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Chelsea dare not lose, West Ham and Leeds play out a survival dress rehearsal, while Phil Foden urgently needs to make an impact Phil Foden made two starts for England over the international break as Thomas Tuchel experimented with how the Manchester City attacking midfielder could be used at the World Cup. He played in a couple of positions but was ineffective in two collectively subpar performances from the Three Lions. It means he has one assist and no goals in his past 22 appearances for club and country in what has been an underwhelming campaign for the 25-year-old. He has dropped below Rayan Cherki in Pep Guardiola’s pecking order and has not completed a full 90 minutes since January. In the Carabao Cup final, Foden was permitted a late cameo, and it feels as if this is the time when he should be making a difference in the final stages of the season. There are still trophies to be played for, even if winning the Premier League title would involve a huge turnaround against Arsenal. This means the FA Cup is the most promising prospect and Foden should be desperate to start and remind everyone of the world-class player he could be, especially against a Liverpool side who often struggle against smart No 10s. The next six weeks could be make or break for Foden’s City and international career, so he must seize every opportunity. WU Manchester City v Liverpool, Saturday 12.45pm (all times BST) Chelsea v Port Vale, Saturday 5.15pm Southampton v Arsenal, Saturday 8pm West Ham v Leeds, Sunday 4.30pm
Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Nick Ames and Jordan Jarrett-Bryan to preview the weekend’s action. Subscribe to The Guardian Football Weekly ► https://www.youtube.com/@FootballWeeklyPodcast?sub_confirmation=1 Chapters: 00:00 - Chapters 00:56 - FA Cup quarter-final preview 01:12 - Where do Slot’s priorities lie? 05:16 - Have Manchester City had a good season? 06:49 - Southampton v Arsenal 10:35 - Would defeat rattle Arsenal? 16:03 - Marc Cucurella comments 21:52 - West Ham v Leeds United 25.43 - Ad break 25:46 - EFL preview 28:26 - Nigel Farage photoshoot at Portman Road 36.49 - Ad break 36:49 - WCL roundup 40:15 - Nick Ames spends time in Kosovo 44:35 - Answering listener correspondence Support the Guardian ► https://support.theguardian.com/ Guardian Football Weekly podcast: Apple ► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/football-weekly/id188674007 Spotify ► https://open.spotify.com/show/6w8qWe0kjgHEHSWDSDGoLW?si=231c666f7f5a4453 Follow Guardian Football Weekly: Instagram ► https://www.instagram.com/guardian_footballweekly/ TikTok ► https://www.tiktok.com/@guardian_footballweekly
Sign up now! Sign up now! Sign up now? Sign up now! The Championship – a league so chaotic it makes a piano falling down some stairs resemble a Zen garden – resumes with an old-fashioned Easter weekend double header. Automatic promotion, playoff places and the drop into the abyss all remain up for grabs, with only beleaguered Sheffield Wednesday’s relegation rubber-stamped as the contenders jockey for position on entering the home straight. Not a Stone Island jacket will go unworn as fans of all 24 clubs proudly get the badge in before heading off to support their teams over a hectic bank holiday schedule. At the top, Frank Lampard’s Coventry City are in the box seat for automatic promotion, with an 11-point cushion between them and Ipswich Town in third. They will fancy their chances of at least maintaining the gap in tomorrow night’s televised Geographically Quite Near Each Other But Not Really A Derby derby against, er, Derby County. With no Good Friday game due to Southampton’s weekend FA Cup appointment with Arsenal, Ipswich will have additional time to de-Farage Portman Road for Monday’s visit of Birmingham. This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
Faye Carruthers is joined by Suzy Wrack, Freddie Cardy and Emma Sanders to discuss the Champions League and Sarina Wiegman’s latest England squad On today’s pod: Arsenal are into the Champions League semi-finals after knocking out Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, while Manchester United couldn’t overcome Bayern Munich as the German champions also progress into the last four. Plus: Sarina Wiegman’s latest England squad, a review of the weekend’s WSL action, and congratulations to Bournemouth for winning the FAWNL Cup for the first time.
Quiz time! Can you identify the British football stadiums pictured in the matchday images below? • This article was amended on 3 April 2026 to correct the spelling of the Wrexham stadium, Cae Ras.
The Lions of Mesopotamia have waited 40 years to return to the World Cup and they have had to do it the hard way If anyone deserves the chance to celebrate Iraq’s return to the World Cup it is Aymen Hussein and not just because the striker scored the winning goal in the final intercontinental playoff against Bolivia on Tuesday. Born and raised in Kirkuk in northern Iraq, a region affected first by war and then by Islamic State, Hussein lost his father in an al-Qaeda attack in 2008. Six years later his brother disappeared and the young footballer was then forced to flee with the remaining members of his family. Football provided Hussein with a way out and hope. Now he has given his country, one that is recovering from recent horrors but still susceptible to the general regional instability as current events show, one of the happiest moments in its recent history.
