For all that Thomas Tuchel has spoken warmly about Trent Alexander-Arnold’s qualities, his actions are all the louder. Opportunities to bring the most esoterically talented right back in the sport into the fold are continually being presented to the England manager. He is not taking them.
As if it were not enough to leave the Real Madrid full back out of a 35-man long list for what amounts to pre-World Cup trials, Tuchel has now gone further down the depth chart to find an alternative for Jarell Quansah, the Bayer Leverkusen utility man whose one appearance for the Three Lions was as a sort of inverted right back whose presence freed Nico O’Reilly to rampage along the left.
It is the sort of player archetype that Ben White can fit quite elegantly into. The Arsenal defender finds himself in an England squad for the first time since the 2022 World Cup, when a bust-up with then assistant manager Steve Holland precipitated his exile from the national team setup. White is a defender of serious quality and versatility, one who theoretically could be a valuable addition to a 26-man squad. Imagine him stepping into the fray behind first choice Reece James, reprising his tandem with Bukayo Saka, darting on the overlap in one play, holding his position as a quasi center back in another. He deserves more than to be a debating point in the wider argument about Alexander-Arnold.
And yet White is also a player who has been wracked by injuries over the past 18 months and whose return to the Arsenal XI after a month out only came on Tuesday against Bayer Leverkusen. The 28-year-old has played just 411 minutes of Premier League football this season, the sort of limited minutes load that might be a disqualifying factor for others. Again, none of this is to denigrate White. It is simply that he does not have the sort of irresistible case to be in the England setup that would justify the continued refusal to take a look at a player with Alexander-Arnold’s skill set.
Now, Tuchel’s defense is that that skill set is so well established that he doesn’t really need to drag Alexander-Arnold over from Madrid to see what he can do. I know very well what Trent can offer us,” he said on Friday. “I played many times against him and suffered when I played with my teams against Liverpool. So I know very well about his strengths and what he can give.”
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That may well be true, but if Tuchel knows just what Alexander-Arnold can bring to any team, which he surely does, he also knows how well the group must be designed to exploit those qualities. Surrounded by Jordan Henderson, Mohamed Salah and Virgil van Dijk, he was one of the two or three greatest creative forces the Premier League saw in the last decade. No one dictates tempo and creates chances from deep like Alexander-Arnold, as Liverpool are finding out to their disappointment this season.
Real Madrid, meanwhile, are clearly benefitting from the 27-year-old’s presence, but it has taken time, all the more so given he has suffered hamstring and thigh issues this season. Time, though, is a commodity that Tuchel did not have even when he took the reins on January 1, 2025. Since then, he has frequently made the point about how few training sessions there are to go around. Now he has a handful before he must pick his 26, several of which will not contain 11 players who promise to be in or around the starting XI against Croatia in the World Cup opener, but who have been afforded rest over the first week of the international break.
There probably isn’t time to tell Elliot Anderson where to be when Alexander-Arnold moves into midfield, to establish whether Ezri Konsa needs to be preferred to John Stones on the right side of defense because he has the requisite recovery pace, to build some automatisms with Bukayo Saka and Cole Palmer.
If you can’t get Alexander-Arnold at the peak of his attacking qualities, then you find yourself with a player whose national team boss said last year must “take the defensive part [of his game] very, very seriously.” A manager like Tuchel knows how he wants to approach knockout football, and that is partly going to be through mitigating risks without the ball. Alexander-Arnold could be as excellent as he was for an hour in the 2022 Champions League final and then find himself caught napping by this year’s Vinicius Junior. In an instant, the project to end 60 years of hunting would unravel.
And in the end, it is not as if the options are Alexander-Arnold or scrubs. The Real Madrid man has a compelling case to be the best fullback in the world, but so does James, almost the ball-playing force that Alexander-Arnold is, but also strong enough to hold down a flank when required (and fit). These aren’t quite the days where you could name a full XI of English right backs, but Tino Livramento, Djed Spence and White are all more than adequate options to cover at least one position in the squad.
That is what Tuchel has to be after in his squad. As he himself regularly notes, his task is not to pick the 26 most talented players eligible to play for England and to engineer a team out of them. If he were, Alexander-Arnold would be in the squad in a heartbeat. It’s just that it would then require an awful lot of tinkering to get the best version of this player and of those around him. There isn’t the time and, given the alternatives, frankly there isn’t the need.
