England Friendlies Explained: Why They Still Matter
England international friendlies explained for UK fans: how the FA arranges them, the six-substitute rule, club release, ticketing and what results mean.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished England National Team20 min read
A friendly is the only fixture in international football where a manager may make six substitutions, hand out a debut that ties the player to nobody, and lose heavily without dropping far in the world ranking. That combination is the entire argument for playing them, and it explains why the Football Association keeps scheduling matches that a large part of the Wembley crowd will grumble about on the way home.
The complaint is familiar and not unreasonable. Ninety minutes of a match nobody is trying to win, in the middle of a domestic season, with players withdrawn from clubs who would rather have them resting. Everything below is an attempt to set out what the fixture is actually for, who arranges it, what rules change when the game does not count, and how a British supporter should read what happens on the pitch.
What a friendly is for once the calendar is full
Start with the constraint. FIFA publishes an international match calendar that fixes the windows in which associations may call players up, and outside those windows a club is under no obligation to release anybody. England's competitive fixtures — World Cup qualifiers, European Championship qualifiers, Nations League matches — occupy most of that space. A friendly has to fit in what is left.
So the modern friendly is not filler. It is a scarce slot, and the FA uses it for one of four jobs.
Preparation is the first. Before a major tournament, the calendar releases players early and a national side plays one or two warm-up matches against opponents chosen to resemble the group opponents ahead. That is where a manager finds out whether his back line copes with a certain kind of centre-forward.
Second is examination. A friendly is the safest place to give a first cap, because a friendly appearance does not permanently commit a dual-national player to England under FIFA's eligibility rules — a point covered in more depth on the youth pathway page.
Third is rehearsal. Set-piece routines, a change of shape at 60 minutes, a goalkeeper's distribution against a high press: none of these can be trialled in a qualifier where a point matters.
Fourth, and least romantic, is revenue. Wembley is an FA asset with a mortgage-sized cost base, and a full house for a friendly pays for a great deal of grassroots football.
Those four jobs pull against each other, which is why friendly selection so often looks incoherent from the outside. A match built to test six new players is not the match that sells 80,000 tickets, and a match against a strong opponent chosen for ranking value is not the match in which you hand a nervous twenty-year-old his debut. Any given friendly is a compromise between at least two of the four, and the compromise is usually visible in the team sheet: a recognisable first-choice spine for the first hour, then the experiments.
Who arranges an England friendly, and how the money moves
Nobody in the game calls this fixture-making. It is closer to booking a venue.
The FA's international department works one to three years ahead, mapping the calendar windows against the qualifying draws once they are known. Where a window has a spare date, it approaches associations directly or through match agents who broker international fixtures for a commission. The other association has the same problem in reverse, which is why the arrangement is usually reciprocal in principle even when it is not reciprocal in practice.
Money flows in one of two directions. For a home match at Wembley the FA takes the gate, hospitality and domestic broadcast income, and typically pays the visiting association a fee plus travel and accommodation. For an away friendly the position reverses, and England, as an opponent who fills stadiums, can command an appearance fee. Some fixtures abroad are arranged with a commercial promoter rather than directly between associations, particularly matches staged on neutral territory.
- Window identifiedThe FA maps FIFA calendar dates against its confirmed competitive fixtures and finds the free slots, usually more than a year out.
- Opponent shortlistedCandidates are ranked on playing style, ranking value, commercial appeal and whether the date suits their own calendar.
- Approach madeContact goes association to association, or through a match agent who holds relationships with several federations.
- Terms agreedVenue, fee, travel costs, broadcast rights, ticket allocation for visiting supporters and the split of any hospitality income.
- SanctioningThe fixture is registered with FIFA and UEFA, referees are appointed by a neutral body and the match is confirmed on the calendar.
- Sale and stagingTickets go on sale through the FA's supporter scheme first, then general sale, with police and local authority planning around the date.
The sequence the FA works through. Individual fixtures vary and some steps run in parallel.
The FA also has to think about who it is seen to be playing. An opponent's political situation, human rights record and standing with FIFA all bear on whether a fixture is arranged, and those judgements are made in the same building as the football ones.
Officials, and why a friendly still needs a full appointment
A friendly is a full international under the Laws of the Game, so it needs a neutral refereeing team appointed through the confederations rather than by either association. That appointment is not a formality. Friendlies are one of the places UEFA and FIFA give experience to officials being developed for bigger fixtures, in the same spirit that the associations use the match to give experience to players. Video assistant refereeing is used in some friendlies and not others, depending on what the host association has agreed and can staff, which is why a decision that would be reviewed in a qualifier sometimes stands untouched in a friendly. If you have ever wondered why the technology seems to come and go, that is the reason; the domestic version of the same system is explained on the VAR page.
The substitution rules that only apply when the game does not count
Law 3 of the Laws of the Game, written by the International Football Association Board, is where the difference sits.
