England definitely lacked creativity in their final third. Whereas France showed a decent amount of creativity in their attack. France has looked very good, overall, especially for such a young team.
US Soccer doesn't necessarily model itself after English soccer. That would be an oversimplification of the reality which is that the style of soccer employed by any country tends to be the result of a number of different factors and influences. And they typically vary over time.
For example, go back a couple/few decades and Germany had a machine-like, boring, regimented attacking style. Probe and retreat and switch, probe and retreat and switch, endlessly until it seemed like the opposing team grew frustrated and allowed themselves to be pulled out of shape. But then, during their recent spate of international victories, they had become much more lively, more aggressive and more creative.
The lack of creativity on the US team is a combination of things. While a player's individual skills and talents are part of it, a big part of it is coaching (not just the coach of the USMNT, but also the coaches a player had when in youth soccer, or school soccer).
US Soccer has certainly had players with the skill and talent to be creative. But, while I can't know this for certain, as an outside observer, it seems to me that in general, the US teams have had creativity coached out of them. I would guess it was unintentional, more a consequence of the system of play and positional coaching than any intention to stifle creativity (which would be nuts).
In order to be creative, a player needs (a) to have enough comfort, both on and off the ball, to improvise, (b) to have the skill to do the unexpected, and (c) to have players around him who are in tune with him in a left-brained manner, and who expect the unexpected. But most of all, the attacking players have to be skilled enough to do all this against very strong defenders.
That last point is critical. If a player plays without confidence, because that player is over-matched by an opposing defender, then the attacking player is unlikely to demonstrate much creativity simply out of an appropriate degree of caution about being dispossessed at the wrong time. Or because even getting into the final third is so difficult, they become risk averse when there.
More emphasis on individual skill development at young ages (all the way up until high-school, at least), and less emphasis on tactical development would help. This is a widely understood, but rarely followed truism. I heard it constantly by the coaches who ran various coach licensing courses I took.
But in youth soccer, especially where the best competition is now found in premiere clubs (which are expensive to join, ruling out quite a lot of talent), the pressure to win, even at young ages, is very, very high. Which is completely counter-productive in terms of development. It forces coaches to prioritize coaching to win games over coaching to develop skills and understanding.
If some parent is paying 5000/year for their kid to play in a premiere club, that parent wants that kid to be winning. Otherwise, that parent will take that kid to some competing club. This is a problem, and some ODP coaches I've talked to about it know it, but are effectively powerless to do anything about it.
