Thomas Tuchel’s 26-man squad in May turned Djed Spence from a fringe name into one of the most watched players in England’s camp, and he has answered the call with the sort of rise that few at Tottenham Hotspur saw coming. For a player once written off as a right-back who could not quite settle, the move into an England shirt changed the scale of the conversation overnight.
That is why his name keeps surfacing now. His family quickly followed him to the United States after the squad announcement, and Spence, 25, has not looked like a passenger. Against Mexico, he was able to slot into a back five when England were defending deep, the kind of flexibility that helps explain why Tuchel took the gamble on a player whose club career had often looked stuck in neutral.
Spence’s path to that point has been anything but smooth. He started life as a winger in Peckham, south London, was released by Fulham just shy of his 18th birthday and then had to keep restarting his career on loan. Nottingham Forest came next, and almost immediately he found himself under another change of manager. Steve Cooper took him to a level that was later reflected by a graffiti tag outside the City Ground reading, “Djed Spence, we miss you.”
Tottenham Hotspur never gave him a clean run. Antonio Conte dismissed him in public as a “club signing” rather than someone he wanted, and Spence later said that remark “shattered his confidence”. Conte gave him just 43 minutes in total, a brutal number for a player who arrived with the promise of becoming a long-term answer. Even after loans at Rennes, Leeds and Genoa, he was still fighting for relevance. He studied French and Italian but never fully settled, had a loan in Yorkshire cut short by a knee ligament injury after seven appearances, and in Italy the Serie A side refused to pay £8m to make the move permanent. Daniel Farke also complained about his lateness to training sessions at Leeds.
Back in north London, the struggle did not end. It took two-and-a-half years for Spence to start a game there, and four years after joining Tottenham Hotspur he had already played under five Spurs managers. Under Roberto De Zerbi, he was still not guaranteed a start, and with Ben Davies, Destiny Udogie and Souza all out, he has been forced more often than not onto the opposite flank because of an injury crisis. That has made him a useful stopgap rather than a settled regular, even as Tuchel looked past the uncertainty and saw enough to name him in the 26-man squad.
The real question now is less about whether Spence belongs than how far this late turn can carry him. After loans across three clubs and only an hour of football between August and mid-December 2024, he has gone from expendable to examinable on the biggest stage. If this summer has proved anything, it is that the Spence England Player story is no longer about survival. It is about whether a career nearly broken by doubt can now be rebuilt fast enough to change his future as well as his present.
