Bukayo Saka's Fitness Concerns Impacting England's World Cup Aspirations

Bukayo Saka looks broken. Not in spirit, but in body – and for a player who usually fizzes with energy, that contrast is jarring enough to set alarm bells ringing across England’s camp.

Gary Neville has watched him closely in North America and doesn’t like what he sees. The winger, normally England’s ever-present livewire, is carrying a persistent Achilles problem that the FA’s medical team has had to monitor throughout the tournament. The numbers tell their own story: three group games, all from the bench, minutes rationed carefully by Thomas Tuchel as if every sprint came at a cost.

“Bukayo Saka doesn’t look right at all,”

he said, highlighting the missing trademarks – the smile, the bounce, the sharp competitive edge. For a player who usually radiates joy and menace in equal measure, the flatness is hard to ignore. Neville called it what it is: a concern.

Ian Wright went further. He questioned whether Saka should have been on the plane at all. The Arsenal forward had already admitted he was “happy to gamble” with his fitness after a punishing club season, but Wright sees a player who looks drained rather than daring. Saka’s minutes were heavily managed during the Premier League run-in, his body repeatedly protected from the full 90. That pattern has followed him across the Atlantic.

“We're going into a World Cup,”

Wright said,

“and still not starting the first few games, only starting when we're three games in, and still isn’t looking like the Saka that we know – this guy needs a break.”

It’s not just criticism; it sounds like a plea.

The worry doesn’t stop with one player. It spreads across England’s flanks.

Tuchel has turned to Anthony Gordon and Noni Madueke to inject life into the wide areas, but the spark has not arrived. The wings, traditionally England’s escape route when the middle of the pitch tightens, have fallen quiet. Attacks stall. Full-backs overlap into blind alleys. Crosses don’t come, or when they do, they lack conviction.

That creative vacuum has forced England to lean even harder on Jude Bellingham’s surging interventions and Harry Kane’s moments of ruthlessness. When the wide men fade, everything narrows. England become predictable, easier to funnel into traffic, easier to trap.

Roy Keane has seen this film before and doesn’t like the ending. For him, the wingers are running out of excuses.

“The wingers need to grab their opportunity. These players haven't quite grabbed their opportunity yet,”

he said, pointing out that the group stage offers a margin for error that the knockouts simply do not.

“In the group games, you can maybe slip up in one of them, but now at least one of them has to start turning up.”

That “now” is here. England head to Atlanta for a last-32 tie against DR Congo, a fixture they are expected to navigate but one that arrives with a heavy subtext: this is where the tournament truly starts. This is where a misfiring flank, a half-fit star, or a timid performance can send a favourite home.

Beyond DR Congo, the bracket sharpens. Win, and a route through Mexico or Ecuador looms. Survive that, and Brazil may be waiting in the quarter-finals. Then, potentially, the mountain: Argentina in the semi-finals, the reigning champions, the standard-bearers, the team that turns belief into doubt the moment you see Lionel Messi in the tunnel.

Wright, ever the optimist but no fool, can see a path and a ceiling.

“I think if we can get to Brazil we could probably beat Brazil,”

he said, backing England’s talent to rise to one of the game’s great names.

“But then I think we’d have problems after that. I said England would reach the semi-final from the start.”

Keane stripped away even that layer of hope when it came to Argentina.

“England would have absolutely no chance of beating Argentina in the semi’s, I just can’t see it,”

he said. No caveats, no maybes. In his eyes, the gap is too big, the flaws too obvious.

All of which brings the conversation back to Saka and the wings. If England are to test Brazil, let alone stare down Argentina, they cannot limp into those games with a star forward half-fit and his understudies still searching for a performance. They need the old Saka: the one who runs at defenders as if the pitch belongs to him, the one whose body language lifts a stadium.

Right now, they have a different version – still willing, still brave, but dulled by the demands of a brutal season and the strain of an Achilles that won’t let him be himself.

Atlanta will offer a clue. Is this just a slow build towards full sharpness, or the start of a tournament where England’s most reliable wide threat never quite arrives?