By Opta Analyst | Created at 2026-07-18 17:28:12 | Updated at 2026-08-02 23:35:24
2 weeks ago
Between them, Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane have scored 12 of England’s 13 goals at the 2026 World Cup. No team has ever relied so heavily on two players at the tournament, but history tells us that may not be a bad thing.
Football has been traditionally classified as a “weak link” sport. Generally, it’s thought a team’s success is determined more by the quality of its least-skilled player than the brilliance of its superstars. In such a low-scoring sport where every player is heavily reliant on those around them, individual excellence can only take a team so far.
Other sports – basketball is often the example cited – are “strong link” sports. In these cases, an exceptional player can dominate proceedings and almost carry a team to victory single-handedly.
At the 2026 World Cup, however, Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane are challenging that conventional wisdom.
That’s not to say England’s supporting cast haven’t been solid, but there’s no escaping the fact Bellingham and Kane have been overwhelmingly responsible for England’s run to the semi-finals, where they face long-time rivals Argentina in Miami on Wednesday.
Between them, the duo have scored 12 of England’s 13 goals at the tournament. Marcus Rashford‘s strike against Croatia in England’s opening group game is the only goal scored by anyone else.
As a proportion, then, Kane and Bellingham have scored 92.3% of England’s goals, and they’ve scored each of the last nine between them.
That’s an incredible number. In fact, in World Cup history, it’s the most concentrated a team’s attack has ever been.
Applying a minimum threshold of 10 team goals in a tournament, England’s dependence on Kane and Bellingham exceeds that of any other side in World Cup history.
But is such a reliance on two players a sign of strength or weakness? History suggests it’s certainly not a fatal flaw.
Of the seven teams at the top of this list, one went on to win the World Cup – that was Italy in 1938. England could yet join them.
The other teams on the list above also enjoyed fairly successful tournament runs. Although they went out with a whimper, France were the best team at the 2026 World Cup for large spells. Kylian Mbappé (8) and Ousmane Dembélé (5) combined for 81.3% of their goals.
Spain finished fourth in 1950 and Switzerland reached the quarter-finals in 1958 before losing to Austria in the highest-scoring World Cup match ever played. Italy made the semi-finals on home soil in 1990, and Hristo Stoichkov powered Bulgaria to the final four in 1994.
In other words, six of the seven teams reached at least the semi-finals.
There is, admittedly, an element of selection bias here. Restricting the sample to teams who scored at least 10 goals naturally means we’re going to see nations that had good chances of progressing deep into the tournament.
Even so, the evidence suggests relying heavily on two elite attackers is not inherently a negative thing.
It wasn’t exactly a negative for France this year, while Argentina relied heavily on Lionel Messi to take them to glory in Qatar 2022.
Messi attempted 32.0% of Argentina’s shots at the 2022 World Cup and has increased that share to 34.0% in 2026. Across those two tournaments, only Robert Lewandowski, who accounted for 38.7% of Poland’s shots in 2022, has carried a greater share of his team’s attacking burden.
With Argentina and now England leaning so heavily on a small number of world-class players, perhaps the World Cup is forcing us to reconsider football’s reputation as the ultimate weak-link sport.
Then again, Spain, who’ve reached the final of the 2026 World Cup, are more of an ultimate team than a team choked with superstars, although of course they have exceptional players.
Whatever happens on Wednesday in the second semi-final, the 2026 World Cup final will pit one complete team against one carried by a few stars.
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