Lee Carsley received a message of congratulations from Jack Grealish in the wake of England U21s claiming a second successive European Championship with an extra-time win over Germany.
Substitute Jonathan Rowe nodded home the winner for England in Bratislava, after Germany had come back from two goals down to take Saturday’s Euro 2025 final to extra-time.
The victory saw Carsley match Dave Sexton’s achievements of 1982 and 1984 by winning successive European U21 Championships with England.
England senior international Jack Grealish was among those to congratulate Carsley at full-time, with the Manchester City winger writing on his Instagram story: “Congrats to England U21s!
“Another amazing achievement! What a manager this guy is. Deserves it.”
Ahead of the Euros, Carsley signed a new contract to extend his stay as U21s boss to 2027.
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Harvey Elliott after scoring England’s first goal in the win over Germany
Image credit: Getty Images
And the 51-year-old, who won five of his six games as the England senior side’s interim coach at the end of last year, is already talking about going for a hat-trick of European crowns in two years’ time.
“Funnily enough, on Saturday I got the new squad of players that are potentially available for the next campaign so I’m not thinking about moving on too quickly.”
Asked whether he would be working alongside Tuchel at the 2026 World Cup, Carsley added: “I’m not sure.
“I’m very proud of the job that I do and I love working with the players.
“Obviously, I’ve had a chance with the senior team as well and I loved that, so the best thing I can do is help the pathway and help the senior team.”
Of his side’s back-to-back success, Carsley said: “The lazy thing as coaches would be to just try to reproduce what we’ve done last time (in 2023), but we’ve done it totally differently.
“We thought outside the box with our training, about tactics and with the way we wanted to play with our squad selection.
“All these instructions we’ve tried to put into them have been taken on board so quickly. This squad believes that they can win and that’s the kind of players we need.”
