditto Jude Bellingham with Real Madrid, while at Arsenal, you could make a strong case for either Declan Rice or Bukayo Saka.

Throw in the tremendous form of Ollie Watkins at Aston Villa and the remarkable numbers being produced by Cole Palmer since last summer’s transfer from 2022-23 treble winners City to Chelsea and a picture begins to form of this being a… no, we’re not going to say the two ‘G’ words. Let’s just say platinum age group. Or something like that.

The players named above have scored a combined 151 goals this season. Take those numbers to the European Championship kicking off in Germany in June and England will not only win the tournament, they will be hailed as the greatest football team to have ever lived.

And that is without even mentioning the likes of Anthony Gordon, Jack Grealish, Ivan Toney, Jarrod Bowen and Marcus Rashford. No wonder manager Gareth Southgate wants to take a squad of 26, not the traditional 23.

But are these huge numbers being put up by England’s attacking players unusual, or are there prolific options every season and they just don’t translate to tournament football?

We have crunched the numbers from the seasons leading up to England’s recent World Cups and European Championships to see how the current crop compare.

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Euro 2024

• 323 combined appearances, 254 G+A (goals and assists)
• Average of 0.79 G+A per 90 minutes per player

It’s coming home.

Prolific numbers almost across the board, with the main differences from previous tournaments being Kane’s otherworldly stats of 53 goals and assists in 41 appearances in all competitions, and also players who may only be backups at the Euros, such as Watkins and Palmer, averaging almost a goal or assist every game.

Saka’s goalscoring numbers are the best of his career to date. Ditto Foden, ditto Bellingham, ditto Gordon.

Palmer, the joint-top scorer in the Premier League, has got most of his 20 league goals from a right-forward position (according to respected data website Transfermarkt) but is actually more prolific as a central attacking midfielder, with 10 in 12 appearances in that role.

Watkins has scored 19 goals in the Premier League (third in the list behind Palmer and Haaland) and added 12 assists (the best record in the league).

As for the selection of the eight attackers, Maddison, who pretty much stinks the list out with his tally of only four goals and seven assists in an injury-hit debut season for Tottenham Hotspur, seems the more likely pick as a backup to Bellingham.

Gordon appears to have a good chance of being selected as a backup option at left forward. He has 11 goals and nine assists this season for Newcastle, all in the Premier League, but Toney, Grealish, Rashford, Bowen et cetera are in the mix, too.

All of which gives Southgate the best kind of headache.

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World Cup 2022

• 158 combined appearances, 77 G+A
• Average of 0.49 G+A per 90 per player

To make the seasons comparable, we have picked the eight foremost attacking players selected for each recent major tournament. Where there were more than eight attackers (ie, strikers, wide forwards and attacking midfielders), we have narrowed it down to the eight who got the most game time in the tournament concerned (Maddison didn’t play a single minute at Qatar 2022, for example).

And again, to compare fairly in terms of player profiles from each squad, we are just looking at goals and assists in all competitions, with apologies to data extremists.

Here are the eight from England’s run-in to the 2022 World Cup quarter-finals, featuring probably only four who are guaranteed to go to Germany this summer, just 18 months on.

Of course, with that World Cup being played in the European winter rather than its usual summer slot, these numbers are from early August to mid-November. Kane’s goalscoring sticks out but is nowhere near the rate he scored at either last season (30 goals in the Premier League) or this one.

Grealish’s record of just one goal or assist in 18 appearances is the worst of any of the lists in this article, while elsewhere, Saka, Foden and Bellingham are all in decent form (the latter was still at Borussia Dortmund and had scored four goals in five Champions League group-stage games) but, again, nowhere near this season’s figures.

Goals weren’t a problem in Qatar — England scored 13 in five matches (although almost half of these were against Iran in their first group fixture) and finished as the third-top-scorers at the tournament, behind only runners-up France (16) and winners Argentina (15), who both played two more games.

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Euro 2020

• 372 appearances, 196 G+A
• Average of 0.53 G+A per 90 minutes per player

Ah, the summer of 2021. Good times.

It had been a hugely truncated campaign going into these delayed-by-a-year Euros, with a horrible club season riddled by the pandemic played out in empty stadiums, although a few fans made it in for the final at Wembley apparently, you might remember.

Southgate’s attackers made the most combined appearances of any squad on our lists, but fatigue wasn’t an issue at the tournament, with England going all the way to the final.

Kane, Raheem Sterling and Rashford were the most prolific players during the 2021-22 season leading up to the Euros, although again Kane wasn’t as clinical in front of goal as in other years; in fact, 17 in 37 Premier League appearances was his worst goals-per-game ratio since breaking into the Spurs team in 2014.

Dominic Calvert-Lewin scored 16 goals in 33 league matches to break into the squad. Saka only scored five times and laid on three assists in 32 league appearances, while Grealish’s 10 assists and seven goals in 27 matches for Villa saw him become that summer’s ‘clamour’ player.

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World Cup 2018

• 354 appearances, 196 G+A
• Average of 0.56 G+A per 90 minutes per player

The highest average goals-plus-assists from previous tournaments so far, but only by a fraction, with the numbers for 2022, 2020 and 2018 all being very similar.

Kane had enjoyed a magnificent season, with 41 goals in 48 appearances in all competitions; including 30 in the Premier League, plus seven in seven matches in the Champions League. Sterling averaged just under a goal or assist per game for City, while Dele Alli’s output of 14 goals and 16 assists for Tottenham was incredibly impressive from attacking midfield in what remains his last great season.

Danny Welbeck (who was then at Arsenal) and Ruben Loftus-Cheek bring the average down a tad. The latter snuck into the squad on the back of a good loan stint at Crystal Palace (from Chelsea), where he only played 1,875 minutes in the league.

