Dan Ashworth believes England can win FIFA World Cup

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Bengaluru, May 2: The Football Association’s technical director, Dan Ashworth believes that England can win the upcoming 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.

The 1966 World Cup champions have been seeded in the Group G of 2018 WC along with Belgium, Panama and Tunisia. England will begin their 15th WC journey on June 18 against Tunisia.

Speaking on England’s chance in the upcoming WC, Dan told BBC Sport, "Is it impossible for England to win the World Cup? No, it isn't."

Despite going into tournaments with good squads, England hold the reputation of an early exit. Apart from the 1966 World Cup victory as the host nation, the Three Lions have reached the semi-finals only one more time in the 1990 tournament in Italy. In Brazil 2014, they were eliminated from the group stages after finishing fourth in a group where Costa Rica, Uruguay and Italy finished above them.

However, Dan believes that Gareth Southgate’s England will not suffer the same fate again and make an early exit in the upcoming Russia WC as they want to inspire the nation.

"We want to inspire the nation and in order to do that, we have to play well and win some football matches," he said.

He added, "We have got some talented players. We don't have a history at this moment in time of succeeding at tournaments. So we've hopefully got to try and move our talented players into performing better at tournaments and getting through to those latter stages.”

After Dan took charge as the technical director of the FA in September 2012, England have achieved some massive international success in the youth levels.

Last year, the England youth teams won both the U-17 and U-20 FIFA World Cups for the first time in history. While, the England U-19 team also won the 2017 U-19 European Championship crown.

Speaking on their long-term project to achieve sustainable success at the highest level of international stages, Dan elaborated, "One of the first things I did (after taking over) was look at what international success looks like. We've studied 10 countries - three non-European, seven European - and looked at their senior success."

"Two things really sprung out to us. One, that success at youth level does correlate to success at senior level. And the second thing that stood out to us was the number of caps.

"The German players in their senior team had around 60-odd youth caps before that transition (to the senior team). Our senior players were on about 30 so we were getting half the experience at youth level.

"We looked at things differently. We went strategically to try and play non-European opposition, so sent out younger teams to Brazil, we re-entered Toulon. We had a look at that programme and that pathway to really try and help equip our young players better for international football.

"That's a long-term programme and it doesn't happen overnight. The shoots are there, it's promising, but until we start competing at the latter stages of tournaments I won't deem this programme to be a success."