In a competitive senior international a squad may use five substitutes, taken in three stoppages plus the half-time interval, which is why a manager who wants four changes will usually make them in two batches. In a friendly between senior representative teams the permitted number rises to six. Other friendly matches can go further still, where both teams and the referee agree the number before kick-off.
- 5Substitutes in a competitive international
- 6Substitutes in a friendly between senior teams
- 3Stoppages available to use them
The limits set by the Laws of the Game, not a description of how many changes any team actually makes.
Two things do not change. A substituted player still may not return to the pitch; the Laws restrict return substitutions to youth, veterans, disability and grassroots football, so the rolling-substitute arrangement people remember from testimonials is not available in an international friendly. And the concussion protocol runs on its own track, with additional permanent concussion substitutes sitting outside the ordinary count under the trial provisions IFAB has approved.
The practical consequence is that a friendly is a different sport for the last half-hour. Six changes across a hundred-odd minutes of playing time means the side finishing the match may share only four or five players with the one that started it, and any conclusion drawn from the closing twenty minutes is nearly worthless. Supporters who leave early are usually right to.
The other things that bend in a friendly
Substitutions are the change everyone knows about. Several others matter more than they appear to.
Squad size for a friendly camp is set by the association rather than by a competition regulation, so a manager can call up more players than a tournament list would allow and can add replacements without a formal approval process. That is why friendly squads look bloated, and why a withdrawal on the Tuesday produces a new name on the Wednesday rather than a gap.
Disciplinary consequences run on a separate track. Cautions and dismissals in a friendly are dealt with under FIFA's disciplinary code, but cards accumulated within a qualifying competition are counted inside that competition, so a booking in a March friendly does not move a player a step closer to missing a qualifier. The carry-over arrangements have been amended more than once and are worth checking against the current regulations rather than taken on memory.
Video assistant refereeing, as above, is optional and depends on what the host association can staff. So is goal-line technology, and the complement of match officials is appointed according to what the fixture warrants rather than what a competition mandates. A friendly is a full international played under the Laws of the Game with a discretionary amount of the apparatus that normally surrounds them.
What the Nations League did to the fixture
Before 2018, the autumn was mostly friendlies. UEFA's members had qualifying groups that gave the larger associations a handful of straightforward matches and then long gaps, filled with friendlies that nobody enjoyed selling.
The Nations League, launched in the 2018-19 season, was designed explicitly to replace them. It sorted associations into leagues by strength, gave each a small group of comparable opponents, and attached promotion, relegation and a route to European Championship qualification to the results. The format is set out on the Nations League page.
The effect on England's calendar was blunt. September, October and November dates that would once have held friendlies now hold competitive matches, and the number of friendlies England play in a typical cycle fell sharply. What survives is concentrated in the March window and in the pre-tournament period.
There is a secondary consequence that gets less attention. Smaller European associations lost their most valuable fixtures, because a friendly against England was worth more to a federation in central Europe than a Nations League group match against a comparable neighbour. UEFA's answer was that competitive football against equals develops a side better than an annual thrashing does, and on the evidence of how the lower Nations League leagues have gone, that argument has largely held. The friendly against a giant was always a financial arrangement dressed as a football one.
That has made the remaining friendlies more purposeful and, in an odd way, more interesting. A friendly is now a deliberate choice to give up a competitive fixture's ranking points in exchange for an experiment, which means the opponent has usually been chosen for a reason. Watch who England play in March of a tournament year and you can generally work out which group opponent the coaching staff are worried about.
Testing players, systems and set pieces
Here is what a coach can genuinely learn in ninety minutes with no jeopardy, and what he cannot.
He can learn whether a player copes with the speed of international football. That is a real and immediate test, and it is the reason debuts happen in friendlies rather than in qualifiers. Domestic form does not settle it; some very good Premier League players have looked half a second slow in a white shirt and never quite recovered.
He can learn whether a shape holds against an unfamiliar problem. Playing a side that uses a back three with wing-backs, or one that presses in a way nobody in England does, exposes structural weaknesses that a home qualifier against a weaker opponent never will.
Set pieces are the most underrated use of the fixture. A routine needs live repetition against defenders who do not know it, and there is nowhere else to get that. Coaching staff will sometimes run the same corner four times in a friendly, which looks like a lack of imagination and is the opposite.
There is also a quieter use, which is fitness. A player returning from a long absence needs competitive minutes in a controlled setting, and an association and a club will sometimes agree in advance that he plays an hour and no more. Those arrangements are rarely announced, and they explain a substitution that otherwise looks inexplicable at 0-0.
What he cannot learn is anything about temperament under pressure. A friendly at 1-1 with fifteen minutes left is not a qualifier at 1-1 with fifteen minutes left, and pretending otherwise has caused a lot of bad selection over the years. The evidence on England and pressure is examined on the tournament record page.
