Germany

What Nagelsmann has assembled is a layered reset rather than a clean break — neither the 2014 winners nor a wholesale youth revolution, but a side built in three distinct strata laid one upon another. At the base, Manuel Neuer, recalled from international retirement, stands as the lone surviving bridge to the fourth star, the only man in the squad who lifted the trophy in Rio. Above him sit the survivors of the post-2014 middle generation that carried the team through the lean years — Joshua Kimmich, Antonio Rüdiger, Leon Goretzka, Leroy Sané, Kai Havertz — players old enough to remember the humiliations first-hand. And resting on top, bearing more of the weight with each passing month, the new architecture: Jamal Musiala and Florian Wirtz as the twin creative engines, with Aleksandar Pavlović, Nathaniel Brown, Felix Nmecha and the freshly summoned Assan Ouédraogo seeded in around them.

The churn since Qatar is real and it is generational, a changing of the guard rather than a refresh. Toni Kroos has retired into punditry, Thomas Müller has gone to Major League Soccer, Ilkay Gündoğan has drifted out of the picture — the entire passing intelligence of the old order, gone in a single cycle; Matthias Ginter did not make the twenty-six; and Marc-André ter Stegen's injury reopened a goalkeeping succession that, by a route nobody would have drawn eighteen months ago, led all the way back to Neuer. The team remains emotionally tethered to 2014 because Neuer is in it, but the football itself has moved decisively on: it now runs through Musiala's carrying and Wirtz's craft and the hybrid right-back-into-midfield role Kimmich has made his own, not through a Kroos metronome that no longer exists to set the beat.

Measured against the side that limped out of Doha, the continuity is almost nominal — a handful of names, no more, survive as genuine first choices. The creative burden has shifted wholesale onto two players who were boys when Germany last went out in the group; the goalkeeper is a returning forty-year-old who has not appeared for his country since that extra-time night in Stuttgart; the defence is organised around Tah and Schlotterbeck rather than the veterans the public still pictures. This is a team labouring to make the last two World Cups read as a closed crisis rather than a settled habit, and the uncomfortable truth beneath the optimism is that it has not yet been asked the question at a World Cup, where the old anxieties were born and where, for now, they still live undisturbed.

Nagelsmann took perhaps the most unlikely route imaginable to a job of this size. A knee injury ended his playing career at twenty before it had properly begun, so he poured the whole of himself into coaching, and rose at a speed the German game had never seen: the youngest manager in Bundesliga history at Hoffenheim in 2016, where he kept a small club up and then carried it into the Champions League; a Champions League semi-final at RB Leipzig; then a record fee to take him to Bayern Munich in 2021, where he won the title in his first season before an abrupt and slightly mysterious dismissal in March 2023. The DFB hired him that September to revive a wounded institution before a home European Championship, and Euro 2024 — a swaggering, reconnecting run halted only by Spain in extra time — earned him an extension through Euro 2028. That extension reframes everything: 2026 is not a one-tournament audition with the axe poised, but the first World Cup proof point in a longer rebuild the entire federation has staked itself on. If it fails, it fails as a federation's bet, not merely as a manager's.

The lazy shorthand — flexible pressing coach, positional-play tinkerer, early adopter of aggressive structures — is accurate enough and far too generic to be of use. The Germany-specific version is narrower and more revealing: he is trying to make the national team urgent again without tipping it back into the transitional chaos that the post-2014 sides kept sliding into. His public voice runs in two registers. In squad-announcement mode he is expansive, generous, all trust and warmth; in match mode he turns technical and guarded, and after the win over the United States he was pointed about the work still outstanding — positional adjustment under heavy pressure, sharper occupation of the final third, and above all a smarter middle gear between pressing high and dropping off in the North American heat, where, as he put it, a side cannot attack for ninety minutes and a half-hearted press is worse than a disciplined retreat. His selection calls disclose the man more plainly than any interview: Neuer's tournament aura over Baumann's qualifying ledger, Sané's pedigree over Saïd El Mala's domestic momentum. Those are bets placed on big-stage trust, and the thing about such bets is that when they lose, they lose in front of everyone.