For examples of how little a team’s form in the World Cup run-in matters in the tournament itself, look no further than the US The last time the United States men’s national team entered into the final stretch of their preparations for a World Cup on home soil, the results were dire. From January through April of 1994, the Americans, who were mostly sequestered in a full-time training camp, played 12 games and won just twice. They even managed to lose to Iceland, who were a total non-factor in global soccer back then. Then, that ’94 team went on to survive the group stage and narrowly lose to eventual champions Brazil, 1-0, in the round of 16. They delivered on expectations in spite of their deflating run-in.
Rival fans have raged after 11 of Mikel Arteta’s players withdrew from action with their countries before the season finale With the benefit of hindsight, Mikel Arteta’s response to a question before Arsenal’s victory over Everton last month about how the forthcoming international break might affect his squad was revealing. “We have really good communication with most of them,” Arteta replied when asked whether he was planning to speak to the various international managers that were expected to call up his players. “We’ll wait and see how everybody is and have those conversations and make the right decisions.” Considering that Arsenal were still pursuing an unprecedented quadruple at the time, was this the most nervous he had ever felt going into an international break? “It’s a period that I don’t enjoy a lot,” admitted Arteta. “Especially when we have 18, 19 players playing. And especially with what happened in our recent history with very important players. But that is part of the calendar and we have to accept that.”
From Algeria to Uzbekistan, our writers and contributors from around the world assess the state of the 48 nations to qualify for the tournament “There’s more talent and potential than in 2022,” Kylian Mbappé said ominously this week after France had beaten Brazil 2-1 despite having Dayot Upamecano sent off after 55 minutes. He may well be right. For the second game of this window, against Colombia, Didier Deschamps changed the entire starting XI but was still able to field an attack of Marcus Thuram, Désiré Doué, Rayan Cherki and Maghnes Akliouche. Doué scored two in a comfortable 3-1 victory. “I’m well aware that there are some very good players that I won’t be bringing because, in my opinion, there are even better ones,” Deschamps said. Marcus Christenson
Roberto Baggio proposed an overhaul of talent pathway in 2011 but it was never acted on and the national team’s approach now is just not working The decline of Italy’s footballing expectations can be read in the headlines that greeted their third consecutive failure to qualify for a men’s World Cup. When the Azzurri lost their playoff against Sweden in November 2017, La Gazzetta dello Sport defined it as “The End” and an “Apocalypse”. After defeat by North Macedonia in 2022, Il Corriere dello Sport saw a country sinking “Into Hell”. On Wednesday both newspapers led coverage of elimination by Bosnia and Herzegovina with a simpler, perhaps sadder, “Tutti A Casa” – Everybody Go Home. What else is there left to say? Italians understood long ago that 2018 was not some aberration but the continuation of a trend, their team having failed to reach the tournament’s knockout stage in 2010 or 2014.
The former England and Tottenham forward has had to be patient to get his chance but he ‘was never going to give up’ “It’s been a long time coming,” Jermain Defoe says on his first day as Woking’s manager. Dressed in a sharp grey suit that he admits he is wearing on the instructions of his mother, Sandra – “I know she’ll be watching this, and she’ll be like: ‘You’ve got to look smart!’” – the former England striker certainly looks the part as he fields questions in the unassuming surroundings of the Cardinal Bar at the Laithwaite Community Stadium. From missing the buzz of playing top‑level football since retiring in 2022 to acknowledging why it is crucial to “earn your stripes” as a manager, Defoe is brutally honest about the task that awaits him at the club that has never made it to the Football League in 139 years of existence. He even jokes that he turned down his former team Tottenham to take over at Woking.
Police investigate chants heard at Barcelona friendly Spain’s coach and justice minister condemn behaviour Lamine Yamal has criticised chants by Spain fans during a friendly against Egypt in Barcelona that police are investigating for Islamophobia and xenophobia. Spain supporters chanted “who doesn’t jump is a Muslim”, prompting Yamal to respond on Instagram. He wrote that the chanting “was aimed at the opposing team and was not something personal against me, but as a Muslim it is still a lack of respect and something intolerable. To those who sing these things: using a religion as a form of mockery on a pitch shows you up as ignorant and racist.”
