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This football book is strangely uninspiring, yet oddly compelling. Even title raises questions. The Dear England title already is used by a successful play, an upcoming TV show, and a national address authored by Gareth Southgate in 2021.

This version of Dear England is not officially connected to any of those. It exists as an anomaly in the expanding Dear England universe, a volume about leadership: a traditionally uninspiring top-level coach trope that Southgate adheres to relentlessly, using the words “leadership”, “leading” or “management” a minimum of 500 times across 336 pages.

Questions Explored

“What are leaders? What is the role of a leader? And what do leaders know?” Southgate inquires in the opening, setting out his position, but choosing not to ask “Why are leaders?”, questions probably set aside for a follow-up publication.

Additionally, this book features a book-shaped hole throughout. It’s an exercise in passive-aggressive personal vindication, in nearly but not entirely expressing the underlying truth, jumping adeptly from lingering grievance to fresh pain across a collection of graphs, management jargon and digressions about historical figures.

Immersion

Engaging with the text is like overhearing your parents having a controlled but intensely emotional argument in the adjacent space while you’re attempting to pay attention on a corporate presentation titled “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also difficult to stop reading, as Southgate keeps coming close to a topic you actually want to learn about, before suddenly shifting focus.

Disclosures

Readers will find typically attention-grabbing disclosures in publications like these, such is the peeled-eyeball fascination with England managerdom. The most notable examples are: the manager made up his mind he was certainly going to step down as England manager after fans threw cups at him at the European Championship; he came very close to abandoning the game at mid-match against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his team were subjected to racism; he introduced the idea of set-piece coaches and the entire league in the Premier League is now copying him; he has now lost his love for soccer, a surprising confession thrown away in a single paragraph at the conclusion.

Guiding England through a time of anger, optimism, political ferment and pandemic restrictions was a harsh journey. The wounds are clearly still raw.

Commonplace Material

In other sections, the text is flooded with an robotic linguistic mush of generic leadership chat. Review editions of this book were provided with reviewers under non-disclosure agreements ahead of publication, probably out of apprehension someone might disclose that “difficult conversations can, by their very essence, be difficult”, that you should always consider the consequences, that leadership takes place where transformation combines with compassion.

Emotional Core

The book contains nevertheless real feeling present. Managing England through a time of fury, hope, turmoil and lockdown was a brutal ordeal. The bruises are clearly still fresh, though expressed in a jargon-laden reimagining of the traditional leader narrative: demonstrating my accuracy about everything all along.

Notable Cases

Even publication’s introductory section, Trojan-horsed as thrilling memories of the championship match of the European Championship, is all about how effective the manager really was at substitutes (the major criticism of Southgate centering on he wasn’t effective at altering the lineup). Further on, he goes into extensive analysis about how he handled the Euros final of 2021 perfectly – particularly the losing spot-kick decider – because he followed a predetermined process, which suggests that bringing on inexperienced squad members at the last moment to take the biggest shot of their existence was logical and correct.

This was proved right by a winning shootout against Switzerland four years later after a match where England spent the entire match looking as if they were trying to wear a pullover the backwards. “The control we exerted in that tiebreaker was absolutely exciting,” he writes, amid equating the performance to special forces killing Osama bin Laden. Goodness.

Missed Opportunities

When we approach to a revelation, he withdraws from identifying individuals or providing the juice. We discover there were difficult England players who required more focus, possibly because they were spoilt early in their careers. But as you lean forward eagerly, the author is quickly diverting into a topic named a specific management theory, which claims that as opposed to a collection of characteristics or values, team environment is in fact something that is created by, gah, please, no more.

Notable Sections

Within the more compelling bits are when Southgate explores about the incremental method of fostering fortitude in young people, or how he tried to describe what it means to be English more coherently and more positively than any other figure in the spotlight. Best of all, there is a truly compelling description of that traumatic night in the Bulgarian capital where England’s players of color were subjected to vile treatment (and afterwards defended robustly by their coach).

Sincere Finale

Possibly the most sincere part {comes|arrives|appears