The Nations League was met with scepticism when it was introduced in 2018, and not every adjustment made to its format since has been an obvious improvement. Yet the competition has fundamentally worked — and it stands as a welcome reminder that football’s administrators occasionally get things right.
The case for it begins with what it replaced. England’s first game after the 2022 World Cup was a 2-1 win away over Italy, and their first after the 2018 World Cup was a 2-1 defeat to Spain. Their first outing after the 2014 tournament was a 1-0 friendly win over Norway — a Norway of Joshua King, Håvard Nordtveit and Tarik Elyounoussi, not the Norway of Erling Haaland, Martin Ødegaard and Antonio Nusa. After the 2010 World Cup it was a 2-1 friendly win over Hungary. The Italy and Spain fixtures had their appeal, but the sense of anticlimax was palpable, and inevitably so: after the maximum-emotion drama of a World Cup, a comedown is the only possible outcome, whether a team returns home with a trophy, a thrilling defeat or an ignominious exit.
That is why the Nations League is such a boon. It is not a meaningless friendly, instantly forgotten amid the paper aeroplanes swooping down from bored crowds at Wembley, and it is not the opening of a qualifying process for some distant tournament. It matters as much as a team decides it matters, which means a manager who wants to experiment can do so without results becoming a crisis. At the same time there is a purpose to winning and a prize at the end of it — even if it sounded a little desperate when Roberto Martínez defended his record as Portugal manager by pointing to Nations League success in 2025. A quick measure of the competition’s standing is how many of its former winners anyone can actually name. In that sense it occupies a similar role to the Carabao Cup: not nothing, but not obviously something either. In the international calendar, it functions as a palate-cleanser.
Saturday’s meeting of England and Spain arrived almost unnoticed, partly because of the breaking news in the Manchester City case. The Premier League had paused, there was some mild relitigation of England’s World Cup exit to Argentina, and then suddenly there was a game at Wembley between England and the world champions that took on a life of its own. In one respect the outcome mirrored England’s defeat by Argentina in Atlanta: England led the reigning world champions by a single goal with 55 minutes played, then collapsed to concede twice. In other ways it was a significant improvement. Two of Spain’s three goals came from individual errors, both of them, oddly, by Manchester City players — which raises the question of how much the previous day’s revelations had been playing on their minds. Harry Kane slipped as he took a penalty that would have made it 3-1 and slammed the ball against the bar. Spain missed chances and their margin of victory could have been greater, but on another day England might easily have won by a couple of goals. Against a team as good as Spain, making it a contest either side could have won — even if Spain shaded it — is an achievement in itself.
Would English football suddenly have been redeemed had Kane converted and England won 3-1? Of course not: the frustrations of the Argentina defeat would still linger. But this was an opportunity for England to move on, and for Thomas Tuchel to begin learning from the mistakes of the semi-final. England may go on to get positive results against Croatia and Czechia and qualify for the quarter-finals next March; they may not. Far more important is that the process of preparation for the 2028 European Championship continues — and that is far easier to do inside a structure of at least semi-competitive matches that are simultaneously less important and more challenging than qualifiers.
That is admittedly the view from a nation like England, for whom qualification for major tournaments can be taken almost as read. The Nations League has helped smaller countries too, because everybody benefits from playing opponents at roughly their own level. Nobody wants the likes of Andorra and Liechtenstein shut out of international competition, but defending desperately to avoid a hammering at the hands of even moderate opposition suits nobody. When smaller teams play each other there is a chance of a proper game, with genuine attacking and defending. And thanks to the structure of Euros qualification, there is a potential route to the tournament through the playoffs, short-cutting for a gifted generation a process that might previously have taken a decade or more of gradual coefficient improvements.
Not every change to the format has been for the better, and the tournament is still treated with a degree of scepticism by some. But the Nations League has worked, and it serves as a welcome reminder that sometimes the people running this sport get it right.