Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham have never looked better with England - while Declan Rice is a portrait of pain. And it's proof that the Premier League needs a radical shake-up, writes IAN LADYMAN

Of all the many and varied questions asked of

Thomas Tuchel

during this World Cup, one has become rather repetitive.

‘Thomas, how is

Declan Rice

?’

Rice, fundamental to

England

’s chances against Norway on Saturday, arrived in America carrying an injury to his lower back and hamstring and continues to nurse it through the biggest summer of his life, just as he nursed it through the back end of the biggest domestic season of his life.

It’s not an injury as such. It’s pain caused by a nerve, caused by over-playing. Treatment can’t cure it. Only rest can. But you don’t get that in English football, a landscape not exactly potted with easy games.

The

Premier League

is not

Serie A

or

Ligue 1

or even the

Bundesliga

. It doesn’t allow big players an opportunity to take their foot off the pedal or be rested occasionally. It doesn’t have a winter break.

So players such as Rice – as willing and selfless as you will ever find – push their bodies through various levels of pain and discomfort until somebody tells them they can stop. Rice has not reached that point yet.

Harry Kane (left) and Jude Bellingham (right) have lit up the World Cup with England

Declan Rice, meanwhile, looks exhausted after a punishing season with Arsenal that has left him nursing nerve pain

If he is lucky, starting this weekend in a Miami melting pot, he still has nine days and three big games to go.

Here in America we have seen Rice sitting on the bench with an ice pack on his leg after the DR Congo game. The previous match, against Panama, he sat out. On Wednesday back at the team base in Kansas City, he didn’t train with the rest of the squad. Tuchel has talked of him playing in almost unbearable discomfort. At times he has been a portrait etched in pain.

So what we know is that the curse of the English domestic season remains. Every England manager for as long as we can remember has talked about it. It’s a burden.

Gareth Southgate observed our bungled attempts to insert an international break into the schedule a few years ago with a mixture of bemusement and disdain.

Tuchel, his successor, hasn’t even attempted to go there.

‘What is the point in talking about it?’ he replied when asked about it by

Daily Mail Sport

last season.

‘The situation is not going to change.’

England players have on the whole not lacked stamina or endurance at this World Cup. The way Tuchel’s 10 men repelled Mexico in the final 20 minutes to win at the altitudinous Azteca last Sunday showed us that.

Some have struggled to hit their expected performance levels, nevertheless. Some pretty big cracks have thus far been papered over by results.

With this in mind, is it just a coincidence that England’s two best players at this World Cup do not play their club football in England?

Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham have just finished domestic seasons in Germany and Spain that do not ask the same hard-nosed questions of players each week.

Kane and Bellingham both played significantly fewer league minutes than Rice’s 3,099 last season. Kane’s number was 2,382 while Bellingham – who missed part of the campaign with injury – played 1,917.

That is telling in itself. Kane now plays about 1000 fewer minutes a season in the Bundesliga than he did in the Premier League with Tottenham. That’s a reduction of about a third.

Last season, he started 25 league games, as opposed to 38 in his final Spurs season in 2022-23.

Kane has never looked fitter or more energised for England than he has over the last four weeks while Bellingham has been magnificent, arguably the player of the tournament.

And it is, of course, not just about the minutes that are played. It’s how those minutes look and feel at the time.

Kane has never looked fitter or more energised for England than he has over the last four weeks

Bellingham and Kane both played fewer than 2,500 minutes of league football in 2025-26. Rice, however, played more than 3,000

Kane’s Bayern side won the Bundesliga by 16 points and lost one game all season. Bellingham and Real Madrid were no match for Barcelona on this occasion but still finished 14 points clear of Villarreal in third.

League seasons for the top clubs on the continent just don’t pinch as hard as they did, for example, at Arsenal last season. For Rice it must have felt as though every minute of every game mattered.

Kane’s Bayern won an astonishing 18 Bundesliga games by three goals or more last season. Within that were an 8-1, a 6-2, a 6-0, three games won 5-0 and three won 5-1. It tells a story.

Mikel Arteta’s team, on the other hand, didn’t wrap up Arsenal’s first league title for two decades until the back end of May. Every game felt critical because it was and that’s exactly why Rice started all but three of them. Only goalkeeper David Raya played more.

The Premier League may or may not be the best in the world but it is the most exacting. Over the years we have seen our best players arrive at summer tournaments bent out of shape.

Here, England’s World Cup campaign has momentum at last but it has come from a survival effort in Mexico rather than any great improvement in their football.

Tuchel’s team have played well for one half against Croatia, 20 minutes against Panama, 25 against DR Congo and in fits and starts at the Azteca where they could easily have been behind by half-time.

It feels the wrong time to be critical but objective analysis only leads us this way. After all, how many of England players have played the kind of football likely to win a World Cup so far?

Kane (pictured with his wife Kate) enjoyed a relaxing last month to the club season, with Bayern Munich having wrapped up the Bundesliga title with games to spare

Thomas Tuchel’s team have played well in spells but how many of his squad have truly showed World Cup-winning form?

We know about Kane and Bellingham, but who else?

Maybe Manchester City’s Nico O’Reilly. Maybe City’s new signing Elliot Anderson. It is hard to find any other candidates beyond those four and at times it has been hard to escape the familiar feeling that too many have arrived with their best football already left behind in the heat of Premier League battle.

It’s not a comprehensive argument. There are exceptions and Norway’s fit and firing striker Erling Haaland is one. He played almost 3,000 league minutes for City last season.

Nevertheless, there is a history of English players disappearing into a pit of fatigue during World Cups that is hard to ignore. Players like Wayne Rooney will tell you all about it.

On the continent they laugh at England’s failure to halt the season in the middle of winter. Even Kane has teased us about it on social media, usually from a winter sun lounger.

The Premier League tried it but ostensibly they failed. The FA Cup got in the way, for a start.

We have already stripped our two domestic cup competitions down to the bone to the point where the only way to inject some space into the calendar would be to reduce the number of teams in the Premier League down to 18.

There is a strong argument for that. The quality at the bottom has been dismal for some time. But it would require the votes of 14 Premier League clubs to push that one through and when was the last time we saw a turkey vote for Christmas?

New Man City signing Elliot Anderson (centre) is one of a handful of England stars who don't look drained of their best form thanks to the Premier League calendar

It is, frankly, a laudable idea but one that will never get off the ground.

So the bed that English football has made for itself is one currently been laid in by its best players here in America.

Some will argue that it doesn’t matter. Why should we sacrifice or change the fundamental uniqueness of our domestic landscape just so that the national team has a better chance of winning something every other summer?

It’s a fair argument but it will feel like it matters in Miami this weekend where we will need Bellingham and Kane at their impressive best once again.