England chiefs lay bare Fifa World Cup logistics schedule

The chief executive of the Football Association has laid bare the logistical complexities of England’s upcoming World Cup.

The tournament is being held across the United States, Canada and Mexico with many European teams expecting to lose money, in part, because of travel issues.

“These tournaments, you’re going to be away for a long time,” Mark Bullingham told Georgie Ainslie’s Performance People podcast. “The team flew in on 1 June. If we make it all the way to the final, we’d be flying back on 20 July.

“There’s a lot of time in there. It’s 18 internal flights, 6,500 miles, a lot of different hotels and so on.

“So you need everyone to want to get on, everyone to want to be there, and to have a manager who believes in that environment. And in Thomas Tuchel, we’ve got that.”

Route to England World Cup final

England’s potential route to the final starts with three games – against Croatia, Ghana and Panama – in Dallas, Boston and New Jersey.

Assuming Tuchel’s men win the group they’ll take on a third-place team from one of the other pools in Atlanta – keeping them, so far, in the western half of the United States.

But success in their first knockout round would see them head to Mexico City – at altitude – before a potential quarter-final in the humidity of the Miami summer.

From there a semi-final would be back in Atlanta before the final in New Jersey.

Combined with travel to and from their base camp in Kansas City, the team will rack up the air miles while avoiding one of the three host nations entirely in Canada.

“You’d rather have an expectation than not, for sure,” Bullingham added. “It’s brilliant that everyone’s so excited about going out there. We’ve got a team that we know can beat anyone on the day.

“But if you look at the stats, it’s only twice in history that a European team has won a World Cup outside Europe. There’s a reason for that. It’s very hard to win in heat, altitude, humidity and so on. Other countries are better at dealing with that because they’ve grown up with it.

“So it is going to be hard, but we’ll be doing everything we can to go as far as possible.”