Welbeck only scored five goals in 28 Premier League games but Southgate’s forward line options were more limited than they are now.

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Euro 2016

• 315 appearances, 162 G+A
• Average of 0.51 G+A per 90 minutes per player

Again, a strikingly similar number of average goals and assists from England’s forward line going into the European Championship in France, where they were managed by *checks notes* Roy Hodgson.

Rashford started this 2015-16 season playing under-23 football but ended it at the Euros aged just 18 after a breakthrough year.

Overall, this was a young attack, with a 22-year-old Kane having just finished his second full season at Spurs, and proved he wasn’t a one-season wonder with 25 league goals, while Alli was only 20 and Sterling 21.

Jamie Vardy had just won the Premier League title with Leicester City, providing 24 goals and eight assists in the league, while Liverpool duo Daniel Sturridge and Adam Lallana also made the squad.

The squad numbers are decent, albeit Wayne Rooney was seriously on the wane (pun intended) having only scored eight goals in 28 league games, his worst return since leaving Everton in 2004.

Anyway, it meant absolutely s*d-all at the tournament, as England put Kane on corners and scored just four times in four miserable games and were sent home by Iceland, a country with a slightly bigger population than Leicester (or Cleveland, Ohio).

We can see that the average figures for the past four tournaments are very similar, ranging from 0.48 to 0.55 goals and assists per 90 minutes from the squad’s eight primary attackers.

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World Cup 2006

• 331 appearances, 168 G+A
• Average of 0.51 G+A per 90 minutes per player

OK, there is a clear pattern for their last four tournaments, so let’s skip Euro 2012 and head back to the golden generation and see how Southgate’s current squad compare with the last era when England were expected to compete for trophies.

Sven-Goran Eriksson took no fewer than 10 attack-minded players to the previous major tournament held in Germany, the 2006 World Cup.

To compare fairly, we’ll leave Theo Walcott out because, well, he hadn’t made his Arsenal debut then, having joined from Southampton in January that year and was less likely to kick a ball at the tournament than Victoria Beckham. Stewart Downing also went, but had missed much of the season for Middlesbrough through injury and only made a couple of substitute appearances.

This was prime Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard territory and the pair both had great seasons for Liverpool and Chelsea respectively, with 43 goals between them from midfield.

Up front, a young Rooney had scored 19 times for Manchester United, while Michael Owen had played only 11 times for Newcastle due to injury, rushed back for the tournament (he later admitted he shouldn’t have been picked), and promptly suffered an ACL knee injury in the final group game against Sweden.

Despite the plethora of options at Eriksson’s disposal, England laboured to 1-0 wins over Paraguay and Ecuador, and needed two late goals to beat Trinidad & Tobago, 2-0, before failing to score in defeat against Portugal in the quarters (not helped by Rooney’s red card), showing that a coherent attacking plan is more important than the individuals available.

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Euro 2004

• 355 appearances, 153 G+A
• Average of 0.43 G+A per 90 minutes per player

It was a similar story two years earlier in Portugal.

The most prolific goalscorer in England’s squad was Owen, who had a one-in-two ratio for Liverpool. There were ample goals from midfield that season (15 for Lampard, 14 for Paul Scholes), albeit Gerrard endured one of the worst goalscoring seasons of his career with just four in 34 league appearances and six in 47 games in all competitions.

Gerrard’s numbers are boosted by 17 assists, the same number provided by David Beckham at Real Madrid.

But the backup striker options are sparse compared to the current generation, with Emile Heskey (never a prolific scorer) netting 12 in 47 in his final season at Liverpool, while Darius Vassell scored 10 in 39 for Villa.

Rooney’s numbers are low from his second (and last) season at Everton, but he was just a kid and went on to have an outstanding tournament before it was ended by injury in the quarter-final loss to Portugal.

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So if this year’s attackers have far more end-product than any of England’s recent tournament squads (who have reached a final and a semi-final in the past three tournaments) and comfortably beat the ‘Golden Generation’ of the mid-2000s, how on earth does Southgate line them up in Germany to make the most of several players who are in the form of their careers?

Even with Palmer’s outstanding numbers, it is hard to see how he displaces either of the two players who line up in his position: Bellingham as a No 10 or Saka as a right-sided forward.

Saka may have looked leggy of late, but his figures are the best of his career and he has the trust of Southgate, having performed at a high level for his country for three years now. Would Southgate push Bellingham back into the No 8 role in midfield to make way for Palmer? His managerial history with England suggests not.

Watkins? Again, he is not going to take Kane’s place, and the alternative would probably be to push Kane into a deeper role and, in turn, move Bellingham backwards too.

The form of Watkins, Palmer and Gordon — even Bowen if the West Ham forward is called up (19 goals and nine assists in 41 appearances… yet another player in the form of his career) — gives Southgate options, be it as alternatives if his first choices are injured or tired or, more importantly, in-form bench options.

England performed well at the 2022 World Cup, but Southgate’s hesitance to be proactive with his substitutes in the quarter-final against France, not forcing the issue at 1-1 and only making changes after Olivier Giroud had given the French a 2-1 lead in the 78th minute (Mason Mount, Sterling and Rashford came on between the 79th and 85th minutes, then Grealish replaced defender John Stones in the eighth minute of stoppage time), was a weakness on England’s part.

We know Southgate will not change the formation to accommodate extra attackers — and he is probably right to do so, given his dodgy defence — but if England reach the latter stages of this summer’s tournament and have in-form game-changers on the bench, it may prove the difference.

The numbers certainly suggest he has the luxury of England’s most prolific forward options for a long time.

Over to you, Gareth.

(Top photos: Getty Images)