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The soccer publication is strangely tedious, yet strangely irresistible. Even title is confusing. Dear England currently belongs to a successful play, an upcoming TV show, and a national address written by the manager in 2021.

This edition of Dear England is not formally connected to those. It exists as an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about management: a typically uninspiring elite football manager theme that Southgate sticks to relentlessly, using the words “leader”, “leading” or “leadership” no fewer than 500 times across 336 pages.

Inquiries Raised

“What defines a leader? What do leaders do? What insights do leaders have?” he asks at the outset, setting out his position, but stopping short to address “When are leaders?”, questions probably set aside for a future volume.

Beyond that, this book has a notable absence at its core. It’s an attempt in indirectly hostile self-justification, in coming close without actually saying the actual thing, skipping nimbly from lingering grievance to unscabbed wound across a assortment of graphs, management jargon and discussions about 16th-century statesmen.

Reading Experience

Reading it is like overhearing your family members having a polite but intensely emotional disagreement in the next room while you’re attempting to concentrate on a business seminar titled “112 Reasons Why Naturally I Had the Last Laugh”. But it is also impossible to stop reading, as Southgate keeps drifting near to a topic you genuinely wish to learn about, before unexpectedly veering away.

Insights

Readers will find typically attention-grabbing disclosures in works of this nature, due to the peeled-eyeball interest with leading the national team. The most notable examples are: Southgate resolved he was absolutely going to quit as England manager after fans hurled beer glasses at him at the European Championship; he nearly decided to abandoning the game at half-time against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his team were subjected to racism; he invented the approach of specialist dead-ball trainers and all teams in the Premier League is now copying him; he has now lost his love for the sport, a startling revelation casually mentioned in a single paragraph at the conclusion.

Managing England through a period of fury, hope, turmoil and confinement was a harsh ordeal. The scars are obviously still fresh.

Predictable Elements

In other sections, the content is saturated with an computer-generated verbal clutter of generic leadership chat. Advanced copies of this book were distributed with critics under non-disclosure agreements ahead of release, presumably out of fear someone might leak that “challenging discussions can, by their nature, be difficult”, that you should always consider the consequences, that leadership occurs where transformation intersects with understanding.

Sincere Expression

There is however authentic feeling within. Managing England through a time of anger, optimism, political ferment and pandemic restrictions was a brutal ordeal. The scars are clearly still fresh, albeit conveyed in a terminology-heavy reinterpretation of the classic leader story: how my decisions were correct about each issue throughout.

Specific Examples

Even book’s introductory section, Trojan-horsed as thrilling memories of the deciding game of the European Championship, is completely dedicated to how successful the manager actually was at substitutes (the primary Southgate gripe revolving around he wasn’t successful at making changes). Later, he goes into great depth about how he handled the championship match of 2021 flawlessly – specifically the losing tiebreaker – because he complied with a established procedure, which must mean that bringing on inexperienced squad members in the closing stages to take the most important kick of their existence was sensible and correct.

This was proved right by a winning tiebreaker against the Swiss team at a later tournament after a fixture where England spent the entire match looking as if they were trying to don a sweater the inside out. “Our commanding performance in that shootout was absolutely exhilarating,” he writes, while likening the showing to US Navy Seals eliminating a notorious figure. Oh Gareth.

Missed Opportunities

On the occasions we do get close to a revelation, Southgate withdraws from identifying individuals or sharing the details. We discover there were challenging England players who required more attention, possibly because they were spoilt at the start of their careers. But as you lean forward eagerly, the author is already diverting into an area titled a specific management theory, which claims that rather than a collection of characteristics or values, culture is in fact a phenomenon that is formed by, gah, please, that’s sufficient.

Notable Sections

Among the more compelling bits are when Southgate discusses about the piecemeal process of building mental toughness in young people, or how he attempted to articulate what it means to be English more clearly and more positively than any other figure in the spotlight. Best of all, there is a genuinely gripping description of that harrowing night in Sofia where England’s African heritage squad members were subjected to vile treatment (and subsequently protected robustly by their coach).

Heartfelt Conclusion

Perhaps the most heartfelt segment {comes|arrives|appears