Club release when the match does not count
Annexe 1 of FIFA's Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players is the whole of the law here, and it is more generous to associations than most supporters assume.
A club must release a registered player to his association for matches on the international match calendar. Friendlies played inside a window are covered. The release period for a friendly is shorter than for a competitive fixture, and the player must be returned by a set deadline after the last match of the window, with the deadline extended where he has crossed continents.
Outside the windows, nothing. No obligation, no mechanism, no appeal. That is why associations do not schedule anything of consequence there.
Clubs are not required to release an injured or ill player, though the association may have him examined by a doctor of its own choosing. This is the flashpoint. A club that wants a player rested has an incentive to describe a niggle as an injury, and an association that wants him has an incentive to disbelieve it, and the dispute is normally settled by phone rather than by regulation.
The financial side is less well known. FIFA operates a club protection scheme funded centrally, which compensates clubs for the wage cost of a player injured on international duty, within defined limits and for a capped period. It does not make a club whole for a season-ending injury to a key player, and it was never designed to. But it exists, and it is one reason the release system has held together as well as it has. The wider money picture at club level is covered on the wage bills page.
What an international week actually contains
Players report on a Monday, as a rule, and the match is on a Thursday or a Saturday. Between those two points sits a routine with more administration in it than football.
The first day is medical. Every player arriving from a club is screened, because the association is taking custody of an asset worth more than the fixture and the club will want a written account of what happened to it. Load data from the previous weekend is read across, and a player who has covered 180 minutes in six days is flagged before he has trained once.
Training is short and thin on volume. There are rarely more than two full sessions before a friendly, one of them weighted heavily towards set pieces and shape, and a portion of the squad will not train fully at all. That is the constraint every international coach describes and few supporters allow for: a club manager has his players for eleven months, and an England manager has them for about four days at a time, during which the first priority is returning them uninjured.
Media obligations take a real slice of the week. A pre-match press conference is required by the confederations for competitive fixtures and the FA runs the equivalent for friendlies, alongside broadcast interviews, sponsor commitments and — at Wembley — a run of community and grassroots events that the association schedules around the squad precisely because a friendly week has room a qualifier week does not.
Matchday for a friendly is recognisably lighter. Team news that would be guarded before a qualifier is often given out early, because there is nothing to protect; a manager will sometimes name a side two days out and tell the room how long each player is expected to last. Captaincy rotates in a way it never does in a competitive fixture, and the armband going to a player winning his fifteenth cap rather than his sixtieth is a deliberate signal rather than an accident of selection.
Then there is the part with no football in it at all. Squads meet, in the plain sense of the word. Players who spend the season trying to take each other's places sit at the same tables, and a good deal of what a national coach does in a friendly week is build the relationships he will need in a tournament hotel eighteen months later. Coaches say this constantly and it sounds like public relations. It is also the honest answer to why a fixture that decides nothing still gets three days of preparation.
Release deadlines close the week out. The player goes back, the medical report goes with him, and the club's staff pick up where the association's left off.
Playing away from Wembley
The old Wembley closed in October 2000 and the new stadium opened in 2007, and for those seven seasons England had no home. The FA took the team round the country instead, and the fixtures went to Old Trafford, Villa Park, St James' Park, Anfield, Elland Road, the Riverside Stadium, Pride Park and a string of other grounds.
That period is remembered fondly, and not only by nostalgists. Attendances at a 35,000-seat ground looked and sounded better than a half-full national stadium, ticket prices were lower, and supporters in the north and the midlands could reach a home international without a return trip to London. It also spread the FA's relationship with local authorities and police forces, which had a value nobody put on a balance sheet.
| Period | Where England played home matches | Practical effect |
|---|---|---|
| To October 2000 | The old Wembley Stadium | Fixed home, twin towers, a standing London logistics operation |
| 2001 to 2007 | Club grounds across England | Smaller capacities, cheaper tickets, regional access |
| 2007 onwards | Wembley Stadium, with occasional exceptions | Largest capacity and hospitality income, London-centred travel |
Since the return to Wembley the FA has occasionally staged matches elsewhere, usually when the stadium is committed to something else. There is a standing argument, made most often by supporters outside the south-east, that friendlies in particular should be taken around the country as a matter of policy. The counter-argument is straightforwardly financial: Wembley's capacity and hospitality income are why the FA can fund what it funds, and a friendly at a club ground gives up a large share of that. Both positions are honest. The visitor guide to the ground itself sits on the Wembley page.
Ticket pricing and who a friendly is sold to
The FA prices friendlies below competitive fixtures. That is a consistent policy rather than a promise, and the mechanism is worth understanding because it explains who ends up in the ground.