A front-foot, creator-led 4-2-3-1 that wants the ball and looks to prise open compact blocks through its interiors rather than swamp them from the touchlines. Germany pressed and attacked vertically through both warm-ups — 4-0 against Finland, 2-1 against the United States — without lapsing into the transitional disorder of recent cycles. The part worth watching is what the shape becomes the moment Kimmich steps inside.

In possession. From a nominal back four the picture tilts toward a 3-2-5. Kimmich inverts off the right touchline into central midfield, turning the double pivot into a temporary three and handing Germany an extra body with which to feed the interiors. Tah and Schlotterbeck hold the central platform behind him, the latter a left-footed progressor threading passes into the Wirtz and Brown channel. Pavlović anchors and recycles; Nmecha shuttles past him, carrying and counter-pressing. Ahead of that base Musiala drifts in as the central ten and drives through traffic, Wirtz begins from the left and rotates into the half-space to combine and shoot, Sané holds the right touchline before cutting onto his left, and Havertz drops off the last line to link play and to attack Kimmich's deliveries. Brown overlaps high outside Wirtz, or underlaps into the inside-left channel when the winger holds width.

Out of possession. Germany are a pressing side with a deliberate, situational drop-off rather than an all-game high press — by design, and with one eye fixed on a baking summer. Against Finland's low block they pinned and squeezed and scored from settled pressure; against the United States the early aggression built the momentum that brought Havertz's second-minute goal before the hosts found room through the middle around the twenty-minute mark. Nagelsmann's own framing is the key to reading it: in forty-degree heat you cannot hunt the ball for ninety minutes, and a press delivered at half-intensity is worse than no press at all, so the side has to choose its moments and re-compact cleanly when the first wave is beaten.

The wrinkle. The defining wrinkle is the geometry of Kimmich's height. When he steps inside at the right instant, Germany have a second midfielder, cleaner lines into Musiala and Wirtz, and a build-up that hums; when he goes a beat too early and the ball turns over behind him, the vacated right-back zone becomes a transition runway straight at Tah. That is precisely the question the warm-ups left hanging. Against the United States the bright opening gave way to a middle spell in which the pivot kept losing the first duel after turnovers and Tah was reduced to a string of emergency interventions before a late Baumann save preserved the rehearsal. There is a second, newer worry layered on top, and the German press has named it without hesitation: against the United States the creative pair, Musiala and Wirtz, largely vanished from the game — Sky and t-online ran their post-match takeaways under headlines about the two of them disappearing — which is a performance concern rather than a fitness one, but a concern all the same, because everything Germany hope to be in attack is routed through those two. The attack, when it clicks, looks ready. Whether the rest-defence behind two adventurous full-backs can survive a turnover against an opponent that actually finishes its chances is the thing nobody has yet answered.

The bull case is a deep redemption run, and it is more than a fantasy because the attacking variety underneath it is genuine. Havertz links and arrives on the cross; Undav waits as a pure finishing alternative; Musiala picks locks no German teammate can pick; Wirtz gives him a second elite brain between the lines; Sané offers the direct pace that won the United States game late. Kimmich hands the side a second midfielder from right-back, and set-pieces are a real and separate route to goals, with Kimmich, Wirtz and Groß all able to deliver into the heads of Havertz, Tah, Schlotterbeck and Rüdiger. Nine straight wins and two warm-up victories say the machine can be wound up and made to run.

The best-case football is, in truth, not complicated. Germany score early against Curaçao and kill the old first-round anxiety before it has time to settle into the stadium; they manage the heat and the travel with intelligence rather than bravado; they keep Ivory Coast's wide pace in front of them rather than behind them; and they turn Musiala and Wirtz loose on Ecuador's compact, well-drilled structure. The group becomes a launch-pad rather than a trauma trigger, and Germany walk into the knockout rounds with rhythm in the legs and quiet in the head.

From there the ceiling is a semi-final or better, should the bracket and the bodies consent, and the fifth star sits within the range of plausible dreams — the precise thing this whole rebuild was conceived to chase, even if it is not something a sober writer commits to paper as an expectation. For any of it, three things have to hold: Neuer's return has to settle the team rather than unsettle it, the back four has to survive the transition moments the United States exposed, and Musiala has to arrive at the tournament sharp and central rather than half a yard short. Reachable. A considerable distance from given.