Manager and team had hit rock bottom, but together they found redemption and are heading to North America A manager down on his luck after a second failure in quick succession, wondering what the future would hold. A national team struggling at the bottom of their qualifying group given a second chance through the vagaries of the Nations League. That national team happens to be the country where the manager made his name, inspiring a team from a town with a population of 50,000 to win the Swedish Cup. So the two get together, doubting manager and doubting country, and somehow, less than six months after the nadir, they are going to the World Cup finals.
Only half of the 26 places appear nailed-on and some players benefited from missing the Uruguay and Japan games Jordan Pickford remains the undisputed No 1. Harry Kane is irreplaceable up front. Declan Rice and Elliot Anderson look certain to start in midfield, nobody has emerged as a realistic challenger to Bukayo Saka on the right and Jude Bellingham’s hopes of grabbing the No 10 spot were done a world of good by other challengers failing to impress against Japan and Uruguay.
Plus: qualifying for the World Cup with no more than two wins, a 20-0 victory and scratching a 34-year itch Mail us with your questions and answers “The Bundesliga table shows Bayern Munich on 70 points with an eye-popping goal difference of +72,” pops Chris Fryer. “Has any club won the league with a greater goal difference than points tally?” Bayern Munich have won 22 and lost one in the Bundesliga this season. That was a 2-1 defeat against Augsburg, which means their 22 victories have produced a goal difference of +73. In other words, their average margin of victory is an absurd 3.32 goals. 0.388 Rangers 1898-99 (Scottish First Division) 0.353 Hearts 1957-58 (Scottish First Division) 0.200 Liverpool 1895-96 (Second Division) 0.176 Ajax 1966-67 (Eredivisie) 0.09 Birmingham 1892-93 (Second Division)
Japan’s goal wasn’t Palmer’s fault and Mainoo couldn’t track back, but Tuchel will now see the scale of what faces him To see a world in a grain of meaningless friendly. It has become a habit to say you don’t learn anything from these games. This isn’t strictly true. You just don’t learn anything new. But it’s all still there, ready to be decoded like a set of sporting tea leaves. On a strangely empty night at Wembley Stadium – also known as “a night at Wembley Stadium” – the opening half-hour of this 1-0 England defeat against Japan was fluffy, formless and free from any real edge. But that half-hour was also hugely telling, packed with echoes, ghosts and patterns. Another March friendly: another note in the never-ending story of England footballdom, an epic poem in 1,080 parts.
The defender, a sole link between the past and present, is focused on nurturing young talent to help her country realise its 50-year plan “Ranking!?” Saki Kumagai says with a laugh. In the afterglow of her team’s Asian Cup triumph in Australia, the veteran Japan defender is asked about where this trophy sits among the many other titles she has won throughout her staggering 17-year career. But she just smiles and shakes her head. “I never compare my titles,” she says. “Yes, I won some trophies in my career. But this team is from a different generation, so [winning] a trophy in this tournament, that was the really impressive thing for me.
Relegation battle has exposed Spurs’ institutional flaws with the stupidity of the interim hire still startling Probably Tim Sherwood put it best, speaking on Sky Sports about the through-the-looking-glass world of Tottenham Hotspur and magic bean relegation remedies. “They need an arm round the shoulder,” Sherwood said. “I’d tell Xavi Simons he’s the new Luka Modric. Obviously he’s not but I’d tell him he was. I’d tell him: ‘Save us from relegation and you can go to Real Madrid next season.’ Obviously he won’t but I’d tell him that.” Sherwood has had a good Tottenham crisis period. “The Premier League has smacked him in the mouth,” was his verdict on Igor Tudor, pre-sacking. While every proper football man will like the sound of this, of the Premier League being large and unassailable, Tudor deserves a little sympathy.
The expansion of this summer’s 48-team tournament mean Tuesday’s games will be the best we see until the round of 16 Sign up for Soccer with Jonathan Wilson here Live in a World Cup host city? Tell us your stories There is always a slightly odd rhythm to the World Cup. The final round of qualifying games is almost invariably more exciting than the early games at the tournament itself, and now with 32 teams making it through the group stage and into the knockout rounds, that is likely to be even more true for the 2026 edition. Those final qualifiers in November were thrilling and meaningful – Troy Parrott’s hat-trick! Scotland scoring two absurdly good goals in the same game! DR Congo beating Nigeria on penalties as bottles rained down from the stands! Honduras failing to score against Costa Rica! – and Tuesday will be too as 12 teams battle for the six remaining slots. But for those not involved in World Cup playoffs, there is an unsatisfying phoniness to the friendlies they must play instead, with experimental line-ups and weary players going through glorified training exercises. While it’s never good to be letting in five goals, neither the USA nor Ghana should be too concerned about the defeats to Belgium or Austria.