Wembley is banded by location, so the same fixture carries several price points. Concessions apply for under-16s and over-65s. The FA has run family enclosures with reduced adult prices attached to a child ticket, on the reasonable theory that a friendly is where you take a nine-year-old to a first England match rather than to a knife-edge qualifier. Availability is generally good, and a friendly is the easiest England ticket to get.
Priority goes to members of the FA's supporter scheme before general sale, and the scheme's rules, caps and loyalty points are set out on the England Supporters Travel Club page. Away friendlies work differently again, with the allocation to travelling England fans set by the host association and distributed through the scheme, usually with a requirement to have attended previous matches.
Prices change from season to season, so no figures appear here. Check the FA's ticketing pages before you plan a trip, and note that friendly tickets often remain available on the day.
Who fills the ground is a different question from who can afford it. A midweek friendly at Wembley draws a noticeably different crowd from a tournament qualifier: more families, more first-timers, more coach parties organised through junior clubs and county FAs, and fewer of the supporters who follow the side abroad. That produces the atmosphere friendlies are criticised for, which is quiet and patient rather than hostile. Whether that is a failure depends on what you think the fixture is for. A national association that never puts on an affordable, low-stakes match has no obvious way of turning nine-year-olds into supporters, and the FA has been fairly consistent in treating friendlies as the entry point rather than as the shop window.
Do friendly results predict anything
The ranking answer is precise. FIFA's world ranking uses a points formula in which every match is weighted by an importance coefficient, and friendlies sit at the bottom of the scale, with matches played outside international windows weighted below those played inside them. The scale rises through the Nations League group stage to qualifiers and then to final tournaments.
The football answer is messier. Friendly results correlate weakly with tournament results, and the correlation runs mostly through squad quality rather than through anything the friendly itself reveals. A good side beats a poor side in March and also in June, which tells you about the side and not about the fixture.
Where friendlies do carry information is in the negative. A team that concedes repeatedly from the same defensive pattern across two or three friendlies has a problem that will not fix itself under pressure. Individual performances are noisier still, because a player facing tired opposition after five substitutions has been handed an easier examination than his stat line implies.
The ranking weighting has a knock-on effect that supporters occasionally spot and misread. Because a friendly against a much weaker side can cost ranking points even in victory, under a formula that rewards results relative to the gap between the two teams, a heavily favoured association has a mild incentive to choose stronger friendly opponents than pure preparation would suggest. Seeding for World Cup and European Championship draws runs off the ranking, so the choice is not cosmetic. It is one of the few places where the fixture list is shaped by arithmetic rather than by football.
An honest reading: treat a friendly as a diagnostic instrument with a low resolution. It rules things out more reliably than it rules them in.
Friendlies that turned out to matter
25 November 1953. Hungary came to Wembley and won 6-3, the first side from outside the British Isles to beat England on English soil, and they did it with a withdrawn centre-forward that the English defence had no vocabulary for. Six months later, in Budapest, they won the return 7-1. Neither match counted for anything. Both changed English football more than any qualifier of that decade, because they ended the assumption that the country that codified the game still understood it best.
23 October 1963. The FA marked its centenary with a match between England and a Rest of the World XI at Wembley, which England won 2-1. It was an exhibition, and it is remembered because of the company: the fixture put the English game back in the international conversation two decades after it had left it.
Then there is the whole category of pre-tournament friendly. England's preparation before the 1966 World Cup included a European tour of matches that meant nothing and settled a great deal about selection and shape, and the pattern has repeated before every tournament since. The story of the tournament that followed is told on the 1966 page.
And the oldest fixture of all began as a friendly. England and Scotland met at Hamilton Crescent in Partick on 30 November 1872 and drew 0-0, the first recognised international match between two national teams, described in full on the oldest rivalry page.
How to judge a friendly performance
Watch the first hour and discount the last thirty minutes. That is the single most useful rule, and it follows directly from the six-substitute allowance.
Watch the shape rather than the scoreline. Whether the midfield holds its distances against a pressing side is information. Whether the ball goes in twice or four times mostly is not.
Watch for the thing the coach is obviously testing. A friendly usually contains one experiment — a player out of position, a different build-up pattern, a set-piece variation repeated three times — and identifying it is more rewarding than tracking the score. If a full-back inverts into midfield twice in the opening twenty minutes, that is not an accident.
Do not draw squad conclusions from a debut. One cap against a side ranked fortieth in the world on a wet Tuesday tells a manager very little, which is why he will usually give the same player a second one before deciding anything.
And keep a sense of proportion about the result. England have lost friendlies and won tournaments in the same year, and won friendlies handsomely before going out in a quarter-final. The fixture is a rehearsal room, not a performance. If you want the matches that actually settle England's fate, they are the qualifiers and the finals, and the European Championship record is the better place to look for a verdict. More of the domestic game sits in the football section, and the wider set of England guides begins at the hub.