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This soccer book is strangely uninspiring, yet strangely captivating. Its title is confusing. The Dear England title already belongs to a hit play, an forthcoming television program, and a national address penned by the manager in 2021.

This edition of Dear England isn’t formally related to any of those. It represents an oddity in the expanding Dear England universe, a book about management: a traditionally dull top-level coach trope that Southgate sticks to persistently, using the words “leadership”, “leading” or “leadership” at least 500 times across its 336-page length.

Questions Posed

“What defines a leader? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” Southgate inquires early on, setting out his position, but declining to explore “When are leaders?”, questions probably saved for a follow-up publication.

Additionally, this publication features a significant gap in the middle. It’s a venture in indirectly hostile self-defense, in almost-but-not-quite saying the actual thing, jumping skillfully from lingering grievance to fresh pain across a assortment of graphs, business clichés and references about 16th-century statesmen.

Reading Experience

Going through the book is like overhearing your loved ones having a controlled but intensely emotional argument in the next room while you’re attempting to concentrate on a corporate presentation named “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also difficult to stop reading, as the author keeps coming close to something you genuinely want to learn about, before unexpectedly shifting focus.

Disclosures

There are typically controversial revelations in works of this nature, due to the rapt interest with leading the national team. The most striking instances include: Southgate resolved he was definitely going to resign as England manager after fans hurled containers at him at the European Championship; he almost chose to abandoning the game at half-time against Bulgaria in 2019 after his team were racially abused; he invented the idea of set-piece coaches and the entire league in the top division is now following his lead; he has now lost his enthusiasm for the sport, a surprising admission briefly included in a single paragraph at the end.

Leading England through a time of fury, aspiration, political ferment and confinement was a brutal ordeal. The scars are clearly still unhealed.

Generic Content

Otherwise, the text is saturated with an robotic word-sludge of standard guidance discourse. Advanced copies of this book were shared with critics under non-disclosure agreements prior to launch, probably out of apprehension someone might leak that “tough talks can, by their inherent quality, be difficult”, that you should always consider the consequences, that management happens where change combines with understanding.

Genuine Feeling

The book contains nonetheless authentic emotion present. Guiding England through a era of rage, hope, political ferment and pandemic restrictions was a grueling experience. The wounds are evidently still raw, even if presented in a buzzword-filled reinvention of the classic coach theme: demonstrating my accuracy about everything from the start.

Notable Cases

Even publication’s initial chapter, Trojan-horsed as exciting recollections of the championship match of Euro 2024, is all about how successful he in fact was at substitutes (the big Southgate gripe being he was not effective at substitutes). Later, he delves into extensive analysis about how he managed the deciding game of 2021 flawlessly – specifically the failed tiebreaker – because he complied with a predetermined process, which implies that bringing on youthful talents very late to take the most important shot of their existence was sensible and accurate.

This was proved right by a victorious penalty decider against the Swiss team in a subsequent competition after a match where England spent 120 minutes looking as if they were striving to wear a pullover the wrong way round. “Our dominance in that shootout was truly exciting,” he writes, while comparing the display to elite military units neutralizing a high-profile target. Oh Gareth.

Missed Opportunities

When we do get close to a disclosure, Southgate withdraws from identifying individuals or giving us the juice. We learn there were problematic England players who insisted on more consideration, possibly because they were spoilt early in their professional journeys. But as you expect hopefully, he is already shifting into a topic titled a specific management theory, which states that as opposed to a assemblage of characteristics or principles, organizational ethos is in fact a phenomenon that is developed by, gah, please, that’s sufficient.

Strengths

Included in the better bits are when the author writes about the gradual method of developing mental toughness in young people, or how he sought to define national identity more lucidly and more constructively than any public personality in the public eye. Most impressively, there is a genuinely compelling description of that distressing match in the Bulgarian capital where England’s black players were subjected to vile treatment (and later defended vigorously by their leader).

Genuine Ending

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