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The football book is curiously dull, yet strangely captivating. Even title causes confusion. The Dear England title already belongs to a popular theatrical production, an forthcoming television program, and a public letter authored by Gareth Southgate in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England is not formally related to those. It represents an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about leadership: a classically uninspiring elite football manager trope that the author follows relentlessly, using the words “leader”, “guiding” or “leadership” at least 500 times across the book’s entirety.

Questions Posed

“What are leaders? What actions do leaders take? And what do leaders know?” Southgate inquires in the opening, outlining his stall, but stopping short to ask “How are leaders?”, themes presumably reserved for a follow-up publication.

Otherwise, this publication has a notable absence in the middle. It’s an exercise in passive-aggressive personal vindication, in nearly but not entirely saying the actual thing, hopping skillfully from lingering grievance to raw emotion across a collection of data visualizations, corporate platitudes and references about Thomas Cromwell.

Reading Experience

Reading it is like listening to your family members having a mannered but deeply felt disagreement in the nearby area while you’re trying to concentrate on a business seminar named “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also impossible to stop reading, as Southgate keeps approaching to something you actually want to discover, before suddenly shifting focus.

Insights

The book contains typically news headlines in books of this nature, due to the intense obsession with leading the national team. The best examples include: Southgate resolved he was certainly going to resign as England manager after fans threw cups at him at the tournament; he almost chose to forfeiting the game at the interval against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his team were racially abused; he invented the idea of specialist dead-ball trainers and everyone in the top division is now copying him; he has now abandoned his passion for soccer, a surprising revelation thrown away in a short passage at the final part.

Guiding England through a period of fury, optimism, upheaval and lockdown was a harsh ordeal. The bruises are obviously still unhealed.

Generic Content

Throughout much of the book, the text is overrun with an computer-generated word-sludge of standard leadership chat. Advanced copies of this publication were shared with journalists under non-disclosure agreements prior to publication, likely out of concern someone might disclose that “challenging discussions can, by their very essence, be difficult”, that you should always consider the consequences, that leadership takes place where evolution meets compassion.

Sincere Expression

The book contains however genuine emotion within. Guiding England through a time of fury, hope, upheaval and confinement was a harsh journey. The bruises are clearly still unhealed, even if presented in a terminology-heavy reinterpretation of the standard coach theme: why I was actually right about all matters throughout.

Notable Cases

Even publication’s opening passage, disguised as gripping recollections of the deciding game of the European Championship, is completely dedicated to how good the manager in fact was at tactical substitutions (the major common complaint revolving around he wasn’t effective at making changes). Later, he delves into great depth about how he oversaw the championship match of 2021 flawlessly – specifically the losing tiebreaker – because he complied with a established procedure, which implies that introducing inexperienced squad members in the closing stages to take the crucial kick of their careers was reasonable and correct.

That approach was validated by a victorious penalty decider against Switzerland four years later after a game where England spent the full duration looking as if they were attempting to don a sweater the wrong way round. “Our dominance in that penalty decider was absolutely thrilling,” Southgate writes, while equating the display to elite military units killing Osama bin Laden. Oh Gareth.

Missed Opportunities

When we come near to a revelation, Southgate retreats from naming names or providing the details. We learn there were difficult England individuals who required more attention, maybe because they were spoilt at the start of their time in football. But as you lean forward eagerly, he is already veering off into a topic named The Culture Code, which states that rather than a collection of attributes or ideals, culture is in fact a phenomenon that is formed by, alas, stop, no more.

Strengths

Included in the more compelling bits are when Southgate explores about the incremental method of building fortitude in young people, or how he attempted to describe national identity more lucidly and more constructively than anyone else in the public eye. Most impressively, there is a truly compelling narrative of that distressing match in the Bulgarian capital where England’s black players were targeted with hatred (and subsequently protected forcefully by their leader).

Sincere Finale

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