Marc Skinner laments City’s advantage after Vivianne Miedema shines and Brighton welcome back Kiko Seike With her hat-trick in Arsenal’s 5-2 win over Tottenham, Alessia Russo took her tally to 25 goal contributions in 31 games this campaign. It is a notable return from a player in her prime, not just in her buildup play, but also her finishing. Arsenal’s attacking dominance – they have scored 18 goals in their past five games – is down to the fact that many of their attacking players are in form. Stina Blackstenius has three goals in her past four games while Caitlin Foord also scored on Saturday, her first appearance since returning from the Asian Cup. Renée Slegers has spoken about the versatility in the type of goals her side produces and the need to be ruthless in both penalty areas. Spurs’ two goals meant an end to Arsenal’s 106-day streak of not conceding in the WSL. While all runs must come to an end, Arsenal still boast the meanest defence in the league. Sophie Downey
Minnows have all but sewn up the Swiss Super League title with seven games to go having been favourites to go down The FC Thun heroes do not hide their amusement and amazement when speaking about what has been an incredible season. They giggle when asked if they could possibly have expected such a scenario. They know that the situation is surreal and illogical. The words “incredible” and “unbelievable” are used frequently. When Thun were promoted in May to the Swiss Super League, they were predicted to struggle. The Berner Zeitung journalist Adrian Horn says: “A lot of pundits identified them as No 1 relegation candidates. Expectations were very low, and fans thought that avoiding relegation would be a major success.”
Rasmus Højlund is back among the goals at Napoli while Jakub Kiwior has helped make Porto solid in defence and Largie Ramazani has given Valencia a creative spark The Dane, like many others, struggled under Ruben Amorim at Old Trafford and was packed off to Naples. He scored on his debut, a 3-1 win over Fiorentina, and has been consistent since, netting 10 goals in 26 games for Serie A’s third-placed team. “Now it’s portrayed as if I’m back and just doing really well,” Højlund, who cost United £72m when they signed him from Atalanta in August 2023, said to Denmark’s TV2 last week. “But inside myself my thoughts are in a completely different place. I’m self-critical. I still want to be even better, more involved in the games and score more goals, but it’s fun to observe how the image of me is constantly changing.”
Players are not covering the distances of old – they are not being lazy but adapting to demands of an arduous campaign There is nothing English football admires more than honest endeavour, which is perhaps a consequence of the league’s origins in the industrial cities of the north and Midlands. “He put in a shift.” “She did her job.” “He gave his all.” The language of football is the language of the pit or the factory floor. All top-level players these days are supremely skilled, but still we demand that they be exhausted by the final whistle, legs leaden with effort, hair soaked with sweat. Which was why it seemed to cause such consternation when Alan Shearer mentioned on Match of the Day last Saturday that Chelsea have run less than their opponents in every Premier League game they have played this season.
The Frenchman, who has been named the best male footballer in the world by the Guardian, has benefitted from PSG’s focus on the team rather than individuals What makes a good player great, and a great player the best? This question has been occupying me since 2014, when the Guardian first asked me to contribute to its inaugural Next Generation feature. My job was to look for a France-based talent born in 1997 who could go on to have a stellar career. After a great deal of research, I narrowed it down from my shortlist of five by asking questions not about the players’ football ability, but about other attributes: resilience, adaptability, decision-making, creativity, work ethic, response to feedback and willingness to learn. Qualities we cannot see, and are harder to measure.
Ousmane Dembélé becomes our seventh winner as he beats Lamine Yamal into second and Vitinha into third on our list of the best players on the planet Premier League dominates list | How every judge voted | Our methodology | The top 100 female players for 2025 2024 edition | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012
The margin may have got smaller but the brilliant Spanish midfielder makes it a hat-trick of No 1 finishes They say the best things come in threes, and Aitana Bonmatí has written herself into the Guardian’s top 100 history as the first player to finish at the top of the tree for a third consecutive year. Last year the majestic midfielder emulated her Barcelona and Spain teammate Alexia Putellas by winning for a second year running, but the 27-year-old has now gone one better, establishing herself once again at the top of the women’s game.
Aitana Bonmatí has been voted the best female player on the planet by our panel of 127 experts ahead of Mariona Caldentey and Alessia Russo 2024 list | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 Meet the judges | See how every judge voted Subscribe to Moving the Goalposts, our free newsletter
From PSG’s Ibrahim Mbaye to Brazil’s next hope, we select some of the most talented players born in 2008. Check the progress of our classes of 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 … and go even further back. Here’s our Premier League class of 2025
We pick the best youngsters at each club born between 1 September 2008 and 31 August 2009, an age band known as first-year scholars. Check the progress of our classes of 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 … and go even further back. Here’s our 2025 world picks
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