Jude Bellingham on England's Euro 2024 Journey and Tuchel's Brotherhood

Jude Bellingham doesn’t bother dressing it up. For all the noise about England’s run to the Euro 2024 final, he says the truth inside the camp was far less polished.

Things, he admits, were wrong.

“We didn’t connect as well as we could”

England reached Berlin and a shot at Spain, yet never once looked like a side in full stride. Performances were laboured, the mood oddly flat for a team supposedly in its prime. From the outside, it was put down to tactics, fatigue, form. From the inside, Bellingham points somewhere else.

"At the Euros I think we got a few things wrong off the pitch, I don’t feel the group connected as well as it could have for a number of reasons," he said from England’s World Cup base in the United States.

The expectation was suffocating. "When it came to the tournament, we were seen as one of two or three teams that could win it," he said. Yet the football never matched the billing. "We weren’t playing well, which doesn’t help, so even when we were winning, we didn’t get the feeling that we were as happy as we should be."

It was a revealing admission: a squad that reached a major final without ever truly feeling like a team.

Tuchel’s “brotherhood” mission

That is exactly what Thomas Tuchel is trying to tear up and rebuild. The new England manager has spoken openly about forging a "brotherhood" in the group as he chases the World Cup this summer, a word that underlines how far he believes the culture must move from the Euro 2024 experience.

Bellingham’s comments underline the scale of that job. The talent is not in question. The chemistry was.

The Real Madrid midfielder now finds himself in a very different environment, in a camp where Tuchel has made togetherness a central theme rather than a slogan on a wall. Whether that translates under pressure in the knockout stages will define England’s tournament.

A miracle goal that still makes him uncomfortable

No moment summed up England’s chaotic Euro 2024 journey like Bellingham’s overhead kick against Slovakia in the last 16. It was the kind of goal that lives forever in highlight reels: last minute, acrobatic, season-saving.

For Bellingham, it carries a different weight.

"I still remember how I was feeling at the time. It always makes me feel a bit uncomfortable because it was such a bad situation," he said.

"We weren't playing well. I remember as a kid watching World Cups and Euros where we crashed out against teams we shouldn’t have gone out to and I remember thinking, 'Wow, I’m about to be a part of one of those moments’. It shakes up the whole of English football."

The overhead kick dragged England into extra time and, eventually, into the quarter-finals. Yet it came from desperation, not dominance. The pattern continued: penalties needed to scrape past Switzerland in the quarters, a last-minute winner to edge the Netherlands in the semi-finals. A team constantly on the brink, rescued by moments rather than control.

Even one of the most iconic goals of his young career is, in his mind, tinged with that sense of unease.

A straight fight for the No 10 shirt

Now the stage shifts to the World Cup and a new battle. Bellingham is not walking into Tuchel’s XI unchallenged. He faces a direct fight with Morgan Rogers for the No 10 role in England’s opener against Croatia on Wednesday.

On paper, it is a selection dilemma. In reality, it is a contest between two players who have known each other for years.

The pair grew up in the same area in the West Midlands and played junior football together. The rivalry is real, but so is the bond.

"As a person, he is a top guy, he can get along with anyone, can have conversations with anyone," Bellingham said of Rogers. "He can be a bit loud. We have debates that turn into arguments a lot. But we get on like brothers, to be fair."

Tuchel has been blunt with them. "The manager has made it very clear in a lot of the times where he has spoken that we are playing for the same position," Bellingham explained. The picture has softened slightly as the coach experiments with both in different roles, but the core battle remains.

Bellingham strengthened his case with a commanding display in the final warm-up win over Costa Rica on Wednesday, dictating play and reminding everyone why he is viewed as a generational talent. Even so, he insists there is no bitterness if the call goes another way.

"I know that has eased up a bit more now that he sees me playing more positions and Morgs playing more positions, but I honestly have no ill feelings when he is playing and I’m not playing."

From fracture to brotherhood?

England arrive at this World Cup with scars from a European Championship that looked like a success on paper but felt fractured inside the dressing room. Bellingham’s honesty strips away the illusion: a team can reach a final and still be miles away from its best self.

Tuchel wants to close that gap with culture as much as tactics. Bellingham, at 23, already sits at the heart of that project, both as a standard-bearer on the pitch and as a voice unafraid to say when something is wrong.

The question now is simple. When the pressure rises again and the margins tighten, will England still be relying on last-minute miracles, or will that long-promised brotherhood finally show up where it matters most?