England manager Gareth Southgate says it’s going to take some time before Phil Foden and Mason Greenwood can earn his trust again after breaking quarantine to host two girls at the team hotel in Iceland.
Foden and Greenwood were sent home from the squad as they moved on from Iceland to Denmark during their two-fixture UEFA Nations League road trip, as the pair have hit the headlines across Europe for all the wrong reasons.
Video footage showed Manchester City midfielder Foden and Manchester United striker Greenwood appearing to invite women to their hotel rooms following England’s 1-0 win over Iceland in Reykjavik.
Their breach of the team’s COVID-19 protocols led Southgate to remove them from his squad, and both men were sent home as they missed England’s 0-0 draw with Denmark on Tuesday night.
Speaking to reporters in Denmark, Southgate laid out the situation for his two ill-disciplined young stars.
“Trust needs to be rebuilt and that takes time,” he said.
“There has to be a consequence to what happened and then we’ve got to try to help them rebuild. Young people err more often than older people do. But that doesn’t mean that you can hold that against them forever.”
The issue of the team’s COVID-19 protocols was, according to Southgate, only a circumstantial issue, with the England boss revealing the players would have received the same punishment even without the quarantine restrictions in place.
“I don’t really understand how players could have felt that was acceptable. That is a puzzle to me,” he admitted.
“We talked about a COVID breach. Initially, that was what we needed to take control of. We had to act quickly.
“What’s emerged since means that whether there had been a COVID situation or not we’d have been sending the players home anyway.
“Everybody else needs to understand that’s not going to be tolerated within an England camp.”
Foden and Greenwood both issued apologies following the incident, while the English Football Association announced they would be launching an investigation into the breach of protocols, which they labeled “unacceptable.”
