Senegal Becomes the First African Team to Beat England

Senegal became the first African national team ever to beat England’s senior men’s side, defeating the Three Lions 3-1 in an international friendly at Nottingham’s City Ground on June 10, 2025. The result stood out immediately in football coverage not just for the margin of victory but for the specific milestone it represented: in more than a century of England fielding a national team, no African country had previously managed a win against them.

England took an early lead through captain Harry Kane, who scored in the seventh minute, giving the home side exactly the start a friendly against a lower-ranked opponent would typically be expected to produce. Senegal responded with a performance that dominated the remainder of the match, equalizing and then pulling ahead through goals from Ismaïla Sarr, Habib Diarra and Cheikh Sabaly, turning what had opened as a routine fixture into a genuinely historic result by full time.

The loss carried particular weight given the timing: it was the first defeat suffered by England under head coach Thomas Tuchel since he had taken charge of the team in January 2025, arriving less than half a year into a tenure that was still being closely scrutinized by English football media. Commentary following the match focused heavily on what the result suggested about Tuchel’s early management of the squad, with some outlets explicitly framing the loss as casting doubt on his fit for the role, a debate that extended the match’s significance well past the historic African-team milestone that had made it newsworthy in the first place.

For Senegal, ranked among Africa’s strongest footballing nations and Africa Cup of Nations champions as recently as 2021, the win added a genuinely novel milestone to an already established record of continental success, giving Senegalese football a specific, dateable claim, the first African win over England, that had eluded every other national team on the continent across the entire history of international football between Africa and England.