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This soccer publication is curiously tedious, yet oddly compelling. Its title causes confusion. Dear England currently names a popular theatrical production, an future television program, and a public letter penned by Gareth Southgate in 2021.

This version of Dear England isn’t officially connected to those. It stands as an peculiar entry in the expanding Dear England universe, a book about management: a classically uninspiring elite football manager trope that the author adheres to relentlessly, relying on the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “leadership” no fewer than 500 times across its 336-page length.

Questions Posed

“What are leaders? What is the role of a leader? What knowledge do leaders possess?” Southgate inquires in the opening, outlining his stall, but declining to ask “How are leaders?”, topics likely saved for a second book.

Beyond that, this book contains a notable absence at its core. It’s a venture in indirectly hostile self-justification, in nearly but not entirely stating the actual thing, skipping skillfully from unsettled score to fresh pain across a assortment of pie charts, management jargon and references about 16th-century statesmen.

Reading Experience

Reading it is like listening to your family members having a controlled but deeply felt debate in the adjacent space while you’re attempting to concentrate on a corporate presentation called “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also impossible to put down, as the author keeps approaching to something you actually wish to hear about, before suddenly changing tack.

Revelations

Readers will find always controversial revelations in works like these, explained by the intense obsession with leading the national team. The best instances are: the manager decided he was definitely going to step down as England manager after spectators threw cups at him at the European Championship; he nearly decided to abandoning the game at mid-match against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his squad members were racially abused; he introduced the concept of set-piece coaches and all teams in the English football is now adopting his methods; he has now misplaced his love for the sport, a shocking admission thrown away in a short passage at the conclusion.

Guiding England through a time of rage, hope, upheaval and lockdown was a brutal experience. The wounds are clearly still unhealed.

Commonplace Material

In other sections, the content is overrun with an robotic linguistic mush of standard management talk. Advanced copies of this book were shared with critics under secrecy pacts prior to publication, likely out of apprehension someone might reveal that “difficult conversations can, by their very essence, be difficult”, that you should always look before you leap, that leadership happens where transformation meets understanding.

Genuine Feeling

The book contains nevertheless authentic emotion within. Leading England through a period of fury, aspiration, upheaval and confinement was a grueling journey. The wounds are clearly still unhealed, even if presented in a terminology-heavy reinvention of the classic leader story: how my decisions were correct about each issue throughout.

Notable Cases

The publication’s initial chapter, presented as gripping recollections of the deciding game of Euro 2024, is entirely focused on how good he actually was at tactical substitutions (the major Southgate gripe revolving around he wasn’t good at making changes). Subsequently, he delves into great depth about how he oversaw the deciding game of 2021 perfectly – notably the unsuccessful tiebreaker – because he complied with a set protocol, which must mean that throwing on youthful talents at the last moment to take the most important shot of their lives was logical and correct.

This was validated by a winning penalty decider against the Swiss team four years later after a game where England spent the entire match looking as if they were trying to don a sweater the inside out. “Our dominance in that tiebreaker was absolutely thrilling,” Southgate writes, while comparing the performance to special forces neutralizing Osama bin Laden. Oh Gareth.

Missed Opportunities

When we approach to a insight, Southgate retreats from naming names or giving us the substance. We hear there were difficult England players who required more focus, maybe because they were spoilt during the beginning of their time in football. But as you lean forward expectantly, Southgate is already diverting into a topic called a specific management theory, which claims that instead of a collection of characteristics or values, organizational ethos is in fact a phenomenon that is created by, alas, stop, we’ve heard enough.

Strengths

Among the stronger sections are when the author writes about the piecemeal process of building resilience in the next generation, or how he attempted to define Englishness more coherently and more helpfully than any other figure in the limelight. The standout section, there is a genuinely absorbing description of that harrowing match in the Bulgarian capital where England’s black players were targeted with hatred (and afterwards supported robustly by their manager).

Genuine Ending

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