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This soccer book is curiously uninspiring, yet oddly compelling. Even title raises questions. The Dear England title already names a successful play, an upcoming TV show, and a open letter penned by the manager in 2021.

This edition of Dear England is not officially tied to those. It represents an oddity in the expanding Dear England universe, a volume about management: a typically dry elite football manager trope that the author sticks to doggedly, relying on the words “leadership”, “guiding” or “leadership” at least 500 times across its 336-page length.

Inquiries Explored

“What defines a leader? What do leaders do? What knowledge do leaders possess?” Southgate inquires in the opening, outlining his argument, but declining to ask “How are leaders?”, topics probably saved for a follow-up publication.

Additionally, this publication has a notable absence throughout. It’s a venture in subtly confrontational self-defense, in coming close without actually expressing the underlying truth, jumping skillfully from lingering grievance to fresh pain across a assortment of pie charts, corporate platitudes and discussions about Thomas Cromwell.

Immersion

Reading it is like eavesdropping on your loved ones having a mannered but deeply felt debate in the adjacent space while you’re attempting to concentrate on a business seminar called “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also impossible to disengage, as the author keeps coming close to an issue you genuinely want to discover, before suddenly veering away.

Revelations

Readers will find inevitably news headlines in books like these, such is the intense obsession with leading the national team. The best ones encompass: he resolved he was certainly going to step down as England manager after fans threw cups at him at the tournament; he nearly decided to withdrawing from the game at mid-match against Bulgaria in 2019 after his team were subjected to racism; he invented the idea of set-piece coaches and everyone in the top division is now adopting his methods; he has now misplaced his enthusiasm for soccer, a surprising revelation briefly included in a single paragraph at the end.

Guiding England through a era of rage, aspiration, political ferment and pandemic restrictions was a brutal ordeal. The scars are evidently still raw.

Predictable Elements

In other sections, the content is overrun with an AI-style word-sludge of commonplace leadership chat. Advanced copies of this book were shared with critics under secrecy pacts ahead of launch, presumably out of fear someone might reveal that “tough talks can, by their nature, be difficult”, that you should always look before you leap, that leadership takes place where change combines with empathy.

Emotional Core

There is nevertheless genuine emotion here. Guiding England through a period of anger, optimism, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a brutal experience. The bruises are evidently still fresh, though expressed in a terminology-heavy reimagining of the standard football manager narrative: why I was actually right about each issue from the start.

Detailed Instances

Even publication’s introductory section, disguised as gripping accounts of the final of the European Championship, is completely dedicated to how successful Southgate actually was at substitutes (the big common complaint revolving around he was not successful at altering the lineup). Subsequently, he goes into great depth about how he managed the championship match of 2021 impeccably – specifically the losing spot-kick decider – because he followed a established procedure, which suggests that introducing youthful talents very late to take the crucial kick of their existence was reasonable and right.

That approach was confirmed by a winning shootout against Switzerland at a later tournament after a match where England spent the entire match looking as if they were striving to put on a jumper the wrong way round. “The control we exerted in that tiebreaker was absolutely thrilling,” he states, in between comparing the display to elite military units killing Osama bin Laden. Goodness.

Avoided Revelations

When we come near to a revelation, he withdraws from identifying individuals or sharing the juice. We discover there were difficult England individuals who demanded more attention, possibly because they were indulged at the start of their careers. But as you lean forward eagerly, Southgate is already veering off into something called a specific management theory, which claims that as opposed to a collection of attributes or values, culture is in fact something that is formed by, gah, stop, that’s sufficient.

Strengths

Within the better sections are when he explores about the gradual process of fostering fortitude in the next generation, or how he tried to define national identity more lucidly and more helpfully than any public personality in the spotlight. Most impressively, there is a genuinely absorbing narrative of that harrowing evening in the Bulgarian capital where England’s African heritage squad members were subjected to vile treatment (and subsequently supported robustly by their coach).

Genuine Ending

Possibly the most sincere segment {comes|arrives|appears