Five Dressing-Room Doors Open at Once

Chengdu, one October evening. The rain was light, just enough to soak a long strip of the substitutes bench at Chengdu Rongcheng's training ground. I stayed behind after the session, listening to the last studs clattering down the corridor that leads into the dressing room. Thirty-nine years in this trade, and I still keep the habit of sitting until the last door closes. The quiet between the sound of boots on grass and the sound of the dressing-room door shutting is where I hear the most, who is still outside, who has gone in, who hesitates on the threshold. That night, my phone buzzed. A colleague in Buenos Aires sent a short line: the Argentine football association had locked in the date for Lionel Messi's farewell match, against Benin, on October 6. No exclamation mark, no emoji. I sat still for a long while, staring at the screen, then out at the rainy pitch. At that same moment, on the other side of the world, five dressing-room doors belonging to five national teams were opening for new men. The rain that year washed away many things, but it never washed away the memory of a single summer. This time, what is being carried off is a generation. The October 2026 FIFA Days window is unfolding in a state I have not witnessed in nearly four decades on the job: most of the world's leading national teams changed head coaches at the same time. France handed the seat to Zinedine Zidane. Germany handed theirs to Jurgen Klopp. The Netherlands called on Xavi Hernandez, the first time in roughly half a century they have accepted a head coach who is not Dutch. Italy brought Roberto Mancini back. England kept Thomas Tuchel but asked him to change how positions are arranged. Spain went against the current: Luis de la Fuente stayed in place and called up almost the entire title-winning core. On the news feed, this is a story of names. Zidane, Klopp, Xavi, Mancini, Tuchel, names powerful enough to turn a window of friendlies and Nations League fixtures into a global media event. But based on my experience of following matches and training sessions for years, I know one simple thing: a name cannot run for anyone for ninety minutes. And when five national teams change direction at once, the thing worth worrying about is not the coaching seat. It is the corridor leading into the dressing room. Before dissecting each team, I want to be clear about how to read this window. Most of the information in circulation, about who leads whom, about a completed World Cup 2026, about farewells and reunions, has not been fully confirmed by primary sources. Some details are clear, such as Messi's farewell fixture published by the Argentine federation for October 6. But most of the rest is projection or cross-unverified reporting. People who cover teams from the inside learn to tell those two kinds of information apart, otherwise they end up writing something false about a specific human being. Start with France. In a feature I wrote a few seasons ago about the midfield of a small club in western China, I noted something that has since proved true of almost every big team: the midfield is not where you run the most, it is where you decide who is allowed to run. France have a solid defence and a deep attack. Where they are thinner than the biggest rivals on the continent is the ability to control the middle third. This is an organisational problem more than a talent problem. At Real Madrid, Zidane inherited a Casemiro, Kroos, Modric trio that was already humming before he arrived. Zidane's difficulty with France is that he must assemble his own formula by hand, rather than walking into a ready-made midfield three. For a national team that gathers only a few times a year, rebuilding a midfield is many times harder than at a club, because the number of sessions is always bounded by the club calendar. I expect France will not play the 4-3-3 of peak Madrid. More likely they lean toward a double pivot, or a security-first structure before thinking about controlling the ball in the opponent's half. That is the sensible handling when you have a strong defence and a sharp attack while your midfield is not yet mature enough to carry a match. Now Germany. Their problem, as commonly described, is less structural and more mental. Germany do not lack talent, but many of their best players underperform in national colours, and their competitive mentality in big matches has weakened over several years. For Klopp, this is a psychological problem before it is a tactical one. At club level he is famous for turning a collective into an emotional machine, a high press that exists not only to win the ball but to create the feeling that the opponent has no time to think. Applying that at national-team level takes many times longer, because there are not hundreds of sessions to drill reflexes into place. Distance-covered figures are usually packaged as an effort metric. Over years of watching training sessions, I have seen one thing: ineffective running still produces beautiful numbers. A player who runs twelve kilometres without ever touching the hot spot of the match has a number that only says he was on the pitch, not that he played football. Klopp calling up forty-four players split into four groups is a notable signal. He is treating this window as a long audition, not a camp to go and win. He is prioritising identifying people before identifying a system, and for Germany, picking the right people matters far more than picking the right shape. The Netherlands are the most interesting case in terms of identity. Inviting Xavi, a man carrying the positional-play gene learned from Johan Cruyff but raised in Spanish football, is like taking a seed back to where it was born. As an idea, this is a revival of the Cruyff template. At national-team level, though, identity is not simply choosing an old philosophy again. The Netherlands now have a generation trained in a very different environment from Cruyff's or Van Basten's. They have technique and physicality, but it is not certain they have the patience to play a game that demands hundreds of short passes before a gap appears. Xavi is credited with recalling some previously ignored players and cutting veterans, including Memphis Depay. That is the mark of a genuine