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The football book is oddly tedious, yet curiously compelling. Its title causes confusion. The Dear England title already names a popular play, an forthcoming television program, and a open letter written by the manager in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England isn’t officially related to those. It represents an peculiar entry in the Dear England Multiverse, a volume about management: a traditionally dry top-level coach subject that Southgate sticks to persistently, employing the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “leadership” at least 500 times across the book’s entirety.

Questions Raised

“What are leaders? What is the role of a leader? What insights do leaders have?” Southgate inquires early on, establishing his argument, but declining to ask “When are leaders?”, themes probably set aside for a follow-up publication.

Additionally, this book has a significant gap in the middle. It’s an exercise in indirectly hostile self-defense, in almost-but-not-quite saying the real point, hopping nimbly from unresolved issue to unscabbed wound across a collection of pie charts, management jargon and references about historical figures.

Immersion

Engaging with the text is like eavesdropping on your parents having a mannered but deeply felt disagreement in the nearby area while you’re attempting to focus on a business seminar named “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also difficult to disengage, as the author keeps approaching to a topic you genuinely want to learn about, before unexpectedly veering away.

Insights

Readers will find typically controversial revelations in works like these, such is the peeled-eyeball interest with the role of England manager. The most striking instances include: he resolved he was definitely going to resign as England manager after fans threw cups at him at the Euros; he came very close to abandoning the game at half-time against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his squad members were subjected to racism; he invented the approach of set-piece coaches and everyone in the Premier League is now adopting his methods; he has now abandoned his love for soccer, a surprising admission casually mentioned in a short passage at the end.

Guiding England through a era of anger, hope, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a brutal journey. The scars are evidently still unhealed.

Commonplace Material

Otherwise, the content is saturated with an robotic linguistic mush of generic management talk. Review editions of this book were distributed with critics under non-disclosure agreements before release, likely out of concern someone might leak that “difficult conversations can, by their very essence, be tough”, that you should always think before you act, that guidance takes place where evolution intersects with understanding.

Sincere Expression

There is nevertheless real sentiment within. Guiding England through a period of anger, aspiration, political ferment and pandemic restrictions was a brutal experience. The bruises are evidently still unhealed, though presented in a buzzword-filled reinvention of the standard football manager story: demonstrating my accuracy about everything all along.

Notable Cases

The book’s introductory section, Trojan-horsed as gripping accounts of the final of the European Championship, is all about how successful Southgate actually was at player changes (the primary common complaint revolving around he was not effective at altering the lineup). Later, he delves into extensive analysis about how he oversaw the deciding game of 2021 perfectly – particularly the failed tiebreaker – because he followed a established procedure, which implies that throwing on youthful talents very late to take the biggest kick of their careers was logical and right.

This was validated by a winning penalty decider against Switzerland in a subsequent competition after a game where England spent the entire match looking as if they were trying to put on a jumper the inside out. “The control we exerted in that penalty decider was absolutely exciting,” he notes, amid likening the display to special forces eliminating a notorious figure. Goodness.

Withheld Details

On the occasions we come near to a disclosure, he retreats from identifying individuals or providing the juice. We hear there were difficult England players who demanded more attention, maybe because they were pampered early in their professional journeys. But as you anticipate expectantly, the author is already veering off into an area called a leadership concept, which claims that instead of a grouping of attributes or ideals, culture is in fact an element that is formed by, gah, enough, we’ve heard enough.

Highlights

Within the more compelling bits are when Southgate writes about the gradual process of fostering mental toughness in youth, or how he sought to describe national identity more coherently and more constructively than any public personality in the spotlight. The standout section, there is a truly gripping account of that traumatic night in Sofia where England’s African heritage squad members were viciously abused (and subsequently defended vigorously by their leader).

Genuine Ending

Possibly the most sincere section {comes|arrives|appears