Aside from a sense of manifest destiny, what exactly is Wiegman-ball? | Jonathan Liew | OneFootball

“This is a movie,” Sarina Wiegman said, and as England celebrated their heist in Geneva that sense of unreality seemed to have infused her players too. “Goodness me,” sighed Esme Morgan as she returned to the dressing room after the 2-1 extra-time win over Italy, blowing out her cheeks in relief. Meanwhile, the captain, Leah Williamson, was trying to explain just how England manage to keep going behind but pulling out victories at the very end.

“Whilst there are seconds on the clock, there are seconds that we’re just waiting,” she said. “It’s less ‘if’ and more ‘how’. I don’t know how to explain it, I don’t know how we do it.”

And frankly, this was the sort of victory that defied rational explanation. By the dying minutes of this game Beth Mead was playing in central midfield as part of a double pivot behind Ella Toone and the strike duo of Michelle Agyemang and Aggie Beever-Jones. Lauren Hemp, who started the last World Cup final as a second striker, was now left-back. And England were basically just pumping long balls into the area hoping something would happen. The formation: like, 2-6-2? 3-2-1-4?

In a way, it scarcely mattered. This is after all tournament football, where the usual logic does not always apply, where the result is the result, however you get it. The new plan is no plan. Just go at it. “Everybody’s fighting and everybody wants to win and everybody feels like they can win,” Lucy Bronze said afterwards and frankly her stirring performances in this tournament suggest that ultimately it may be no more complicated than that.

For Wiegman, however, all this represents a certain tectonic shift. When she arrived as England coach in 2021 she was presented not simply as a great leader but a sharp tactician, a coach raised in the Cruyff persuasion, who met the great man at the age of 13 on a television show, who had absorbed his principles of dynamic possession and won Euro 2017 with the Netherlands playing the classic Dutch 4-3-3. Who above all had a philosophy, a defined style of playing.

These days, that style is a little harder to discern. England have switched freely between a back four and a back three, often in the same tournament, sometimes even in the same half. Passing principles have been blooded, adopted and then junked in the face of trouble. So what exactly is the philosophy? Four years into the reign of the most successful coach in the history of English women’s football, what exactly is Wiegman-ball? And how is it possible that days before a European Championship final, we don’t even know the answer?

Wiegman may be a coach of the Dutch school, but perhaps her formative experience as a footballer was playing at a Fifa invitational tournament in China in 1988. There she met the US national team coach Anson Dorrance, who was impressed with the young defensive midfielder and invited her to train at the University of North Carolina the following year.

That year with the Tar Heels opened a world of possibility. “It was a soccer paradise,” she later said. She worked with Dorrance, played with all-time greats such as Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly, trained at world-class facilities, returned to the Netherlands with a creed that would shape her. Creating success in women’s football was not purely a theoretical exercise. It was about building a culture, being professional, showing ambition, exhibiting an elite mentality. Whatever it takes, you do it.

Perhaps in retrospect this helps to explain why so many of Wiegman’s triumphs with England have felt vaguely American in character: that sense of manifest destiny, the superior physicality, a cold confidence in getting the job done, a belief above all that trophies are won through sheer force of will. It is by now no coincidence that England have compiled a litany of major tournament wins undeserved on the simple run of play. Spain in 2022. Colombia and Nigeria in 2023. Sweden and now Italy in 2025: victory as an extension of identity.

And of course the fumble by Laura Giuliani for Agyemang’s opening goal and the crucial late miss by Emma Severini and the extra-time foul by the same player are not mistakes that happen in a vacuum, but mistakes induced by pressure. Perhaps Wiegman’s greatest achievement is to build a culture in which England’s players can navigate their own way through adversity, never get disheartened, never relinquish their desire to take the thing they do not deserve.

This is what sees you through the tough moments, against more limited and tiring opponents. England’s ability to produce a swell of pressure in the closing minutes remains unparalleled. It may well be the closest thing England have to an actual ideology, the “proper England” of which so many in the camp have spoken. “You can never write the English off,” Kelly said afterwards. “I don’t think you’ll find a team in world football with more fight and more resilience,” Bronze said.

The fact that this can be read as deeply disrespectful to the beaten Italians – what, did they simply not fight as hard? – is beside the point. Wiegman’s focus on culture – the underrated skill of binding 23 players for a month – is what gets England through the big moments. England do not lie down. England stay united right until the end. Then some things happen, and it’s best not trying to analyse those too much.

There are of course similarities here with the other great England coach of this era. Gareth Southgate was also a culture guy rather than a tactics guy, a healer rather than a technician, a man whose gift – and it really was a gift – was not to micro-manage or theorise but simply to create the right environment for gifted athletes to thrive for four weeks. To make the chore of international football feel fun. To find the right emotional blend. What is Southgate’s tactical identity? Beyond a weird predilection for playing right-footers at left-back, it’s hard to pin down.

The caveat is that while this is a reliable way of progressing in tournaments, it is an extremely unreliable way of winning tournaments. Teams that are tactically inchoate but blessed with gifted individuals and an unshakeable mentality can win big pots in the absence of a genuinely great alternative. We think of the USA in 2019, Portugal in the men’s European Championship of 2016, arguably England in 2022. Meanwhile England’s habit of grimacing their way through knockout football almost won them the biggest prize of all in 2023, only for Spain to outclass them in the final.

It’s instructive revisiting the postmortem of that match, a spirited and honourable defeat, and yet one in which pretty much nobody in England gear was capable of explaining. But hang on. If victories are all about fight and resilience and spirit and never giving up, then do defeats mean you didn’t try hard enough? That you didn’t want it enough? That you gave up? Of course not.

“If we put the ball in the back of the net, it’s game on,” said Millie Bright. Georgia Stanway thought England were “unlucky”. Wiegman, having watched Mary Earps save Jenni Hermoso’s penalty in the 70th minute, was convinced that the momentum of the game would inevitably lead to a goal. “Now we are going to get to 1-1,” she said afterwards. “But we didn’t.”

Perhaps it was no surprise that, as England shuffle towards their next final, nobody really seems to be able to put their finger on why they lost the last. Doing so, of course, would involve acknowledging England’s technical inferiority, their inability to take and recycle the ball under pressure, the lack of sophisticated passers being produced by the English game, the basic absence of process. Better by far to file it away as a twist of fate, bad luck, a random bounce of the ball, just something that happens.

And if true, then England – one of the best-resourced and most talented squads in world football – have a puncher’s chance of lifting the trophy on Sunday night. Perhaps ultimately this is all they want, all they ever required. The TV ratings will be good either way. Perhaps Wiegman’s description of England’s Euro 2025 as a movie was more apposite than she realised. After all, when you’re watching a movie, you’re not really involved. You’re just sitting there, waiting for the plot to unfold in front of you.

Header image: [Photograph: Molly Darlington/Uefa/Getty Images]