overhaul, not merely a change of coach. The biggest risk of an overhaul at national level is that you drop points in the short term, and the European press has no habit of patience. Italy are the opposite case. Mancini was recalled with a statement that he wants to win at all costs, unbound by any tactical template. To outsiders that is a nice line. To people in the trade, it is a licence to do whatever he deems necessary. What matters is Italy's context. Expectations are very low after the team failed to qualify. In football, low expectations are a gift. They let a coach call up twenty-one-year-olds, experiment, fail and fix without being torn apart in the first press conference. In other words, Italy are in a position with nothing to lose. In my experience, that is often the best condition for a young team to form an identity. Three hundred days without applause, I heard the breathing of players more clearly in an empty stand. Silence is not always a bad thing. England are the team under the most pressure. They lost a EURO final, then lost a World Cup semi-final after coming back, and the deepest wound is probably the defeat to Argentina. That is the kind of wound that does not heal over time; it only becomes a different kind of memory inside a player's head. Tuchel has been asked to change positional arrangements. Most likely this concerns the structure of the flanks or the centre-forward role, but the specifics have not been stated. What interests me more is the new names he called up, such as Dominic Calvert-Lewin, the young Rio Ngumoha, or Morgan Gibbs-White. For a team that twice came close to glory and let it slip, fresh blood is not only about building the future. It is also about diluting memory. Here I want to add something about the tactical trend spreading across Europe. Inverted wingers are homogenising football. Traditional wingers, the kind who need only one shift of the hips before whipping a cross with their natural foot, are being written off wrongly. When every team turns its wide men inside, the flanks become empty, and teams bold enough to keep a true winger will hold no small advantage. If Tuchel really does change structure, this is a direction worth trying. Spain are the counter-answer to everything above. They have won almost every tournament in the past three or four years, and De la Fuente has recalled nearly the entire old core, adding only a few new names such as Dean Huijsen, Josep Martinez, Roberto Fernandez or Fermin Lopez. In football, stability is a strategy, not laziness. When the whole European field is changing coaches, one team keeping its structure and personnel sends a signal to rivals that they do not need fixing because they are not broken. The Huijsen case shows another angle too: securing a dual-national player is a strategic move, not just a call-up. But every coin has a reverse side. I have watched enough tournaments to know that dynasties in international football are very hard to sustain. The counter-swing always arrives when least expected, usually after an unforeseen defeat. Spain are at the summit, and the summit is where the descent begins. The rest of this window is the story of two men. Cristiano Ronaldo carries on, at forty-one, and is still treated as a guaranteed starter. That is understandable in brand terms and in terms of squad morale. Tactically, though, it creates a jam. Every match Ronaldo starts is a match a young centre-forward sits out. Inside a dressing room, that kind of jam rarely explodes into noise, but it simmers. On the other side, Messi has fixed the date of his Argentina farewell. The Benin match on October 6 carries more symbolic and commercial value than professional value. It is a fixture staged to close a chapter, not to test a system. Which is precisely why it is worth noting. Argentina after Messi will lose their creative anchor, and the real question is not who replaces him, but where the whole team reorganises its chance creation from. That is a question no farewell match can answer. In the same period, Ronaldo and Erling Haaland will most likely meet directly for the first time. It is a beautiful image for the media, but it is also a lopsided comparison, because the two men are at completely different stages of their careers. Here I want to say what I consider the most important thing about this window, and it runs against most of what is being written. The media is selling the story of five new dynasties born together. But international football does not work that way. At a club, a new coach can change a team's face within weeks because he has a squad playing together every day. At national level, a new coach has only a few days before a run of matches. The new-manager bounce exists, but it is fragile and much harder to measure. What is actually happening is not a tactical revolution, but a generational purge packaged in big names. Look at the common denominator. Mancini calls up twenty-one-year-olds. Xavi recalls the forgotten and discards veterans. Tuchel brings in new faces. De la Fuente adds a few young men. Klopp calls forty-four players to audition. All of them are doing the same job: finding resources for the next cycle. And if that is right, then the biggest blind spot of public opinion lies elsewhere. People are arguing over whether Zidane is better than his predecessor, whether Klopp suits Germany better. The real question is whether these federations have enough patience to wait out a full cycle, or whether they will change seats again after a few Nations League defeats. In thirty-nine years of writing about dressing rooms, I have learned that what kills a national-team project is almost never tactics. It is the calendar and the lack of patience. From zero, I learned that a dressing-room door only opens when you dare to wait in the rain. The men now sitting in national-team seats are the same. They are standing under a different rain, the rain of expectation, of glorious pasts, of the names that came before. What is worth watching in the coming months is not whether they win or lose the first match. It is whether they can hold their patience when results turn against them. I write about the ball, but I keep the beat with the hearts of the people who play it. And a heart does not change direction after a single match.