The Golden Generation doc is coming

The campaign that never stops being talked about

Germany 2006 was supposed to be England's moment. Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, David Beckham — on paper, a squad that could genuinely challenge. On the pitch, a team that never quite found second gear, grinding through the group stage before falling to Portugal on penalties in the quarter-finals. Again.

The off-field noise was almost as loud as anything that happened in the stadiums. Rooney's red card against Portugal. The WAGs in Baden-Baden. Sven-Göran Eriksson's final tournament in charge. The sense, by the end, that something had quietly curdled inside that squad long before the shootout.

What the trailer promises

BBC Sport's trailer signals the documentary will go at both sides of that story — the football and the chaos around it. The full broadcast date, format, and confirmed interviewees haven't been announced from the trailer alone, so exactly who sits down on camera remains the big question. But the framing is clear: this is a proper revisit, not a highlights package.

The timing matters. A generation of fans who watched that tournament as teenagers are now in their thirties, old enough to contextualise it and young enough to still feel the sting. England reaching a World Cup semi-final in 2018 and a final at Euro 2020 has only sharpened the contrast — it turns out the Golden Generation's failure wasn't inevitable, which makes it worse.

Why it still matters

The 2006 campaign sits at the centre of a very particular English football argument: were that group of players simply not as good as advertised, or were they badly managed, badly organised, and badly served by the circumstances around them? Probably some of all three — but the documentary looks set to let the people who were actually there make the case.

That's the part worth waiting for. The trailer. The full release details are still to come from BBC Sport.