England’s Under-20 World Cup winners one year on: Does the future still look as bright for country’s young lions?

One year on from leading England to a first global title since the 1966 World Cup, Paul Simpson remains optimistic about the fledgling squad

England won the U20 World Cup last June (Getty )

The month of May has been kind so far to Dominic Solanke. He began it on the pitch as a late substitute in a Champions League semi-final in Rome. A first Liverpool goal against Brighton and Hove Albion followed last Sunday, in a match that he began ahead of more experienced players like Danny Ings and Adam Lallana – a measure of the faith Jürgen Klopp has showed in his 20-year-old recruit from Chelsea. And still to come is the excitement of a Champions League final, with the possibility of a winner’s medal to add to the one collected at the U20 World Cup last June, along with his Golden Ball for the tournament’s best player.

The season has ended brightly for Lewis Cook too. Of that England team, it is the man who lifted the World Cup trophy as captain who made the most Premier League starting appearances (25) in 2017/18 – a notable improvement on his four in 2016/17. It says plenty about Cook’s progress in a Bournemouth shirt that a run of 18 consecutive Premier League starts only ended on Sunday owing to his manager Eddie Howe’s declared decision to rest the 21-year-old midfielder to keep him fresh ahead of a potential call-up for the World Cup finals in Russia.

Cook, like Solanke, has also collected a first senior cap – in his case against Italy in March –but as their U20 World Cup-winning manager, Paul Simpson, notes, this pair are not the only members of England’s talented young crop to have gained significant experience in the 11 months following their triumph in South Korea. The 13 players who played in the final against Venezuela in Suwon have accumulated 268 league appearances between them – with seven of them making a combined 126 outings in the Premier League (7,360 minutes between them).

Post-Korea, the question of opportunity was always going to arise but Simpson, now coaching England’s U19 side, takes an optimistic view: “There are a lot of them getting an opportunity and I think what the World Cup did was it actually highlighted to a lot of the managers in English football that we’ve got some really talented young footballers here who just need to be given the opportunity to go and play and they’ve thrived on that this season.”

Paul Simpson became the first World Cup winning England manager since Alf Ramsey (Getty ) (Getty)

If Cook heads the list for starts, Everton forward Dominic Calvert-Lewin, England’s matchwinner against Venezuela, shone earlier in the campaign and ended up with the most Premier League appearances overall, 32 in total. “He looks as if he has got stronger,” Simpson says of Calvert-Lewin who scored eight goals in all competitions for Everton, along with two for the England U21s.

The only downside was that the arrival of Turkey forward Cenk Tosun meant he began only one league game in 2018, leaving him on 18 starting appearances – one more than his Everton colleague, Jonjoe Kenny. Arsenal’s Ainsley Maitland-Niles made eight starts, Tottenham Hotspur’s Kyle Walker-Peters two and Everton’s Ademola Lookman one.

“Listen we could all be greedier and want more but I think the players have done really well,” Simpson continues. “The Premier League is such a strong league and it’s so demanding and the rewards are so high for clubs to be successful. It’s credit to the players that the clubs are prepared to take a chance and play them in these games.”

Ademola Lookman has flourished in the Bundesliga (Getty ) (Getty)

It is a different football world from the one Simpson grew up in when, as a 19-year-old he made 37 top-flight appearances in a season for Manchester City. “The situation for managers is so much more precarious now than it used to be,” he adds. “I was given my debut when I’d just turned 16 in 1982. You very rarely hear of that now – it’s tougher because of the influx of the foreign players coming in.”

Looking back to last summer, Simpson reflects that some of England’s opponents at last summer’s U20 World Cup were “miles ahead” in terms of big-match experience: “The opposition players were coming into it a bit more robust than our players, because they’d been tested more.” On this point, it is encouraging to note that England’s players compiled the same aggregate of top-flight appearances (126) in 2017/18 as their Serie A counterparts from the Italy side they defeated in the semi-final in South Korea (albeit the Italians made 103 starts to England’s 76).

Outside of the Premier League, six of England’s World Cup-winning squad spent the year on loan in the Championship: Everton’s Kieran Dowell (Nottingham Forest) and Callum Connolly (Ipswich Town), Chelsea’s Fiyako Tomori (Hull City) and Jake Clarke-Salter (Sunderland), Liverpool’s Sheyi Ojo (Fulham) and Tottenham Hotspur ’s Josh Onomah (Aston Villa). Goalkeeper Freddie Woodman, meanwhile, made five Scottish Premier League outings for Aberdeen; his Newcastle United team-mate Adam Armstrong hit nine goals in Blackburn Rovers’ League One promotion campaign.

Kyle Walker-Peters has made just two league starts for Spurs (Getty ) (Getty)

It is Dowell, with 31 starts and seven substitute outings in the Championship at Forest, who gained the most minutes of top flight or Championship football under his belt of all of Simpson’s class of 2017. “You focus more when you have another game around the corner and there’s pressure on the game rather than academy football,” says the 20-year-old attacking midfielder, when asked about his immersion into senior football.

There were inevitable dips along the way, but his 10 goals in a Forest shirt underlined his promise. “More than anything it was proving that I could do it at that level. A lot of the things I’ve done this season I knew I could do –it’s just proving you can do it. More than anything it’s how I’ve come along physically which has been the biggest improvement.”

Dowell’s parent club Everton had five players in all in that England squad, though their exciting winger Ademola Lookman spent the second half of the season shining on loan at RB Leipzig in Germany. Lookman is said to have struggled to settle on Merseyside though his lack of opportunities – just that one league start in a team short on attacking creativity – cannot have helped.

Kieran Dowell has been a regular for Forest this season (Getty ) (Getty)

One striking statistic after he scored his fifth Bundesliga goal last weekend is that the seven goals and assists he contributed in his last five Leipzig appearances alone was more than the entire creative output of any Everton player throughout Sam Allardyce’s six-month reign as manager. Lookman, according to Simpson, is a winger who “could beat players with ease” and he applauds young English players like him and the Borussia Dortmund-based Jadon Sancho – a member of the England U19 side that he now coaches – for their courage in going abroad.

“I do understand that they want to go and play, and to go and play in the Bundesliga is a really good challenge,” he says. “We’ve seen for many years now young players from Spain, Holland, Germany and Portugal coming over to England. It won’t do our players any harm if they go and have a little spell playing in a different environment, a different country, learning a different style of football. It can only be good for their development long term.”

What happens in that long term for his history boys remains to be seen, but the first 12 months have given us cautious grounds for optimism.

Lion Cubs roaring

An end-of-term report​

Premier League appearances (starts):
Calvert-Lewin 32 (18)
Cook 29 (25)
Solanke 21 (5)
Kenny 19 (17)
Maitland-Niles 15 (8)
Lookman 7 (1)
Walker-Peters 3 (2)