Cristiano Ronaldo exhales raggedly. His face, though trying to maintain inscrutability, betrays his nerves. This isn’t the square-jawed, 41-year-old with almost 1,000 career goals. It’s the 2006 World Cup quarterfinals and he is just 21. Not for the last time, his country’s dreams rest on his shoulders. He places the ball on the spot, takes his run up and fires into the net. Portugal wins the penalty shootout and advances to the semifinal.

Meanwhile, England, among the bookmakers’ pre-tournament favorites, are going home at the quarterfinals. Again.

While the tournament as a whole had been uninspiring from England, they did not play badly under the circumstances on a punishingly humid July evening in Gelsenkirchen, Germany. David Beckham was lost to injury early in the second half, while Wayne Rooney was red-carded for stomping on Ricardo Carvalho, leaving his side to battle on with a man down for an hour.

Ultimately, and for the fourth time in 10 years, England came undone by the nerve-shredding showdown of a penalty-kick shootout at a major tournament.

As Ronaldo celebrates, the cameras cut to the England players. Several have collapsed to the turf in exhausted despair. Among them is Steven Gerrard, the comic-book Captain Fantastic who dragged Liverpool to an implausible Champions League a year earlier. Nearby are Frank Lampard and John Terry, bona fide Chelsea icons who have just secured back-to-back Premier League titles. There’s Rooney, part matador, part bull, a striker who would end his career as Manchester United’s all-time leading goalscorer. And, of course, Beckham, a pop culture icon and one of the game’s best-ever passers.

These players and more formed England’s “Golden Generation,” perhaps the finest collection of soccer stars the country had ever produced at one time. And yet, an underwhelming quarterfinal exit would be as far as they would ever go at international level. The star-studded team photo shared years later by thousands of engagement baiters on social media asking, How did this team never win anything??

Twenty years on, England faces clear parallels. The current generation has gone farther than its predecessors could, making the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup before back-to-back finals in the European Championship. But farther only goes so far.

There is clamor for the Golden Generation 2.0—among them Bayern Munich goal addict Harry Kane, Arsenal midfield engine Declan Rice and Real Madrid Galáctico Jude Bellingham—to finally deliver a trophy. To bring football home and to lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

From the 1966 Triumph to EPL Stardom

England has a curious relationship with the World Cup. The nation that codified and popularized the world’s favorite sport didn’t bother to enter the first three editions, and when it finally deigned to send a team to Brazil in 1950, it didn’t take preparations seriously and suffered a humiliating 1–0 defeat to the United States.

World Cup victory on home soil in 1966 remains the only time the England men’s national team has lifted any major trophy. France, by contrast, has two World Cups and two Euros. Italy four and two. Germany four and three. In the decades since ’66, England’s performances oscillated between glorious and abject failure.

At its outset, the Golden Generation looked like it might break England out of the cycle of disappointment. Invigorated by an influx of money and foreign talent into the rapidly ascending Premier League throughout the ’90s, a new crop of homegrown stars emerged able to mix it up physically and technically with the best in the world.

“When you look back and consider the players,” says Marcus Speller, author, broadcaster and host of the Football Ramble podcast, “which manager wouldn’t want Rio Ferdinand, Sol Campbell, Ashley Cole, Gary Neville, David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Michael Owen, Wayne Rooney? It’s just ridiculous.” 

In 2001, the English Football Association appointed Sven-Göran Eriksson as manager. The urbane Swede, who had won titles in Italy and Portugal, was seen as a coup for England, having even been touted as a potential successor to the great Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United.

The Sven era got off to a perfect start, with the most famous victory of the first few months of his tenure coming as the Three Lions beat archrival Germany, 5–1, in Munich, as soon-to-be-crowned Ballon d’Or winner Owen scored a hat trick. It was an unprecedented result against a team that had only ever lost once at home in World Cup qualifying matches.

“That felt euphoric,” Speller says. “Like the shackles were off and Germany were no longer this team to fear.”

