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The soccer book is curiously dull, yet strangely captivating. Its title causes confusion. Dear England already belongs to a popular play, an upcoming TV show, and a public letter authored by the manager in 2021.

This edition of Dear England isn’t formally related to any of those. It exists as an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a volume about guidance: a traditionally uninspiring top-level coach subject that the author adheres to persistently, employing the words “leadership”, “leading” or “leadership” at least 500 times across its 336-page length.

Inquiries Raised

“What defines a leader? What actions do leaders take? And what do leaders know?” the author questions at the outset, setting out his stall, but stopping short to explore “Why are leaders?”, topics probably saved for a follow-up publication.

Beyond that, this book has a notable absence in the middle. It’s an attempt in subtly confrontational self-defense, in nearly but not entirely expressing the actual thing, jumping adeptly from lingering grievance to fresh pain across a series of pie charts, management jargon and discussions about 16th-century statesmen.

Immersion

Engaging with the text is like eavesdropping on your loved ones having a mannered but intensely emotional argument in the adjacent space while you’re striving to focus on a corporate presentation titled “112 Reasons Why Naturally I Had the Last Laugh”. But it is also difficult to disengage, as Southgate keeps approaching to something you genuinely want to discover, before suddenly shifting focus.

Revelations

The book contains always news headlines in publications in this genre, due to the intense fascination with England managerdom. The best ones are: Southgate made up his mind he was definitely going to resign as England manager after spectators tossed containers at him at the Euros; he almost chose to withdrawing from the game at mid-match against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his team were targeted with slurs; he invented the approach of dedicated restart experts and everyone in the top division is now following his lead; he has now misplaced his enthusiasm for football, a surprising revelation casually mentioned in a brief section at the end.

Leading England through a period of anger, hope, upheaval and lockdown was a harsh experience. The scars are evidently still fresh.

Predictable Elements

In other sections, the content is flooded with an robotic verbal clutter of commonplace guidance discourse. Advanced copies of this publication were provided with journalists under secrecy pacts prior to publication, presumably out of fear someone might disclose that “difficult conversations can, by their inherent quality, be tough”, that you should always think before you act, that guidance occurs where change intersects with compassion.

Emotional Core

The book contains however authentic feeling within. Managing England through a time of fury, optimism, political ferment and confinement was a harsh journey. The bruises are evidently still unhealed, though conveyed in a buzzword-filled reimagining of the standard football manager narrative: demonstrating my accuracy about all matters all along.

Specific Examples

Even book’s initial chapter, Trojan-horsed as gripping accounts of the championship match of the tournament, is completely dedicated to how successful he really was at tactical substitutions (the primary Southgate gripe revolving around he wasn’t effective at making changes). Subsequently, he goes into great depth about how he managed the deciding game of 2021 flawlessly – particularly the failed spot-kick decider – because he complied with a established procedure, which must mean that introducing inexperienced squad members very late to take the most important shot of their careers was logical and correct.

That approach was confirmed by a successful tiebreaker against the Swiss team four years later after a game where England spent 120 minutes looking as if they were trying to put on a jumper the backwards. “The control we exerted in that shootout was truly thrilling,” he writes, in between comparing the performance to US Navy Seals killing Osama bin Laden. Dear me.

Avoided Revelations

When we do get close to a revelation, he retreats from specifying people or sharing the juice. We learn there were difficult England squad members who demanded more focus, maybe because they were pampered early in their professional journeys. But as you expect eagerly, the author is already veering off into an area named The Culture Code, which asserts that as opposed to a assemblage of qualities or values, team environment is in fact a phenomenon that is formed by, alas, enough, we’ve heard enough.

Strengths

Among the stronger parts are when the author writes about the gradual nature of developing fortitude in the next generation, or how he tried to describe what it means to be English more lucidly and more constructively than any public personality in the spotlight. Most impressively, there is a truly absorbing account of that traumatic match in the Bulgarian capital where England’s African heritage squad members were subjected to vile treatment (and subsequently defended forcefully by their coach).

Heartfelt Conclusion

Perhaps the most emotional segment {comes|arrives|appears