🔗 Share this article

The football book is strangely dull, yet curiously irresistible. Even title raises questions. The Dear England title already belongs to a successful play, an forthcoming TV show, and a public letter written by the manager in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England is not officially connected to those. It exists as an peculiar entry in the expanding Dear England universe, a book about management: a classically uninspiring elite football manager theme that Southgate adheres to persistently, using the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “management” no fewer than 500 times across its 336-page length.

Questions Raised

“Who are the leaders? What actions do leaders take? What insights do leaders have?” the author questions in the opening, outlining his position, but stopping short to explore “How are leaders?”, topics probably saved for a second book.

Otherwise, this book contains a significant gap at its core. It’s an exercise in subtly confrontational self-justification, in coming close without actually stating the actual thing, hopping skillfully from lingering grievance to fresh pain across a series of graphs, corporate platitudes and discussions about historical figures.

Reading Experience

Engaging with the text is like listening to your parents having a polite but profoundly personal debate in the adjacent space while you’re striving to pay attention on a professional workshop titled “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also difficult to stop reading, as the author keeps coming close to a topic you genuinely want to discover, before unexpectedly shifting focus.

Revelations

There are typically attention-grabbing disclosures in works of this nature, explained by the peeled-eyeball fascination with the role of England manager. The most striking examples include: the manager made up his mind he was certainly going to quit as England manager after fans hurled cups at him at the Euros; he nearly decided to forfeiting the game at half-time against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his team were subjected to racism; he pioneered the idea of dedicated restart experts and the entire league in the top division is now adopting his methods; he has now lost his love for the sport, a shocking confession thrown away in a short passage at the final part.

Guiding England through a era of rage, optimism, political ferment and pandemic restrictions was a grueling journey. The wounds are clearly still raw.

Commonplace Material

Throughout much of the book, the content is saturated with an robotic linguistic mush of generic guidance discourse. Copies of this book were distributed with reviewers under confidentiality clauses ahead of release, likely out of concern someone might reveal that “difficult conversations can, by their inherent quality, be tough”, that you should always think before you act, that management takes place where change meets empathy.

Sincere Expression

Readers will find however real feeling here. Leading England through a period of fury, optimism, turmoil and confinement was a harsh ordeal. The scars are evidently still raw, though expressed in a buzzword-filled reimagining of the classic football manager theme: why I was actually right about all matters throughout.

Detailed Instances

Even book’s initial chapter, presented as thrilling recollections of the championship match of the European Championship, is all about how effective the manager in fact was at tactical substitutions (the big common complaint centering on he was not good at making changes). Subsequently, he explores significant detail about how he handled the deciding game of 2021 flawlessly – particularly the unsuccessful tiebreaker – because he complied with a established procedure, which suggests that bringing on young players at the last moment to take the crucial shot of their lives was logical and correct.

That approach was confirmed by a successful penalty decider against the Swiss team four years later after a fixture where England spent 120 minutes looking as if they were striving to don a sweater the backwards. “The control we exerted in that tiebreaker was truly thrilling,” he states, in between equating the performance to US Navy Seals killing a notorious figure. Dear me.

Withheld Details

On the occasions we approach to a disclosure, the manager backs away from naming names or giving us the details. We hear there were challenging England squad members who insisted on more attention, maybe because they were pampered at the start of their time in football. But as you expect expectantly, he is quickly veering off into an area named a leadership concept, which states that rather than a collection of attributes or principles, team environment is in fact an element that is created by, alas, enough, that’s sufficient.

Notable Sections

Within the more compelling sections are when Southgate writes about the incremental method of developing resilience in youth, or how he sought to define national identity more clearly and more helpfully than anyone else in the limelight. Most impressively, there is a genuinely compelling narrative of that harrowing evening in Sofia where England’s African heritage squad members were targeted with hatred (and subsequently defended forcefully by their coach).

Heartfelt Conclusion

Perhaps the most emotional part {comes|arrives|appears