When I saw in headlines that soccer/football commentator Gary Lineker had called England’s national team “shit” or “s—” (the two main variations I saw), I knew I had to find the exact wording. The quote is beyond the scope of this blog, since Lineker is English, but for some years I have been tracking the adjectival use of “shit” and “crap” — both borderline NOOBs — and in the interest of science, I wanted to find out what Lineker said.
It proved deuced hard, as almost every newspaper and website either used the single word or versions with hyphens, or asterisks. Finally, I found a Daily Mail article that linked to another Daily Mail article that had the full quote: “I mean, you can think of all sorts of words or expletives if you like, but it was shit.” (At the risk of stating the obvious, an American would say “shitty,” or “they played like shit.”)
Now, “it” was referring to England’s 1-1 draw with Denmark in the UEFA European Championship on June 24. Since then, the team has advanced to the knockout round, and won three consecutive matches to advance to the championship this Sunday against Spain.
You could argue that Lineker’s criticism motivated England. Or, you could say his commentary was shit.
notoneoffbritishisms.com 
I never knew that Americans don’t use the word as an adjective. The other different is that the British have also given the verb a past participle: “shat”.
Ngram Viewer shows “had shat” more common in Britain than the U.S., but not by much! https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=had+shat%3Aeng_us_2019%2Chad+shat%3Aeng_gb_2019&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3
According to the quote, Lineker said that the game was shit — not that the team was shit, which I think would have been a rather stronger claim. Are the headlines you mention, that clearly confused the two, British or American? (And did you intend the last line to be as harsh as it might seem, at least to Brits?)
I think all or almost all of the headlines were British. A lot also about Harry Kane’s response to Lineker. As for last line, I was having a bit of a laugh but maybe I’ll soften it.
There’s also the British past participle of the verb, shat, which Americans don’t use.
“…the team has advanced to the knockout round, and won three consecutive matches to advance to the championship this Sunday against Spain” – the championship is the entire event. England and Spain have reached the final of the championship.
The title of this post should be “Is England Shit?”, but that’s just an American speaking.
Is the use of “are” in the headline an example of Ben using a Britishism ?
Yes.