Caution has a case of its own, and it begins with the failure mode this team knows in its bones: a gifted Germany trapped in old mental weather. The warm-up against the United States showed precisely why the floor is not a fiction conjured for balance. After a bright opening the side surrendered control for a long middle spell, the pivot kept losing the first duel after turnovers, and it took last-ditch defending from Tah and a late save from Baumann to keep the rehearsal clean. Against an opponent that buries those chances rather than spurning them, that passage becomes a scoreline, and a scoreline against a smaller side becomes, in this country, a story before the players have left the pitch.

Then there is the goalkeeper, the whole project's most exposed nerve. Neuer is the plan, and now the stated plan, but should he start against Curaçao he does so at forty, without a single June warm-up minute in his legs, and without an appearance for Germany since the Euro 2024 quarter-final two summers ago. One uncertain action behind a high line and the Baumann debate — Baumann, who started all of qualifying and both friendlies and absorbed the demotion without a word of complaint — swallows the opener whole. The wide threat is thinner than it first appears, too: with Gnabry gone and Karl now injured out of the squad, the right-sided dynamism falls back almost entirely onto Sané, a player who can win a match with one decisive run and lose his side its shape across a run of loose touches in the same forty-five minutes. And the creative axis that is supposed to carry everything underwhelmed in Chicago — a worry the German press flagged plainly, distinct from any question of fitness.

The realistic bad outcome, then, is not group-stage elimination as the central expectation — that would be a fresh catastrophe, a third strike no narrative could absorb. It is the nervier, more corrosive version: a sterile half against Curaçao, a transition-heavy scramble with Ivory Coast, a second-place route or an early knockout exit — the kind of fortnight that makes Russia and Qatar feel less like history safely behind glass and more like a pattern still being written. Measured against a four-time champion chasing a fifth star, anything that reawakens the old first-round dread will be felt, at home, as failure.

Set the hope against the dread and the honest reading lands in the middle: win Group E with visible authority, then mount a serious knockout run. Germany have the squad and the draw to target first place outright, and a clean, controlled group would already be a meaningful corrective after two consecutive first-round exits. The single thing that will tell us most is not whether they beat Curaçao but how they beat them — whether the defensive coordination problems from the United States friendly are cleaned up, whether the Musiala-Wirtz axis rediscovers the game it mislaid in Chicago, and whether Neuer's return steadies the side rather than destabilises it. Get those right and a deep run is credible; get them wrong and the old story is sitting patiently in the next room.

Strengths. Where Germany win their games: the Musiala-Wirtz interior axis, an elite chance-creation pair against compact blocks so long as the spacing between them stays disciplined; Kimmich's hybrid right-back-into-midfield role and his set-piece delivery into a tall back line; a genuine variety of striker, with Havertz's link play, Undav's penalty-box finishing and a physical alternative held in reserve; and the rhythm of a side riding nine straight wins, provided the group opener begins cleanly rather than nervously.

Weaknesses. Where they come unstuck: transition defence when Kimmich and Brown both push and the pivot cannot stop the first pass after a turnover — the fault line the United States exposed for half an hour; a Neuer cold start turning a planned strength into a public referendum; an over-reliance on Sané for wide thrust after the Gnabry and Karl injuries; the creative pair going quiet, as they did in Chicago, with no second source of invention behind them; and the oldest fragility of all, the first-round psychology in which one sterile half reopens the wound of 2018 and 2022.

No nation has carried the World Cup quite the way Germany has — not as a prize won occasionally but as a thing the country half-expects to find a way to, season after season, generation after generation, as if the trophy were less an ambition than a property right held in temporary abeyance. The legend opens in Bern in 1954, where an underestimated West German side beat the great Magyars of Puskás 3-2 in a final that earned its own name, the Miracle of Bern, and is still treated less as a result than as a founding moment of the postwar republic — the first occasion, the historians like to say, on which the new Germany allowed itself to feel like a country again. Twenty years later they lifted it at home, beating Cruyff's Netherlands in Munich in 1974; in 1990 a cold, efficient side under Beckenbauer edged Maradona's Argentina 1-0 in Rome; and the fourth star came in Rio in 2014, a 1-0 win over Argentina settled by Mario Götze deep in extra time, the crown on a campaign whose central memory is not the final at all but a single half-hour in Belo Horizonte, the 7-1 dismantling of the host Brazil that the football world has never quite finished processing.

