Germany — 2026 World Cup Squad

For ten years German football kept telling itself the golden generation was coming. Now it has arrived, and it speaks two club dialects at once: Jamal Musiala's Bayern shorthand and Florian Wirtz's Liverpool grammar, two players who finish each other's sentences in the final third. Group E, with Curaçao among the company, is really just a warm-up lap — somewhere to get the timing right before anything is actually asked of them.

What holds it together is older and colder. Joshua Kimmich conducts from in front of a back line where Antonio Rüdiger snarls and Jonathan Tah cleans up, while Manuel Neuer, at the wrong end of his career but still the loudest voice in the box, anchors everything behind. This is a team built to keep the ball, hunt it down the instant it's lost, and trust its passers to unpick anyone.

The doubt isn't talent; it's temperament. Germany have the players to win this tournament and the recent habit of finding new ways not to. If Musiala and Wirtz stay healthy and the nerve holds in a tight quarter-final, the ceiling is the trophy itself.