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This football book is strangely dull, yet curiously captivating. Its title is confusing. The Dear England title currently names a successful play, an upcoming television program, and a public letter authored by the manager in 2021.

This edition of Dear England isn’t officially tied to those. It exists as an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about leadership: a traditionally uninspiring elite football manager subject that the author follows relentlessly, using the words “leader”, “leading” or “management” at least 500 times across 336 pages.

Inquiries Explored

“Who are the leaders? What actions do leaders take? And what do leaders know?” the author questions at the outset, outlining his argument, but choosing not to ask “Why are leaders?”, questions likely set aside for a future volume.

Otherwise, this publication has a significant gap at its core. It’s a venture in subtly confrontational self-justification, in nearly but not entirely expressing the actual thing, hopping skillfully from unsettled score to raw emotion across a assortment of data visualizations, management jargon and references about historical figures.

Engagement

Reading it is like listening to your loved ones having a polite but deeply felt argument in the nearby area while you’re attempting to concentrate on a business seminar named “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also challenging to stop reading, as Southgate keeps drifting near to an issue you truly desire to learn about, before suddenly veering away.

Revelations

Readers will find always controversial revelations in works in this genre, due to the peeled-eyeball fascination with the role of England manager. The best examples include: Southgate resolved he was absolutely going to step down as England manager after fans threw beer glasses at him at the European Championship; he nearly decided to abandoning the game at mid-match against Bulgaria in 2019 after his team were racially abused; he introduced the idea of specialist dead-ball trainers and the entire league in the English football is now following his lead; he has now abandoned his enthusiasm for football, a startling admission casually mentioned in a brief section at the conclusion.

Managing England through a era of rage, optimism, upheaval and confinement was a brutal experience. The bruises are evidently still raw.

Commonplace Material

In other sections, the content is saturated with an robotic verbal clutter of commonplace leadership chat. Advanced copies of this publication were provided with reviewers under secrecy pacts prior to release, presumably out of concern someone might leak that “challenging discussions can, by their inherent quality, be tough”, that you should always think before you act, that leadership occurs where transformation combines with empathy.

Emotional Core

There is however authentic sentiment here. Managing England through a era of anger, aspiration, upheaval and confinement was a harsh ordeal. The scars are clearly still fresh, though presented in a jargon-laden reinvention of the classic football manager theme: demonstrating my accuracy about everything all along.

Specific Examples

Even book’s initial chapter, Trojan-horsed as gripping accounts of the championship match of the tournament, is entirely focused on how successful Southgate actually was at substitutes (the major Southgate gripe being he wasn’t good at altering the lineup). Further on, he explores significant detail about how he handled the championship match of 2021 flawlessly – particularly the unsuccessful tiebreaker – because he followed a set protocol, which suggests that introducing inexperienced squad members at the last moment to take the most important kick of their existence was reasonable and right.

This was proved right by a winning tiebreaker against the Swiss team four years later after a fixture where England spent the entire match looking as if they were trying to don a sweater the inside out. “Our dominance in that shootout was absolutely thrilling,” Southgate notes, while comparing the performance to US Navy Seals eliminating a notorious figure. Oh Gareth.

Withheld Details

On the occasions we come near to a revelation, Southgate withdraws from specifying people or providing the details. We discover there were difficult England individuals who demanded more attention, possibly because they were pampered early in their professional journeys. But as you lean forward hopefully, he is quickly diverting into something named The Culture Code, which asserts that as opposed to a grouping of characteristics or values, team environment is in fact an element that is created by, gah, stop, that’s sufficient.

Strengths

Among the more compelling sections are when he writes about the piecemeal process of fostering resilience in the next generation, or how he attempted to articulate what it means to be English more clearly and more constructively than any public personality in the limelight. Most impressively, there is a really compelling account of that distressing night in Sofia where England’s African heritage squad members were targeted with hatred (and later defended robustly by their leader).

Genuine Ending

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