Why Rogers could still start for England despite Bellingham getting ‘exactly what he wants’ | OneFootball

We’re firmly into World Cup season now, and equally somehow on day two of everyone apparently agreeing to pretend a FIFA announcement is a ‘leak’ and that nobody is familiar with how squad numbers work.

There’s also some textbook, doom-laden pre-World Cup English exceptionalism and the Daily Express taking the complete and utter p*ss with some Man United numberwang.

Mediawatch is not exactly looking forward to this World Cup, but it’s clear that the arrival of actual games is already urgently needed to cut off the tidal wave of utter guff that is flowing unregulated into Content Bay.

Squad Game

Mediawatch finds it oddly endearing that John ‘No Leaks, Only Whispers’ Cross waited for a more reliable source than FIFA before compiling his version for the Mirror of the story everyone has already written pretending that having a squad number between 1 and 11 = guaranteed starter for your football team here in big 2026.

Fantastic headline on this, by the way.

Now we’re wary of going too tinfoil hat this early in World Cup season but it’s surely no accident Jude Bellingham, the recipient of unflinchingly weird coverage from the UK press (see Mediawatches passim), is singled out here and in a way that clearly implies both greed on his part and simping indulgence on England’s.

Which does seem to be a slightly mad way to describe ‘given the No. 10 shirt he also wore at Euro 2024’. You fools! You’ve caved to his every demand! Now he senses your weakness!

Cross himself knows this is all tish and fipsy, of course. Bellingham is the likely starter for England ahead of Morgan Rogers, but that was the case before the squad numbers were announced and in no way confirms Bellingham’s starting spot for the first or any game. Nor, for that matter, does Marcus Rashford getting the No. 11 shirt ahead of his Barcelona usurper Anthony Gordon.

How do we know Cross knows this? Because he tells us.

But are squad number always even as much as ‘telling’? Or is that mainly when a confident and self-assured young man who simply refuses to play the tabloid media game is ‘handed exactly what he wants’?

So there you go. Squad numbers: certainly telling, unless they aren’t.

Starter for 10

Pretty embarrassing for Alan Shearer, this. As picked up by The Sun:

Uh-oh. We can see where this is heading, can’t we?

Oh, Alan. Alan, Alan, Alan. Al. Mate. Have you not seen the squad numbers?

The Sun have seen them, of course, helpfully pointing out that actually it would still be perfectly legal for Tuchel to still pick Rogers ‘despite what the squad numbers might say’.

Whoa, there. The starting XI doesn’t just have to be the numbers 1 to 11? When did this come in?

We do adore the idea – apparently unanimously and collectively agreed upon by the fourth estate – of squad numbers being some new-fangled concept we’ve all got to quickly get our heads around rather than something that has been the norm for quite literally decades.

But wait. How did you see those squad numbers again, though, lads?

Ah, yes, that’s right. That’s how you’ve all also apparently agreed to describe ‘published in full by FIFA on the day they said they would publish them’.

English exceptionalism

Nothing really wrong with the story from the Mirror here, referring back to the weather delays at the Club World Cup a year ago and noting that FIFA will once again seek to delay rather than rearrange games affected by thunderstorms due to the sheer scale of the logistical nightmare a postponement would cause to the schedule of a tournament that contains precisely zero wriggle room.

Now one might argue that the most interesting lines of enquiry they involve some consideration of the whys and wherefores that have led us to a World Cup being played in a part of the world and at a time of the year when extreme heat and thunderstorms are likely to have an impact on matches.

Or, indeed, why we have a massive tournament with absolutely no tiny crack of spare capacity to squeeze games into a jam-packed schedule after another jam-packed season of club football that finished barely a week ago.

But why bother with any of that awkwardness when you can instead just present these potential delays as a uniquely English problem.

It’s true. England matches could face HUGE delays if thunderstorms hit. You know who else’s matches could face HUGE delays if thunderstorms hit? Everyone. Everyone’s matches could face HUGE delays if thunderstorms hit.

Numberwang

Mediawatch has had its fun with some Arsenal-based number chicanery this week, but turns out that was nothing. We needed the Express and Man United to get the real nonsense.

First of all, it needs stating that almost nothing in the article below that headline is new. The FIFA club benefits programme that compensates clubs while their players are away on international duty is not new, and nor is the £263m figure for this year’s World Cup contained in that headline.

What is new here is the way that headline doesn’t just nudge-nudge hint but flat-out says United specifically are set for ‘huge £263m boost’.

That is just complete bollocks. There is no ‘technically true’ chicanery in play here. It’s just a lie. And the Express know it’s a lie, because as early as the intro it’s changed.

As with the thunderstorms and England, or ‘anti-Arsenal laws’, even here there is still some daft exceptionalism at play because do you know who else gets ‘a share of a £263.6million FIFA pot’? Absolutely every club who has any player involved in the World Cup.

This is not a Man United story unless you specifically decide to make it look like a Man United story. And then just pretend that they’re getting all that lovely cash so you can get some lovely clicks.

We don’t yet know precisely how much of that cash Manchester United will be getting, but the Express do offer some assistance.

It can indeed be used to ‘broadly estimate how much United stand to earn this summer’. Which is interesting, because the Express then go on to… not in fact do that.

Perhaps because ‘about three-and-a-half million quid’ is roughly where such a fag-packet-scribbled broad estimate would land and that, while definitely something, is not quite as exciting as a ‘huge £263m boost’.