The word is “whakapapa”. It comes from the Māori language and it is about finding a sense of belonging within a tribe. It is about togetherness and the strength drawn from it. It is about a feeling of immortality, being able to attach ourselves to something permanent in an impermanent world.

It is a mantra of Owen Eastwood, a former lawyer of Māori descent who has worked as a performance coach with teams as diverse as rugby league’s New Zealand Warriors, the South Africa cricket team and the British Olympic Association, as well as the Royal Ballet School and even NATO. In 2016, the FA offered him one of his most challenging assignments yet: trying to create a sense of identity and togetherness in the England men’s football team, which, over the course of 144 years, had become a by-word for disharmony, underachievement and failure.

Eastwood accepted the task and promised to immerse himself in the subject. He sought out dozens of people for interviews, including current players across the men’s, women’s and various development teams, as well as more historic figures such as Jimmy Armfield, Sir Trevor Brooking, Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney, whose years of experience and insight stretched from the late 1950s to the mid-2010s.

What kept coming back to Eastwood was a total absence of whakapapa, a feeling that, somewhere along the line, the England team had become detached from its roots and its sense of meaning.

Here was a national team with a rich history dating back to the first international match, against Scotland in 1872, and yet few players, past or present, could articulate what playing for England meant beyond referencing a series of fading images – Bobby Moore and the World Cup-winning boys of ’66, Terry Butcher and his blood-stained head-bandage, Gazza’s tears, Stuart Pearce letting out six years of anguish following Italia 90 at Euro 96 – and vague notions such as “pride in the shirt”.

“Pride in the shirt.” What does that even mean?

In Eastwood’s mind, it was a starting point, but it sounded pretty hollow when, having scratched beyond the surface, he found that players were less able to explain what united them on England duty than what divided them.

In his book Belonging: The Ancient Code Of Togetherness, Eastwood recounts his interview with Owen, who made 89 appearances for England between 1998 and 2008, spanning the managerial tenures of Glenn Hoddle, Kevin Keegan, Sven-Goran Eriksson, Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello. “Over the whole of my England career, within the dressing room there was never any mention of the team’s history, nor what it was to be English,” Owen told Eastwood.

Owen suggested the players’ perception of the England identity was largely shaped by external forces: “The media and crowds had this ‘bulldog’ identity. They wanted to see the players chasing everything, being physical, playing at 100mph and showing passion. But that wasn’t the way successful international teams played.”

Beyond that, it appeared incompatible with an England setup in which passion and pride seemed like airy notions rather than something that genuinely underpinned the team’s identity. Time and again, we would come away from international tournaments questioning whether, for all the “bulldog” bluster, international football meant as much to the modern English player as it did to his counterparts from, for example, Wales, Iceland, Croatia or Germany.

England players would talk about how desperately they craved success and how, contrary to perceptions, there was no lack of conviction, desire or togetherness. But then they would retire from the game, and the truth would start to emerge.

There was a “golden generation” of English players who excelled at the highest level of club football but fell well short on the international stage. There were different factors on a micro level — injuries and fatigue in tournaments at the end of a long season, the familiar loss of nerve in a penalty shootout, inflexible tactics from one manager after another — but there were also, without question, deeper issues and questions relating to the team’s identity and culture.

“There’s hatred there. That’s exactly how it was,” former Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard has said of the club rivalries that existed within the England squad during his playing days. “When you meet up for England at that time, you pretend to like them.”

Others have framed it differently, while also making clear that there was very little togetherness, very little sense of belonging.

Frank Lampard’s explanation goes along the lines of, “We didn’t hate each other, but…”. Rio Ferdinand says he felt he would have been undermining Manchester United had he got too close to Liverpool or Chelsea players, such as Gerrard and Lampard, while on England duty. “I think that’s what held us back,” the former defender says.

It sounds damning of all of those concerned, not least the managers, but it keeps coming back to the wider issue here, which is that England didn’t seem to matter, or mean, enough.

Some players felt international get-togethers were a pain in the backside. Outside of tournaments, they felt increasingly like a side-show to the main event in the Premier League and Champions League. Yes, they could talk about uniting for a common cause, but it no longer seemed clear what that cause was.

At the most recent Euros three years ago, after leading England to the semi-finals with an emphatic 4-0 victory over Ukraine, Gareth Southgate talked about the influence of some of the senior players within the squad: Harry Kane, Jordan Henderson, Harry Maguire and Raheem Sterling. He referred to them as “tribal elders”.

His choice of phrase, echoing Eastwood’s ethos, was not a coincidence.

Eastwood arrived at the FA when Southgate was coaching England Under-21s, rather than the senior side, and, even if some of those Māori terms were unfamiliar, it was immediately clear that they spoke the same language when it came to team-building.

