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This soccer book is oddly uninspiring, yet oddly compelling. Its title is confusing. The Dear England title already names a hit play, an forthcoming TV show, and a open letter penned by the manager in 2021.

This edition of Dear England is not formally tied to any of those. It exists as an anomaly in the expanding Dear England universe, a book about management: a traditionally uninspiring top-level coach subject that the author adheres to persistently, relying on the words “leader”, “guiding” or “leadership” no fewer than 500 times across the book’s entirety.

Inquiries Explored

“What defines a leader? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” he asks at the outset, setting out his position, but declining to explore “When are leaders?”, themes likely saved for a second book.

Otherwise, this book has a notable absence throughout. It’s a venture in subtly confrontational personal vindication, in almost-but-not-quite saying the real point, skipping skillfully from unsettled score to unscabbed wound across a assortment of graphs, business clichés and references about historical figures.

Engagement

Going through the book is like listening to your parents having a controlled but intensely emotional debate in the next room while you’re attempting to focus on a professional workshop titled “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also difficult to put down, as the author keeps approaching to a topic you truly want to learn about, before suddenly changing tack.

Insights

The book contains inevitably attention-grabbing disclosures in books of this nature, such is the intense obsession with leading the national team. The most notable ones encompass: the manager decided he was certainly going to quit as England manager after supporters hurled containers at him at the European Championship; he came very close to abandoning the game at the interval against Bulgaria in 2019 after his squad members were racially abused; he invented the concept of set-piece coaches and the entire league in the English football is now copying him; he has now abandoned his enthusiasm for the sport, a startling admission thrown away in a short passage at the final part.

Leading England through a era of rage, hope, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a grueling ordeal. The wounds are evidently still fresh.

Generic Content

Otherwise, the text is flooded with an AI-style linguistic mush of commonplace management talk. Copies of this publication were distributed with journalists under secrecy pacts ahead of publication, likely out of concern someone might leak that “difficult conversations can, by their inherent quality, be tough”, that you should always think before you act, that leadership takes place where transformation meets empathy.

Genuine Feeling

Readers will find nonetheless genuine sentiment present. Leading England through a time of fury, optimism, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a brutal experience. The wounds are clearly still fresh, even if presented in a jargon-laden reinvention of the standard football manager narrative: how my decisions were correct about all matters all along.

Notable Cases

The publication’s initial chapter, Trojan-horsed as gripping recollections of the final of the European Championship, is entirely focused on how effective the manager actually was at substitutes (the major Southgate gripe being he was not successful at altering the lineup). Subsequently, he goes into significant detail about how he managed the deciding game of 2021 impeccably – notably the failed spot-kick decider – because he adhered to a predetermined process, which must mean that bringing on young players in the closing stages to take the most important shot of their existence was logical and right.

This was proved right by a victorious shootout against the Swiss team four years later after a match where England spent the entire match looking as if they were striving to don a sweater the inside out. “The control we exerted in that shootout was simply exciting,” Southgate writes, while equating the showing to elite military units killing a high-profile target. Oh Gareth.

Withheld Details

On the occasions we approach to a disclosure, he withdraws from identifying individuals or providing the substance. We discover there were difficult England players who required more consideration, possibly because they were spoilt during the beginning of their careers. But as you expect hopefully, he is already diverting into something named a specific management theory, which asserts that instead of a assemblage of attributes or principles, team environment is in fact something that is developed by, alas, stop, that’s sufficient.

Strengths

Included in the better parts are when the author explores about the gradual method of fostering resilience in young people, or how he tried to articulate Englishness more coherently and more helpfully than any other figure in the public eye. Most impressively, there is a truly gripping narrative of that harrowing evening in Sofia where England’s players of color were viciously abused (and later supported robustly by their leader).

Genuine Ending

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