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This football publication is strangely uninspiring, yet strangely compelling. Its title raises questions. Dear England currently is used by a successful play, an upcoming television program, and a public letter penned by Gareth Southgate in 2021.

This version of Dear England isn’t formally connected to any of those. It represents an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about guidance: a traditionally dry elite football manager theme that the author adheres to relentlessly, using the words “leader”, “guiding” or “leadership” a minimum of 500 times across the book’s entirety.

Questions Explored

“What defines a leader? What do leaders do? What knowledge do leaders possess?” he asks early on, outlining his stall, but stopping short to address “Why are leaders?”, questions presumably reserved for a future volume.

Additionally, this publication has a book-shaped hole in the middle. It’s an exercise in subtly confrontational self-justification, in coming close without actually saying the real point, hopping skillfully from unsettled score to raw emotion across a series of pie charts, corporate platitudes and discussions about 16th-century statesmen.

Engagement

Reading it is like overhearing your parents having a polite but deeply felt debate in the next room while you’re striving to concentrate on a business seminar titled “Countless Explanations for My Eventual Success”. But it is also difficult to stop reading, as Southgate keeps coming close to a topic you actually want to hear about, before suddenly veering away.

Disclosures

There are inevitably controversial revelations in works like these, explained by the intense interest with England managerdom. The most striking instances include: the manager decided he was absolutely going to step down as England manager after fans tossed cups at him at the tournament; he came very close to forfeiting the game at half-time against Bulgaria in 2019 after his players were racially abused; he introduced the concept of specialist dead-ball trainers and everyone in the English football is now adopting his methods; he has now abandoned his love for soccer, a shocking revelation briefly included in a single paragraph at the conclusion.

Managing England through a period of rage, optimism, political ferment and pandemic restrictions was a brutal experience. The bruises are evidently still raw.

Generic Content

Throughout much of the book, the narrative is overrun with an robotic linguistic mush of commonplace guidance discourse. Review editions of this book were distributed with reviewers under confidentiality clauses ahead of launch, probably out of concern someone might disclose that “challenging discussions can, by their very essence, be difficult”, that you should always consider the consequences, that management occurs where transformation intersects with understanding.

Emotional Core

The book contains nonetheless genuine emotion present. Leading England through a era of anger, optimism, political ferment and lockdown was a harsh journey. The scars are clearly still fresh, though expressed in a buzzword-filled reinterpretation of the classic football manager theme: demonstrating my accuracy about everything all along.

Detailed Instances

The book’s opening passage, presented as gripping memories of the deciding game of the European Championship, is entirely focused on how good the manager actually was at tactical substitutions (the big Southgate gripe centering on he wasn’t good at making changes). Further on, he explores extensive analysis about how he oversaw the championship match of 2021 perfectly – particularly the failed tiebreaker – because he complied with a set protocol, which implies that throwing on young players in the closing stages to take the most important attempt of their careers was sensible and right.

This was validated by a victorious shootout against the Swiss team in a subsequent competition after a match where England spent the full duration looking as if they were trying to put on a jumper the wrong way round. “Our dominance in that tiebreaker was simply exhilarating,” the author writes, in between comparing the display to elite military units eliminating a high-profile target. Goodness.

Missed Opportunities

When we approach to a disclosure, Southgate retreats from naming names or sharing the substance. We learn there were difficult England squad members who insisted on more attention, maybe because they were pampered early in their careers. But as you lean forward expectantly, the author is already veering off into an area titled a specific management theory, which claims that instead of a grouping of attributes or values, culture is in fact something that is developed by, alas, stop, we’ve heard enough.

Notable Sections

Included in the more compelling bits are when Southgate discusses about the incremental nature of developing resilience in the next generation, or how he attempted to describe national identity more coherently and more constructively than any other figure in the public eye. The standout section, there is a really compelling narrative of that harrowing match in the Bulgarian capital where England’s black players were subjected to vile treatment (and afterwards defended vigorously by their coach).

Sincere Finale

Perhaps the most emotional part {comes|arrives|appears