England should build a team around Phil Foden. Gareth Southgate doesn't play him in the same role as Pep Guardiola. Foden's best position is No 10. England haven't got the best out of him.

There are variants on a theme but common denominators to the discussions around Foden. One game against Serbia - and one match of tournament football is often a time when premature conclusions about England are drawn - with no Foden shots, and an underwhelming performance, flagged them up. And yet there are answers; some ignored, some inconvenient, some merely recognition of realities.

England could build a team around Foden. But they cannot simultaneously build one around Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane and Bukayo Saka and Declan Rice. In any case, the Real Madrid team is not built around Bellingham, but built with him. The Manchester City team is not built around Foden; sometimes his position shifts according to whether Kevin De Bruyne is fit, or according to whether Guardiola wants the security of an extra central midfielder, such as Mateo Kovacic, or the width of a specialist winger, like Jack Grealish or Jeremy Doku.

Southgate fielded Foden on the left against Serbia. It is not the position he has occupied most frequently for City this season - he has made more appearances in a central role and some off the right - but nor is it unfamiliar. He scored twice against Brighton in April when the nominal left winger.

Foden's preference for playing as a 10 is well known. It is not always granted, however. His 27-goal season for City, his Footballer-of-the-Year campaign came when he was shunted around the side; because of injuries, because of tactics, because Guardiola is reluctant to use both Foden and De Bruyne in the middle against elite opponents. It was not necessary to put him in his favourite spot.

That they are the respective players of the year in Spain and England can lend itself to lazy assertions that England should be favourites to win Euro 2024; but if many of the discussions around England often have a simplistic element, football is about more than simply selecting 11 very good players. If the Golden Generation taught England nothing else, that is a lesson they should have learned. None of which necessarily makes Foden and Bellingham the Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard of the 2020s: too good to be omitted, but incompatible.

That, as a No 10, Bellingham is likelier to drift left than right means he and Foden run the risk of crowding each other, of popping up in the same pockets. Southgate's explanation of the situation is nuanced, ill-suited to the more extreme statements that populate the opening paragraph and which can dominate the debate. "It's about where they end up with the ball, about them having the freedom to go where they want with the ball - in the areas where they can do the most damage and be at their most productive," he said earlier this week. There is some freedom to interchange, a recognition that Bellingham sometimes defends on the left wing for Real. It is less about where players start, more where they finish in a move.

The nature of international management, as Southgate realises, entails trying to find ways to get talents into the team and to coexist and complement players who sometimes want similar roles. For Foden, like Trent Alexander-Arnold, one game did not reveal a magic formula. But nor did it prove an idea should be jettisoned already.