Before England meet Panama, their second Group G rival at the Nizhny Novgorod Stadium on Sunday, multiple media outlets including the Daily Mirror and Daily Post released the team's starter line-up. Manager Gareth Southgate was not happy about the leak.

According to the leaked list, Ruben Loftus-Cheek will replace injured Dele Alli. And the most eye-catching change is that Raheem Sterling, who missed several opportunities in the first match against Tunisia, will sit on the bench while Marcus Rashford takes his position.

Considering the gap of strength between the two sides, such a leak will hardly be of much help to Panama. But it could be a distraction for England players who mostly care about whether they could make it into the line-up.

"Obviously, any time, if we were to give the opposition the opportunity of having our team, it's a disadvantage to us. So of course our media have to decide whether they want to help the team or not. But given that was just a squad list, it doesn't make any difference to us, really," said Southgate.

According to Tencent Sports, journalists took a picture of a notebook held by Southgate's assistant Steve Holland with England's starting XI written on it, for the Panama game.

This is not the first time English press brought the country's football team into a fix. In July, 2005, the now-defunct News of the World sent Mazher Mahmood who posed as an oil baron from the Middle East to trick Sven-Göran Eriksson, England manager at that time, into telling secrets. The country's former midfielder Frank Lampard also said that at every post-match press conference, players felt that they stepped onto another battlefield against the country's press.