England secured its place at the World Cup with a spectacular last-minute Beckham free kick against Greece. It is a goal still celebrated as one of the finest in the national team’s history, but the fact it remains so lauded tells its own story of an absence of truly great moments. 

At the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea, England performed well, beating Argentina with a Beckham penalty on the way to a 2–1 quarterfinal exit to Brazil. Though Brazil would win the tournament, it felt like a missed opportunity for the English, after Ronaldinho—the scorer of Brazil’s winner—was sent off with over 30 minutes still to play.

“It’s probably the most gutted I’ve ever been after an England elimination,” Speller says. “Brazil were reduced to 10 men and they weren’t really doing much. It was a classic England bottle job. There was no urgency. Nothing really happened in that second half.

“England just had to create something. It was unbelievably flat.”

The kicker was that had England progressed, it would have faced Turkey in the semis, before a rematch with Germany in the final less than a year on from the 5–1 win.

Two summers later, the Three Lions had higher expectations in Portugal for the Euros, with their 18-year-old secret weapon Rooney spearheading the attack. 

He tore through the group stage, scoring four goals against Croatia and Switzerland, as well as nutmegging the legendary Zinedine Zidane against France. Eriksson later said, “I don’t remember anyone making such an impact on a tournament since Pelé in the 1958 World Cup.”

However, that was as good as it got. Facing host Portugal in the quarterfinals, Rooney was withdrawn in the first half with a broken metatarsal and the Golden Generation went out on penalties after a pulsating 2–2 draw. Adding to the frustration of what might have been, several of the major powers flopped that summer with Greece, a 150–1 outsider, lifting the trophy.

If 2002 and 2004 had shown promise, the 2006 World Cup had no visible silver lining. As England lost to Portugal on penalties once more, it marked the third consecutive quarterfinal defeat at a major tournament. 

Star names underperformed in ’06 and fitness was clearly an issue. Rooney, who had broken another metatarsal just six weeks before the tournament, was rushed back early to his and the team’s detriment. Meanwhile, Rooney’s strike partner, Owen, tore his ACL in the first minute of the group stage match with Sweden.

Lessons from the past, particularly around psychology, had not been learned. It is hard to overstate the strength of the hold penalties had on the national consciousness. Almost nothing summed up the era more. Defeat by penalty shootout had become as culturally English as queuing and tea.

While reports say penalties had been practiced in the camp ahead of the 2006 World Cup, there was a prevailing attitude that the shootout—if it came down to it—was simply a lottery that couldn’t really be prepared for.

Defeat, especially in shootouts, became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as visibly anxious players wrestled with what is as much a mental battle as a technical one.

“England’s failures in penalty shootouts obviously affected the players. By that point, the fear of penalties had seeped into English football culture. Everyone expected the worst,” Speller says.

Another issue surrounding the team since 2004 had been team selection. Eriksson, overcome by the talent at his disposal, struggled to find a system into which he could shoehorn his best players—particularly the similarly swashbuckling attacking midfield threats of Gerrard and Lampard.

“There was a tendency to bow to media pressure in terms of selecting certain players even when the system clearly wasn’t working. Most people could see that the midfield combination didn’t function properly,” Speller says.

“I remember discussions at the time where people were saying things like, ‘one stays, one goes’—meaning one midfielder holds while the other attacks. This was 2004, not 1954. Can you imagine that kind of tactical discussion happening in Portugal, Germany or Spain at the time?”

A vicious tabloid press, at the height of the paparazzi era, added to an environment which made it easy for the Three Lions to fail to live up to their billing.

As Eriksson stepped down as manager, he pleaded with the assembled media of Rooney in particular, “Don't kill him, I beg you.”

Any hope of an Indian summer for the rapidly aging Golden Generation was eviscerated by the disastrous tenures of successive managers Steve McClaren, Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson.