As far back as 2014, Southgate was instrumental in the launch of “the England DNA”, a document that spelt out the need to create and establish a new, modern identity that ran through all the development teams. Part of that was about an on-pitch identity – aiming to “dominate possession intelligently” and “regain possession intelligently and as early and efficiently as possible” while “playing with tactical flexibility” – but there was also a significant emphasis on the broader theme of the England team’s identity, with a section called “Who we are”.

Beyond the soundbites and the management jargon that attracted derision in some quarters, there was an important message. It was about creating a different culture around the team and trying to restore that long-lost sense of identity.

“English football has a rich football heritage and history that we want all England players to be aware and respectful of,” the document read. “Before arriving at St George’s Park, the players will understand what is required to represent England – and an induction process will be shared with the players so they understand ‘the England way’. Establishing a distinct and recognisable on-field and off-field England culture, based on clear values and beliefs, is central to our DNA.”

Then came Eastwood, who was introduced to the FA by former head of team strategy and performance Dave Reddin. “We got Owen (Eastwood) involved to do an extensive piece of research to look into questions like, ‘What is the England team’s culture? Where has it come from? What does it mean to be an England player in the 21st century?’,” Reddin tells The Athletic. “There has been so much cultural change in the country that it looks so different now to 20 years ago, never mind 50 years ago.

“It was a seminal piece of research. Owen helped us bring this picture of where we had come from and found some common threads to connect this group of players to this country and what this team wants to be.

“The All Blacks (New Zealand’s serial world champion rugby union team) have rituals and stories that go back over 100 years. With England, there was none of that. What images come to mind when you ask people what it means to play for England? It’s all very well saying Stuart Pearce, the whole ‘bulldog’ spirit, and Terry Butcher with the bloodied bandage, but these players were thinking, ‘That’s not us. That doesn’t resonate with us in the 21st century’.

“You want players to connect to the team in a multitude of ways. Someone like Raheem Sterling is a proud Englishman, but he was born in Jamaica and he’s rightly very proud of his Jamaican roots. He might identify more with those values than with certain traditions, outdated English perceptions of what the England team’s values should be. We wanted to reflect what the England football team means to people in the 21st century and what it should look like to those players within the squad.”

One of the first things the FA did was to formalise the way players were presented with caps after representing England, whatever the level.

“Players would start on their England journey, play for their country, a huge moment in their career… and then they would get a cap through the post,” Reddin says. “So that special moment was brought to them by Royal Mail. Matt Crocker (the former FA head of development teams, who is now technical director for the United States Soccer Foundation) replaced that with a cap presentation evening, and it became the big deal it should be.”

Something similar happened at senior level, where a player making his or her debut would be formally presented with their shirt beforehand by either the manager, an illustrious player from the past or, in the case of Trent Alexander-Arnold in 2018, the Duke of Cambridge — who is also president of the FA. When Rooney made his final England appearance in a friendly against the United States in November 2018, one of his duties that night was to present shirts to debutants Alex McCarthy, Lewis Dunk and Callum Wilson. That, in Southgate’s eyes, was an important symbolic gesture.

That “farewell game” for Rooney, two years on from his previous appearance, was dismissed in some quarters as a cheap publicity stunt typical of an England setup in thrall to celebrity and living in the past.

In fact, the pageantry around Rooney’s send-off was regarded internally as another important piece of symbolism, demonstrating how, in Eastwood’s words, “each of us is part of an unbreakable chain of people going back and forward in time. Back to our first at the beginning of time and into the future at the end of time. Each of us in this chain of people has our arms interlocked with those on either side of it. We are unbreakable. Together, immortal.”

That lineage was underlined in November 2019 by the FA’s introduction of “legacy numbers” before England’s 1,000th match. Mason Mount was informed he was the 1,243rd man to represent England at senior level, so his shirt for that game bore that number underneath the Three Lions crest. “When you consider the number of people who grow up wanting to be footballers and to play for your country, we’re in such a small, privileged percentage,” Mount said. “With the number under the badge, it’s close to your heart. To have that on your shirt, it’s a proud moment.”

The legacy numbers became a useful point of reference during those talks about England’s history.

One such video presentation started with the story of Cuthbert Ottaway, the multi-talented Old Etonian who was England’s first captain but died at the age of 27. It also touched on great players such as Sir Bobby Charlton (number 767) and Bobby Moore (804) and, importantly, Viv Anderson (936), who in November 1978 became the first Black footballer to represent England at senior level, blazing the trail for others, such as Sterling (1,190), Bukayo Saka (1,253) and Kobbie Mainoo (1,280) to follow.

• The Athletic report