England 's scouting team have barely slept in the build-up to the World Cup knockout rounds, working overnight at St George's Park to ready Thomas Tuchel for the last 32 — and a big chunk of that effort has already gone to waste.
The reason comes down to the sheer size of this tournament. Expanded to 48 teams for the first time, the 2026 World Cup has produced a knockout bracket with far more moving parts than any that came before it.
For England, the permutations heading into the final group game meant preparing for a long list of possible opponents. The moment DR Congo was confirmed, most of that homework was no longer worth anything.
According to Sky Sports News reporter Rob Dorsett, the FA mounted its most complex and thorough scouting mission for any men's major tournament, with a team of analysts working through the night at St George's Park to feed the latest information to Tuchel and his coaching staff.
Normally, the FA would send large numbers of analysts across to the United States to watch England's potential opponents in person.
The scale and spread of a 48-team tournament made that impossible. Dorsett describes it as the most logistically demanding World Cup ever staged.
So the work was done from home. A team of specialists — including some coaches from England's junior sides — studied live World Cup games on television back at the National Football Centre, logging statistics and picking apart defensive and attacking patterns.
Those findings were pulled into a full pre-match report and delivered to Tuchel and assistant Anthony Barry by video link during the build-up to the tie.
The headache was the not knowing. Ahead of the final group game, England could still have finished top, second or third in Group L, and each outcome pointed to a different corner of the draw.
Photo by Justin Setterfield/Getty Images
Finishing top brought Ecuador , Ivory Coast , Cape Verde , Uruguay , Senegal , Algeria or DR Congo into play. Second place opened the door to Colombia or Portugal . Third would have widened the field further still.
England's analysts had to build comprehensive dossiers on at least nine different teams — one detailed report for every side they might realistically draw.
Then the bracket settled. As soon as DR Congo was locked in as the opponent, eight of those nine dossiers became worthless in an instant.
The expanded format is proving box office for supporters. England's scouting department might not be quite so thrilled.
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