Gerrard and Lampard retired from international football after Brazil 2014 with the Three Lions finishing bottom of their group. The epilogue of a story that had promised so much came in the form of a dismal 0–0 draw with Costa Rica, after which Hodgson, not reading the room, told the media: “I don't think I could ask for a much better performance." 

Rooney, the last man standing from the Golden Generation, stayed on longer— his final tournament game came as England reached its nadir in a 2–1 defeat to Iceland at Euro 2016.

The Gareth Southgate Effect

Gareth Southgate was an unlikely savior for English football at its lowest ebb. The former defender, who took charge of the national team in 2016, had little top-level managerial experience and initially made it clear that he did not actually want the job. However, armed with an emerging group of young talent and a shrewd understanding of the importance of psychology, Southgate became the guardian of a new era. 

Reaching the semifinal at the 2018 World Cup restored hope. England won two knockout stage games in Russia that summer—as many as Eriksson’s side had managed across three tournaments. 

Crucially for the national psyche, Southgate, who himself had missed England's most infamous penalty against Germany in the 1996 Euro semifinals, led his team to a shootout victory against Colombia in the last 16. After five consecutive penalty shootout defeats at major tournaments, it was a moment of catharsis. 

“Penalties were a huge focus at the end of every training session,” says Phil Jones, a former Manchester United defender who made 27 appearances for England and was part of the 2018 squad. “I would never normally practice penalties, but we were made to.

“Every single person knew that if it was coming down to you, you knew where you were going. And it absolutely worked. Mentally, we were prepared to go all the way.”

At Euro 2020, Southgate’s England went one step further, reaching the final only to lose to Italy in yet another penalty shootout. The curse, it seemed, had not fully lifted. But the mood had changed.

Stars like Kane, goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and Arsenal winger Bukayo Saka actually looked like they enjoyed playing for England in sharp contrast to the Golden Generation. 

“It was night and day,” Speller says. “Southgate did an enormous amount of work to break down the negativity. You could see that need to achieve feeling.”

“Southgate is a brilliant man-manager,” adds Jones, who received his first call into the England team in 2011. “I've seen it first-hand. The unity in the squad, the togetherness, was completely different to before. 

“When I first got into the squad, we used to walk down for breakfast and you would have your little cliques and your tables who'd sit together and there was no real communication with everyone else. You went back to your room, you did your own thing.

“But then you fast forward five years, and the difference was incredible. We're in such a good place and that's a testament to what Gareth did.”

Despite the positives, silverware remained just out of reach. England would lose to France in the last eight of the 2022 World Cup, and then stuttered to the final at the 2024 Euros before coming up short against Spain, as familiar questions arose over how to stuff all the attacking talent into one lineup.

Southgate left England as its best manager of modern times with a squad most would envy and a sense of identity rebuilt, but with no medals to show for it.

Hyper-aware of repeating the missed opportunities of the past, England has bet on Champions League-winning manager Thomas Tuchel to lead the way at the 2026 World Cup.

A laser-focused German coach who prioritizes system over stars, the hope is that his tactical acumen is the missing ingredient for England, once again among the tournament favorites.

Winning this summer is the goal, but 2026 is unlikely to be the last roll of the dice. While the Golden Generation was special in terms of its concentration of superstars, England produces elite players with more regularity now. 

“In the number 10 position alone you’ve got Cole Palmer, Phil Foden, Morgan Rogers, Jude Bellingham,” says Jones. “On paper, England has got one of the best teams in the world. There is absolutely no getting away from that. Whether they go all the way is down to those fine details in the big moments.”

But as long as they don't win, old ghosts will continue to haunt the Three Lions.

“I know we say every single tournament that this could be the one where England do get over the line, but I feel like they've got one hell of a chance,” Jones says. 

Adds Speller: “Expectations are high, but they’re high for good reason. It would be ridiculous to pretend they’re not contenders.” 

If it can finally harness those expectations, this generation may yet prove golden.

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