One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Is Germany’s decade of inexplicably losing early in tournaments finally over?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group E preview. You can also read previews of Curaçao, Ivory Coast, and Ecuador.
Is Germany’s era of inexplicably losing early in tournaments finally over?
In 2014, the soccer world seemed to be at Germany’s feet.
Germany had just won a World Cup in which a 24-year-old Thomas Müller was top scorer, a 24-year-old Toni Kroos was one of the best midfielders of the tournament, and a 22-year old Mario Götze scored the winning goal in the final.
This was a young core poised to dominate international soccer for the rest of the decade.
Instead, they started losing early in tournaments with an alarming frequency. In fact, since they collapsed in the first round in 2018 and 2022, that 2014 final against Argentina is the last World Cup knockout stage game that Germany have played.
The exit in Qatar was particularly perplexing. It seems that things would never go quite right for Germany, the tournament defined by an opening match against Japan in which they easily could have been out of sight by halftime and instead conspired to lose 2-1.
Despite that decade of disappointment, it’s hard not to look at the squad in 2026 and think that they might be able to return to something near the 2014 team. Largely that’s due to the twin young attacking talents of Florian Wirtz and Jamal Musiala.
Wirtz is coming off of a slightly lukewarm debut season at Liverpool, and Musiala has only recently returned from an injury sustained in last summer’s Club World Cup, but they both provide a level of technical skill and creativity that almost no other team can match.
Musiala especially possesses some of the quickest feet in world football, giving him the ability to manipulate the ball and navigate through remarkably tight spaces. His Euro 2024 highlight tape provides a pretty good example of his unique ability to create a window for a shot or a pass.1More importantly, Musiala does the Carmelo Anthony 3-pointer celebration when he scores, making him an honorary New York Knick and therefore my personal friend.
Wirtz and Musiala will likely be able to combine to create lots of high quality chances both for themselves and for their teammates. Lots of Germany’s variance will be determined, then, by what happens immediately behind and in front of them.
Up front, Germany will play some combination of Kai Havertz and Nick Woltemade. They are both skilled players, and both capable of winning headers and playing the ball on the floor, but neither have had particularly outstanding seasons from a production standpoint. Woltemade racked up just under seven expected goals in his first year with Newcastle, while Havertz managed just under three in an injury-shortened season. These are good players, but are not elite level chance getters or goal scorers.
Behind the attacking midfielders, head coach Julian Nagelsmann will have to decide what combination of Angelo Stiller, Aleksandar Pavlović and the journeyman Pascal Groß will anchor the defensive midfield.
Stiller, who has emerged as an elite defensive midfielder for Stuttgart this season to the extent that he will more than likely be an elite defensive midfielder for someone besides Stuttgart next season, is the most obvious choice and someone who Nagelsmann has played consistently in recent tune up friendlies.
While Pavlović missed out on the most recent round of games in March, he seems like the most clear choice to partner Stiller. Pavlović would have likely played a significant role for Germany at the Euros two years ago had he not been forced to withdraw due to an illness, and he was one of the most consistent players for one of the most consistent teams in Europe this season. He started practically every match for Bayern Munich in the back half of the season as they ran away with the Bundesliga title and came within moments of a Champions League final, and over the course of those minutes he was also maybe the best progressive passer on the continent, with the analytics site ScoutLab scoring him the 99th percentile in practically every passing metric.
Germany will likely go as far as that combination of Wirtz, Musiala, Stiller, and Pavlović can take them. And stop me if you’ve heard this before, but that is a young core: Four players all between 22 and 25 years old.
Time will tell if this young German core is as good as that last one. But at the very least, this new generation should be the one to stop the strange decade of bizarre World Cup exits.
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