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This football book is oddly uninspiring, yet strangely compelling. Even title causes confusion. Dear England currently belongs to a popular theatrical production, an upcoming television program, and a national address penned by Gareth Southgate in 2021.

This version of Dear England is not officially tied to any of those. It exists as an oddity in the Dear England Multiverse, a volume about guidance: a classically dull top-level coach subject that Southgate follows relentlessly, relying on the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “leadership” at least 500 times across its 336-page length.

Questions Explored

“What defines a leader? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” Southgate inquires in the opening, setting out his stall, but choosing not to address “When are leaders?”, topics probably saved for a future volume.

Additionally, this book features a significant gap in the middle. It’s a venture in indirectly hostile self-justification, in coming close without actually saying the underlying truth, jumping nimbly from unsettled score to raw emotion across a series of graphs, management jargon and digressions about historical figures.

Engagement

Reading it is like listening to your loved ones having a mannered but intensely emotional disagreement in the next room while you’re striving to concentrate on a professional workshop named “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also challenging to put down, as Southgate keeps coming close to an issue you actually wish to learn about, before abruptly veering away.

Revelations

The book contains always attention-grabbing disclosures in publications in this genre, due to the peeled-eyeball interest with the role of England manager. The best ones include: he decided he was definitely going to quit as England manager after fans threw beer glasses at him at the tournament; he almost chose to withdrawing from the game at half-time against Bulgaria in 2019 after his team were targeted with slurs; he invented the idea of set-piece coaches and everyone in the top division is now adopting his methods; he has now misplaced his love for soccer, a surprising revelation casually mentioned in a single paragraph at the final part.

Guiding England through a era of anger, aspiration, turmoil and pandemic restrictions was a grueling experience. The wounds are clearly still unhealed.

Predictable Elements

Throughout much of the book, the content is flooded with an robotic verbal clutter of commonplace guidance discourse. Advanced copies of this publication were shared with critics under confidentiality clauses ahead of launch, likely out of fear someone might disclose that “difficult conversations can, by their inherent quality, be difficult”, that you should always look before you leap, that management happens where transformation combines with understanding.

Emotional Core

There is however real sentiment here. Leading England through a era of anger, hope, turmoil and pandemic restrictions was a harsh experience. The wounds are evidently still raw, albeit conveyed in a buzzword-filled reinterpretation of the standard coach theme: demonstrating my accuracy about all matters all along.

Specific Examples

The book’s introductory section, presented as thrilling memories of the deciding game of the tournament, is all about how good the manager really was at tactical substitutions (the primary Southgate gripe being he was not successful at substitutes). Further on, he goes into extensive analysis about how he oversaw the championship match of 2021 flawlessly – particularly the unsuccessful penalty shootout – because he adhered to a predetermined process, which suggests that introducing youthful talents at the last moment to take the most important kick of their lives was reasonable and accurate.

That approach was proved right by a winning penalty decider against Switzerland four years later after a fixture where England spent 120 minutes looking as if they were attempting to wear a pullover the inside out. “Our dominance in that shootout was absolutely exciting,” the author states, in between comparing the display to US Navy Seals neutralizing Osama bin Laden. Goodness.

Avoided Revelations

When we come near to a revelation, Southgate retreats from specifying people or giving us the substance. We learn there were difficult England individuals who demanded more consideration, perhaps because they were pampered early in their time in football. But as you anticipate eagerly, the author is already veering off into a topic called a specific management theory, which states that as opposed to a assemblage of qualities or values, organizational ethos is in fact a phenomenon that is formed by, alas, please, that’s sufficient.

Highlights

Included in the better parts are when Southgate explores about the incremental method of developing fortitude in youth, or how he tried to describe national identity more clearly and more constructively than anyone else in the public eye. Most impressively, there is a genuinely absorbing account of that distressing match in Sofia where England’s African heritage squad members were targeted with hatred (and later protected robustly by their manager).

Heartfelt Conclusion

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