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This football book is strangely tedious, yet curiously irresistible. Even title is confusing. Dear England currently is used by a popular play, an forthcoming TV show, and a national address authored by the manager in 2021.

This edition of Dear England is not officially tied to any of those. It represents an oddity in the Dear England Multiverse, a volume about guidance: a traditionally dull elite football manager trope that the author sticks to relentlessly, employing the words “leader”, “guiding” or “leadership” at least 500 times across its 336-page length.

Inquiries Explored

“What defines a leader? What is the role of a leader? And what do leaders know?” the author questions in the opening, setting out his argument, but choosing not to ask “When are leaders?”, topics probably reserved for a follow-up publication.

Otherwise, this book has a significant gap at its core. It’s a venture in subtly confrontational self-defense, in almost-but-not-quite saying the underlying truth, hopping skillfully from lingering grievance to raw emotion across a assortment of pie charts, management jargon and digressions about historical figures.

Reading Experience

Engaging with the text is like overhearing your parents having a controlled but profoundly personal disagreement in the next room while you’re trying to concentrate on a business seminar titled “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also challenging to stop reading, as the author keeps approaching to a topic you actually desire to learn about, before suddenly changing tack.

Disclosures

The book contains always news headlines in books in this genre, due to the peeled-eyeball fascination with England managerdom. The most striking examples are: he resolved he was definitely going to quit as England manager after spectators tossed beer glasses at him at the European Championship; he almost chose to withdrawing from the game at the interval against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his players were subjected to racism; he pioneered the concept of set-piece coaches and everyone in the top division is now adopting his methods; he has now abandoned his love for football, a surprising admission casually mentioned in a brief section at the final part.

Leading England through a time of anger, optimism, political ferment and confinement was a brutal ordeal. The bruises are obviously still fresh.

Commonplace Material

Otherwise, the content is overrun with an computer-generated verbal clutter of standard leadership chat. Review editions of this book were provided with critics under confidentiality clauses ahead of launch, likely out of fear someone might leak that “difficult conversations can, by their inherent quality, be challenging”, that you should always consider the consequences, that management happens where transformation combines with compassion.

Emotional Core

Readers will find nevertheless authentic feeling within. Guiding England through a time of rage, optimism, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a harsh ordeal. The bruises are evidently still unhealed, even if presented in a jargon-laden reinvention of the classic coach narrative: demonstrating my accuracy about everything from the start.

Notable Cases

The book’s initial chapter, presented as exciting accounts of the deciding game of Euro 2024, is entirely focused on how good Southgate actually was at player changes (the big criticism of Southgate being he wasn’t good at substitutes). Later, he explores great depth about how he managed the deciding game of 2021 flawlessly – specifically the unsuccessful spot-kick decider – because he complied with a set protocol, which must mean that throwing on youthful talents in the closing stages to take the crucial kick of their lives was reasonable and correct.

This was proved right by a winning shootout against Switzerland in a subsequent competition after a fixture where England spent the full duration looking as if they were striving to wear a pullover the wrong way round. “Our commanding performance in that shootout was absolutely thrilling,” the author notes, amid likening the showing to US Navy Seals eliminating a notorious figure. Goodness.

Missed Opportunities

When we do get close to a insight, the manager withdraws from naming names or sharing the details. We discover there were problematic England individuals who insisted on more consideration, maybe because they were pampered at the start of their professional journeys. But as you expect eagerly, Southgate is quickly diverting into something called The Culture Code, which claims that instead of a assemblage of qualities or values, culture is in fact a phenomenon that is developed by, unfortunately, please, no more.

Highlights

Included in the better parts are when Southgate writes about the piecemeal nature of fostering resilience in the next generation, or how he tried to describe Englishness more coherently and more helpfully than any other figure in the spotlight. Most impressively, there is a really gripping narrative 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 leader).

Sincere Finale

Maybe the most heartfelt section {comes|arrives|appears