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This football publication is curiously tedious, yet oddly captivating. Its title raises questions. The Dear England title already belongs to a popular play, an forthcoming television program, and a national address penned by the manager in 2021.

This version of Dear England is not formally related to those. It represents an peculiar entry in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about management: a traditionally uninspiring elite football manager theme that the author follows relentlessly, employing the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “leadership” at least 500 times across its 336-page length.

Questions Explored

“Who are the leaders? What is the role of a leader? And what do leaders know?” the author questions in the opening, establishing his argument, but stopping short to ask “Why are leaders?”, themes presumably set aside for a future volume.

Otherwise, this book has a significant gap throughout. It’s an exercise in indirectly hostile personal vindication, in almost-but-not-quite expressing the underlying truth, skipping nimbly from unsettled score to raw emotion across a collection of data visualizations, business clichés and digressions about 16th-century statesmen.

Immersion

Engaging with the text is like eavesdropping on your loved ones having a mannered but profoundly personal disagreement in the nearby area while you’re attempting to pay attention on a business seminar called “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also challenging to put down, as Southgate keeps drifting near to a topic you actually desire to learn about, before suddenly veering away.

Disclosures

Readers will find typically controversial revelations in works in this genre, due to the intense obsession with leading the national team. The best examples include: Southgate made up his mind he was definitely going to resign as England manager after supporters tossed containers at him at the tournament; he almost chose to withdrawing from the game at mid-match against Bulgaria in 2019 after his players were targeted with slurs; he pioneered the idea of dedicated restart experts and all teams in the English football is now following his lead; he has now lost his love for the sport, a surprising revelation briefly included in a brief section at the final part.

Guiding England through a period of fury, optimism, political ferment and confinement was a grueling journey. The scars are clearly still unhealed.

Generic Content

Otherwise, the narrative is overrun with an AI-style linguistic mush of commonplace guidance discourse. Review editions of this publication were provided with reviewers under secrecy pacts before launch, presumably out of fear someone might disclose that “difficult conversations can, by their very essence, be difficult”, that you should always think before you act, that management takes place where transformation intersects with empathy.

Genuine Feeling

There is nonetheless real emotion within. Guiding England through a time of fury, optimism, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a grueling experience. The wounds are evidently still raw, though presented in a jargon-laden reimagining of the classic coach narrative: why I was actually right about all matters from the start.

Specific Examples

Even publication’s initial chapter, presented as gripping accounts of the deciding game of the tournament, is entirely focused on how effective the manager actually was at player changes (the big criticism of Southgate being he wasn’t good at making changes). Later, he explores great depth about how he oversaw the deciding game of 2021 flawlessly – specifically the unsuccessful penalty shootout – because he complied with a set protocol, which suggests that throwing on young players very late to take the most important kick of their existence was reasonable and correct.

That approach was validated by a successful penalty decider against the Swiss team at a later tournament after a game where England spent the full duration looking as if they were striving to wear a pullover the backwards. “Our dominance in that tiebreaker was simply exciting,” Southgate writes, amid comparing the display to US Navy Seals eliminating a notorious figure. Goodness.

Withheld Details

On the occasions we approach to a disclosure, Southgate withdraws from specifying people or providing the substance. We learn there were challenging England squad members who insisted on more focus, maybe because they were pampered at the start of their time in football. But as you expect hopefully, the author is already veering off into a topic named a leadership concept, which states that instead of a grouping of characteristics or values, organizational ethos is in fact a phenomenon that is developed by, alas, please, we’ve heard enough.

Highlights

Included in the more compelling bits are when Southgate explores about the gradual nature of building resilience in young people, or how he sought to articulate what it means to be English more coherently and more constructively than any other figure in the public eye. Best of all, there is a truly absorbing description of that harrowing match in the Bulgarian capital where England’s black players were targeted with hatred (and subsequently defended vigorously by their manager).

Genuine Ending

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