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This football book is oddly tedious, yet oddly captivating. Its title raises questions. The Dear England title already belongs to a successful theatrical production, an future television program, and a public letter penned by the manager in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England is not officially related to those. It stands as an oddity in the expanding Dear England universe, a book about management: a typically dry elite football manager trope that Southgate adheres to persistently, using the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “leadership” a minimum of 500 times across the book’s entirety.

Questions Explored

“What are leaders? What actions do leaders take? What insights do leaders have?” the author questions early on, setting out his argument, but declining to ask “Why are leaders?”, questions presumably saved for a follow-up publication.

Additionally, this book has a notable absence at its core. It’s an exercise in passive-aggressive personal vindication, in nearly but not entirely saying the actual thing, skipping nimbly from unresolved issue to raw emotion across a collection of pie charts, corporate platitudes and references about 16th-century statesmen.

Immersion

Engaging with the text is like listening to your loved ones having a mannered but intensely emotional debate in the nearby area while you’re trying to focus on a corporate presentation titled “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also difficult to stop reading, as Southgate keeps drifting near to an issue you truly want to learn about, before suddenly shifting focus.

Disclosures

The book contains typically news headlines in books like these, due to the peeled-eyeball fascination with England managerdom. The best examples are: Southgate made up his mind he was certainly going to resign as England manager after fans tossed containers at him at the Euros; he almost chose to abandoning the game at half-time against Bulgaria in 2019 after his players were racially abused; he introduced the approach of specialist dead-ball trainers and all teams in the Premier League is now following his lead; he has now misplaced his love for the sport, a shocking revelation thrown away in a brief section at the conclusion.

Guiding England through a era of anger, hope, political ferment and pandemic restrictions was a brutal experience. The scars are clearly still unhealed.

Generic Content

In other sections, the content is overrun with an computer-generated word-sludge of standard management talk. Copies of this book were provided with journalists under secrecy pacts before publication, likely out of concern someone might leak that “difficult conversations can, by their inherent quality, be challenging”, that you should always look before you leap, that management occurs where change meets compassion.

Emotional Core

Readers will find however real sentiment within. Leading England through a era of anger, aspiration, turmoil and confinement was a grueling experience. The bruises are obviously still raw, even if expressed in a terminology-heavy reinvention of the standard leader narrative: why I was actually right about each issue from the start.

Detailed Instances

Even publication’s initial chapter, disguised as exciting recollections of the deciding game of the tournament, is completely dedicated to how effective Southgate really was at player changes (the big Southgate gripe revolving around he wasn’t successful at altering the lineup). Later, he goes into significant detail about how he handled the deciding game of 2021 perfectly – particularly the unsuccessful spot-kick decider – because he followed a set protocol, which must mean that bringing on inexperienced squad members very late to take the most important kick of their existence was reasonable and right.

This was validated by a winning tiebreaker against Switzerland at a later tournament after a fixture where England spent the full duration looking as if they were striving to wear a pullover the wrong way round. “The control we exerted in that tiebreaker was absolutely thrilling,” Southgate states, in between equating the display to special forces neutralizing a high-profile target. Goodness.

Withheld Details

When we come near to a insight, Southgate backs away from specifying people or giving us the juice. We learn there were challenging England individuals who insisted on more consideration, perhaps because they were spoilt during the beginning of their time in football. But as you anticipate eagerly, Southgate is already diverting into something called a specific management theory, which asserts that as opposed to a assemblage of attributes or principles, organizational ethos is in fact a phenomenon that is formed by, unfortunately, stop, we’ve heard enough.

Strengths

Among the better bits are when he explores about the piecemeal nature of building fortitude in youth, or how he attempted to articulate what it means to be English more clearly and more constructively than anyone else in the public eye. Most impressively, there is a genuinely compelling description of that distressing match in Sofia where England’s black players were viciously abused (and subsequently defended robustly by their coach).

Heartfelt Conclusion

Perhaps the most heartfelt section {comes|arrives|appears