The men’s football World Cup is around the corner.

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Well, almost. It is actually being held in the USA, Canada and Mexico. We have already had the granular analysis of why the English football manager Thomas Tuchel has selected the wrong people for his squad, or rather, left out many of the right people for reasons unknown to every expert pundit.

What is interesting is that Tuchel has stressed the importance of teamship in his selections. It builds on Gareth Southgate’s outstanding work in creating an England team that was actually a team. A brilliant lesson in leadership skills applied to one of the hardest challenges - getting young millionaires to get on with each other.

As Tuchel said in his press conference, teams win tournaments. And as Steven Gerrard has recently acknowledged, the so-called golden generation of Beckham, Scholes, Lampard and himself was riven with factions and never felt like a team. Hence losing as they did.

Teams matter because they can engender a sense of belonging and deepen friendships. These matter to everyone, but they are particularly true for boys and men, who need reasons to reach out to each other and different ways to bond. Good teams enable that process. But trends have been moving away from enabling sports teams or other forms of teams where boys have traditionally found kinship, mateship and purpose.

Over the last three decades, Britain has experienced two overlapping trends that have........

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