You can tell from the clothes we're wearing, this picture was taken at a winter Wembley game (not at the World Cup). And it was a women's International - which is a whole other topic.
England beat Croatia 4-2 and the country got ahead of itself; a few days later they drew 0-0 with Ghana, and the same country lost its nerve. Both responses miss the point, because both read the scoreline instead of the lesson beneath it.
A 4-2 flatters you: everything clicks, the chances go in, and you walk away convinced the plan was sound, having learned almost nothing, because nothing pushed back. The goalless draw is the more honest result, because Ghana set up specifically to deny England, the plan stopped working, and Tuchel's side had to find another way. That's not a crisis so much as information.
In sport as in business you need a plan, but you also need to allow that plan to be challenged by reality. You need to let the market decide if you go all the way to the final or if you deserve to go out in the group phase. If you don’t do this, you surround yourself in delusion. You’ll find this out later when you're not in such a good place to do anything about it (or worse, you’ll continue not believing it).
The commentary keeps treating the comfortable result as the truthful one, when it almost never is. A performance where everything goes your way tells you very little, because the conditions were generous. The one that makes you uncomfortable, where the opponent has done their homework and shut down the thing you do best, is the one that actually shows you where your gaps are. The scoreline didn't change who England are; it changed how much they now know about themselves (and how teams are likely to set themselves up to frustrate England, stop them playing their game and stop them winning).
I've lived both versions of this in business, and the pattern holds. The quarter where everything works teaches you to be complacent, while the one where the model creaks, where a customer you'd counted on goes quiet or a channel that always delivered suddenly doesn't, is the one you actually grow from, provided you read it as information rather than indictment. Of the three companies I built, the one that failed taught me more than the two I sold. The setbacks weren't a detour from the work; they were the work.
The harder question, in sport and in business, is what separates the people who use that information from the ones who absorb the blow and carry on as before. England doesn't lack talent, and neither do most struggling businesses; what decides it is psychology, and that's exactly what we sat down to pull apart.
🚨 Watch This Week
Before the opening game I sat down with Dr Claire-Marie Roberts and Megan Hession for the first episode of my RoundTable, to work through the question this whole tournament keeps raising: why do talented, well-prepared teams fall short at the exact moment it’s meant to count the most?
We didn't treat it as a football question. The thing that decides it in sport is the same thing that decides whether a founder holds their nerve in a fundraise, a launch, or a quarter going sideways. Talent gets you into the room. What you do when the pressure lands is a separate skill, and it's a trainable one.
✍🏻 What I've Been Writing on LinkedIn
A few things I put out on LinkedIn this week, if you want more than just the headline:
On the psychology Tuchel is using with England. "Be calm. Be courageous. Don't be scared." That was the message to the squad, and it's more deliberate than it sounds. I wrote about why clearing the negative voice out of the room is so often what separates a side that wins from one that freezes, and why founders need exactly the same discipline.
💡Read about it on LinkedIn
Everyone's asking how to invest in AI. Almost nobody's asking the better question. Amazon, Alphabet and Meta have more than doubled their corporate debt to fund it, and index funds are being forced to buy in at almost any price. The question I think founders should be asking isn't "how do I make my business AI". It's what $14 trillion of AI spending does to the market they're already in.
💡Read about it on LinkedIn
Only 1 in 4 young people in the UK think they have a real shot at the future they want. Most people read that as a social crisis. I read it as the biggest unmet market in entrepreneurship in decades. When people lose faith in the standard route, they don't lose the ambition. They go looking for a different one.