Prince William Visits England’s Football Training Center Ahead of the 2026 World Cup

Prince William paid a surprise visit to the English national team’s training center earlier this month ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. As Patron of England’s Football Association, the Prince of Wales spent time with the support staff working behind the scenes at St. George’s Park, including coaches, analysts, medical personnel, nutritionists, sports scientists, and logistics teams. A huge soccer fan himself, Prince William appeared optimistic about England’s chances this summer.

“All of the things are coming in a line now: the Lionesses’ successes they’ve had, two men’s Euros finals, it feels like we are closing in on that ambition,” he said in a video shared to social media on Wednesday. England’s Three Lions, as the men’s team is known, have come in second at the last two European Championships in 2024 and 2021. The women’s team, the Lionesses, were finalists at the 2023 Women’s World Cup and won back-to-back European Championship titles in 2022 and 2025.

Although nothing has been confirmed yet, Prince William is widely expected to make the trip to the United States to watch at least one England match, having previously traveled to Germany for the Euros in 2024 with Prince George and attended the Women’s Euros final in Switzerland last summer alongside Princess Charlotte.

England arrives at the tournament as one of the contenders, currently ranked fourth in the global FIFA standings. The country’s only World Cup title came in 1966, when the team beat West Germany 4-2 in extra time at home at London’s Wembley Stadium. Since then, England has reached the semifinals twice—in 1990 and 2018—and the quarterfinals as recently as 2022 in Qatar, though the team has also failed to qualify three times (including the last time the United States hosted in 1994) and been eliminated in the group stage on three occasions.

Prince William meets with the “team behind the team” supporting England’s World Cup campaign.

Led by team captain and England’s all-time top goalscorer, Harry Kane, the Three Lions’ 26-player roster was unveiled in a live broadcast from Wembley over the weekend. The announcement was accompanied by a short film set to The Beatles’ “Come Together,” shot across New York City, with references throughout to the iconic English rock band’s cultural footprint in the United States during the 1960s.

Other nations have been rolling out their squads with varying degrees of ceremony. Star Wars actor Ewan McGregor served as a narrator in a cinematic announcement for Scotland’s roster reveal. The United States Men’s National Team introduced its squad at a media event in New York on Tuesday. Norway’s King Harald and Spain’s King Felipe both personally announced their countries’ rosters. However, whether either monarch will attend matches in person remains unclear. King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima of the Netherlands have confirmed plans to attend the Netherlands’ June 20 opener against Sweden in Houston and Curaçao’s match against Ecuador in Kansas City the same day.

England opens its World Cup campaign against Croatia on June 17 in Dallas at 4 p.m. eastern, then meets Ghana on June 23 in Boston at 4 p.m., before facing Panama on June 27 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, at 5 p.m.

Rachel King (she/her) is a news writer at Town & Country. Before joining T&C, she spent nearly a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work covering travel and lifestyle has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Critic, and Cool Hunting, among others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York with her wife, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at .