The greatness was never only in the winning. Germany have lost four finals too — 1966, 1982, 1986, 2002 — and each defeat somehow fed the legend rather than dented it, burnishing the reputation of a side that did not know when it was beaten, that could be outplayed for an hour and still find the goal that mattered in the eighty-ninth minute. The icons run like a spine through the tournament's own history: Miroslav Klose, its all-time leading scorer with sixteen World Cup goals; Lothar Matthäus, the indefatigable captain who long held the appearance record; Beckenbauer, who won it as a player and again from the bench. Organised, tireless, ruthless when the margins narrowed — the identity was so settled it hardened into a cliché other nations envied and resented in equal measure. Turniermannschaft, the Germans named it, untranslatable in a word: a tournament side, one that grows into a competition as it goes and is at its most dangerous when the stakes are at their highest, when lesser teams tighten and Germany, somehow, loosened.

Then the certainty cracked, and it cracked spectacularly. Holders in 2018, Germany went out in the group in Russia, undone by a stoppage-time loss to South Korea in Kazan, their earliest World Cup exit in eighty years — the photograph of Kroos and Özil staring at the turf became the image of an era closing. Four years on in Qatar they contrived to do it again, eliminated in the first round despite, in the final reckoning, beating nobody who mattered, the squad's mouth-covering protest gesture before the Japan match circulating more widely than any of their football. Two World Cups, two group-stage exits, for the four-time champions: a humiliation the German game has spent the years since trying to anatomise. The diagnoses multiplied — a post-2014 core that stayed a season or two too long, an academy production line that had quietly stopped manufacturing the complete midfielders it once turned out by the dozen, a creeping comfort that dulled the old tournament edge, even a loss of national appetite in a country that had grown unused to wanting things it could not have.

Euro 2024, staged on home soil, offered the first real evidence that the patient was mending. Nagelsmann's reorganised, suddenly youthful side rediscovered some of the old swagger and went out only to the eventual champions Spain, beaten in an extra-time quarter-final in Stuttgart that most of the country felt, with some justification, it had not deserved to lose. It reconnected a wary public to a team it had stopped trusting. What it could not do was launder the specific stain of Russia and Qatar, because a home quarter-final is not a trophy and the wound in question is a World Cup wound, particular and unhealed. So Germany arrive in North America as a giant attempting to recover its own sense of inevitability — chasing a record-equalling fifth title, certainly, but more urgently and more modestly trying simply to look like Germany again from the moment the first whistle sounds.

This is not a normal German tournament mood, and the difference is worth naming precisely. The country still knows exactly what the shirt is supposed to mean — control, authority, the quiet inevitability of finding a way when others falter — but two straight World Cup group exits have drained the certainty out of even the first fixture, so that a match against Curaçao arrives freighted with a symbolism it has no business carrying. Euro 2024 repaired the relationship between team and public, brought the country back to its sofas and its public-viewing squares; it did not, and could not, make the World Cup trauma disappear, because a home quarter-final is not a trophy and the wound in question is specifically and stubbornly a World Cup wound.

So the domestic debate is really, underneath everything, a debate about trust. Trust Nagelsmann's Neuer call, aura weighed against minutes. Trust Sané over the younger excitement the public can feel itching on the bench. Trust that Musiala and Wirtz are ready to carry a side that no longer has Kroos, Müller or Gündoğan to lean on when the picture clouds. Trust, in the end, that a good Germany is genuinely back and not merely fervently hoped for. The question the German coverage keeps circling is not whether this team can play football — the warm-ups answered that much — but whether it can look like Germany again when the tournament actually starts: authority from the first whistle, no confusion, no early panic, and above all no sterile sixty minutes against a smaller side, because everyone in the country, to a person, knows exactly which old story a flat opening half would reawaken.