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This football publication is strangely dull, yet curiously irresistible. Its title is confusing. The Dear England title already belongs to a popular play, an forthcoming television program, and a national address written by the manager in 2021.

This version of Dear England is not officially related to those. It stands as an oddity in the expanding Dear England universe, a volume about guidance: a typically dull top-level coach subject that Southgate sticks to persistently, using the words “leadership”, “leading” or “leadership” a minimum of 500 times across the book’s entirety.

Questions Posed

“What are leaders? What do leaders do? What insights do leaders have?” he asks in the opening, setting out his position, but choosing not to ask “Why are leaders?”, themes likely set aside for a second book.

Beyond that, this book has a significant gap throughout. It’s an exercise in indirectly hostile personal vindication, in almost-but-not-quite saying the actual thing, skipping skillfully from unsettled score to unscabbed wound across a series of data visualizations, corporate platitudes and digressions about historical figures.

Reading Experience

Engaging with the text is like eavesdropping on your parents having a polite but deeply felt disagreement in the adjacent space while you’re trying to concentrate on a professional workshop named “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also difficult to stop reading, as Southgate keeps drifting near to something you truly wish to hear about, before suddenly veering away.

Insights

Readers will find inevitably attention-grabbing disclosures in books in this genre, explained by the rapt interest with leading the national team. The most striking ones include: the manager resolved he was definitely going to resign as England manager after fans hurled containers at him at the European Championship; he nearly decided to abandoning the game at the interval against Bulgaria in 2019 after his players were racially abused; he introduced the idea of set-piece coaches and everyone in the top division is now adopting his methods; he has now lost his love for the sport, a shocking admission briefly included in a single paragraph at the conclusion.

Leading England through a era of rage, optimism, turmoil and confinement was a harsh ordeal. The scars are clearly still unhealed.

Commonplace Material

Throughout much of the book, the content is saturated with an AI-style word-sludge of commonplace management talk. Advanced copies of this book were provided with critics under secrecy pacts before launch, probably out of concern someone might leak that “challenging discussions can, by their very essence, be difficult”, that you should always look before you leap, that management occurs where evolution intersects with compassion.

Genuine Feeling

The book contains however genuine feeling present. Managing England through a period of fury, hope, turmoil and confinement was a grueling ordeal. The bruises are obviously still raw, even if conveyed in a terminology-heavy reimagining of the classic leader narrative: demonstrating my accuracy about each issue from the start.

Detailed Instances

Even book’s opening passage, Trojan-horsed as thrilling accounts of the final of the tournament, is completely dedicated to how effective the manager really was at player changes (the primary Southgate gripe centering on he was not effective at altering the lineup). Later, he delves into great depth about how he handled the deciding game of 2021 impeccably – notably the unsuccessful spot-kick decider – because he complied with a set protocol, which must mean that bringing on young players very late to take the most important attempt of their existence was logical and correct.

This was proved right by a successful tiebreaker against Switzerland four years later after a fixture where England spent the entire match looking as if they were attempting to don a sweater the wrong way round. “Our dominance in that tiebreaker was simply exhilarating,” the author notes, amid likening the performance to special forces neutralizing a notorious figure. Oh Gareth.

Missed Opportunities

When we come near to a disclosure, he withdraws from specifying people or providing the substance. We learn there were difficult England players who insisted on more focus, maybe because they were pampered early in their careers. But as you anticipate expectantly, the author is quickly diverting into an area called a specific management theory, which states that rather than a collection of characteristics or ideals, culture is in fact something that is formed by, gah, enough, that’s sufficient.

Notable Sections

Among the stronger bits are when Southgate discusses about the incremental nature of developing mental toughness in the next generation, or how he sought to describe what it means to be English more lucidly and more helpfully than any other figure in the limelight. Most impressively, there is a truly absorbing description of that distressing night in Sofia where England’s black players were subjected to vile treatment (and subsequently defended vigorously by their coach).

Sincere Finale

Possibly the most heartfelt segment {comes|arrives|appears