​On the way to Gillette Stadium to watch the France-Morocco World Cup quarter-final last week, I struck up a conversation with an English reporter who was seated beside me on the media bus. He turned out to be a fairly prominent soccer journalist, author of several substantial books and host of a number of podcasts, and inevitably the chat drifted toward the England national team and their odds of success. While he admitted he wasn’t exactly England’s biggest fan, he offered a theory he had picked up over twenty-something major tournaments. In his view, teams that have suffered bad luck in the past—or even carried a kind of curse—can shake free of that misfortune, but not before they first lift off the metaphorical monkey or monkeys that have been pinning them down.
To illustrate his point for American sports fans, I thought of Michael Jordan finally beating the Detroit Pistons to claim his first NBA Championship after a long series of frustrations with that rival. Or the Red Sox, who clawed their way back from a three-game deficit to beat the Yankees in the American League Championship and then swept the World Series. England, he and I agreed, has plenty of monkeys. It’s been six decades since the nation that gave birth to football won a major tournament, with near-misses piling up since their World Cup triumph on home soil in 1966. For a bit of frame of reference, the Curse of the Billy Goat lingered for 58 years until Steve Bartman complicated it further, and the Curse of the Bambino endured for 68 years before Billy Buckner’s miscue extended it.
As the reporter spoke, it seemed the monkeys were beginning to peel away, one by one. He pointed to England’s round-of-16 victory in Mexico City over Mexico at the Azteca Stadium, the same venue where Maradona’s Hand of God had dealt them a different fate in the 1986 quarterfinals, as the first monkey dropping to the ground. Then there was the more recent development: England had taken on a manager from Germany, the fiercest of their football rivals, for the first time ever, which he saw as the second monkey loosening its grip.
I nodded, recognizing what he was driving at, and mentioned another moment that seemed to support his thesis. In the round-of-32 clash against the Democratic Republic of Congo, England had clawed back from a goal down late, thanks to the heroics of talisman striker Harry Kane—an outcome many past campaigns would have seen crumble. Yet the reporter, with a wry eye toward the unpredictable theater of football, noted that this particular comeback didn’t necessarily count toward the monkey theory because, in his words, “they were always going to win that game” against such a comparatively modest opponent. I rolled my eyes at the contradiction embedded in that remark, acknowledging the familiar oscillation among England fans between despair that could swallow a season and the swagger that could carry them to improbable heights.
The reporter himself didn’t seem to be placing his confidence behind the idea of a universal monkey-off-the-back moment for this England squad, or perhaps he was inclined not to jinx them by affirming it outright. Either way, he didn’t need to push the premise very hard for me to buy in. I had a sense of where this was going from the start.
From about fifteen minutes into England’s opening group-stage match against Croatia, I felt certain of their World Cup trajectory. In those early minutes, there was a penalty—one that Kane himself sent straight toward the goalkeeper, an unflattering reminder of the kind of miscue that would have become a media lightning rod in other eras and contexts. It was almost comically in keeping with old England narratives, those familiar feints and misdirections that make football fandom both exasperating and enthralling.
Yet I found myself captivated by a thread of confidence that was hard to shake. The team had shown glimmers of cohesion, of a plan that could sustain itself through a tournament’s grind, and I found myself leaning into a belief that this might finally be the year they broke through. It wasn’t a certainty by any means, but the signs felt less like stubborn, self-defeating luck and more like a squad slowly discovering how to manufacture opportunities, string plays together, and respond under pressure. I knew that, in football, trajectories often pivot on momentum, small margins, and the gravity of a few decisive moments rather than on sworn, centuries-old curses.
There’s a stubborn tension in following England—the way fans swing between battered skepticism and unearned bravado, the way a single goal or a single save can be recast as proof of a narrative larger than the match itself. Still, as this World Cup unfolded, the sense persisted that something had shifted, that the patience of waiting for the monkey on the back to fall away might be rewarded with tangible progress on the field. And as with any tournament, that progress would hinge on more than just luck: on leadership, on the timing of goals, on the ability to absorb pressure and respond with clarity. The unfolding story would have its twists, but the mood in the moment was one of cautious, growing optimism, mixed with the familiar readiness to brace for a reversal that only football can deliver.