While you are technically correct, in English it’s perfectly fine to say it this way as well.

“Second only” here has meaning “next after”, not “number two”.

So... France took second to England and Argentina?

	▲	vl 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		France’s football team is second only to England’s and Argentina’s. It’s a miracle that in language same words have different meanings depending on context. If this wouldn’t be the case we could have hardcoded NLP algorithmically without inventing these expensive LLMs!
	▲	make3 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Second group essentially is how you have to think of it