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This football book is oddly uninspiring, yet oddly captivating. Its title causes confusion. The Dear England title already names a hit theatrical production, an future TV show, and a public letter authored by the manager in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England is not officially connected to any of those. It stands as an anomaly in the expanding Dear England universe, a volume about management: a typically uninspiring elite football manager subject that the author follows doggedly, using the words “leadership”, “leading” or “management” at least 500 times across its 336-page length.

Questions Explored

“Who are the leaders? What do leaders do? What knowledge do leaders possess?” the author questions at the outset, outlining his stall, but choosing not to ask “When are leaders?”, topics likely set aside for a future volume.

Beyond that, this book features a notable absence at its core. It’s an attempt in passive-aggressive self-justification, in almost-but-not-quite expressing the underlying truth, jumping adeptly from unresolved issue to raw emotion across a series of data visualizations, corporate platitudes and references about Thomas Cromwell.

Immersion

Reading it is like listening to your loved ones having a controlled but profoundly personal argument in the nearby area while you’re trying to concentrate on a professional workshop named “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also challenging to put down, as the author keeps coming close to something you genuinely desire to hear about, before unexpectedly changing tack.

Insights

The book contains always news headlines in books of this nature, such is the rapt interest with leading the national team. The most striking ones are: he decided he was definitely going to step down as England manager after fans threw cups at him at the tournament; he almost chose to forfeiting the game at the interval against Bulgaria in 2019 after his team were subjected to racism; he introduced the approach of dedicated restart experts and all teams in the English football is now copying him; he has now misplaced his enthusiasm for football, a surprising admission casually mentioned in a short passage at the conclusion.

Guiding England through a period of fury, hope, turmoil and confinement was a grueling ordeal. The bruises are clearly still fresh.

Generic Content

Otherwise, the text is flooded with an computer-generated word-sludge of generic leadership chat. Advanced copies of this book were distributed with journalists under secrecy pacts before release, presumably out of concern someone might leak that “challenging discussions can, by their very essence, be difficult”, that you should always think before you act, that management takes place where evolution meets compassion.

Sincere Expression

Readers will find however real emotion present. Guiding England through a time of rage, hope, turmoil and confinement was a brutal experience. The scars are obviously still raw, albeit expressed in a jargon-laden reinterpretation of the traditional coach narrative: why I was actually right about everything throughout.

Detailed Instances

The book’s introductory section, presented as exciting accounts of the deciding game of Euro 2024, is entirely focused on how effective the manager really was at tactical substitutions (the big Southgate gripe revolving around he wasn’t successful at substitutes). Further on, he delves into great depth about how he handled the Euros final of 2021 impeccably – specifically the losing penalty shootout – because he complied with a predetermined process, which must mean that throwing on young players at the last moment to take the most important kick of their existence was logical and right.

This was confirmed by a successful shootout against the Swiss team in a subsequent competition after a game where England spent 120 minutes looking as if they were striving to don a sweater the backwards. “Our dominance in that shootout was absolutely exciting,” he states, in between likening the performance to elite military units neutralizing Osama bin Laden. Dear me.

Withheld Details

When we come near to a revelation, Southgate withdraws from identifying individuals or sharing the details. We discover there were problematic England squad members who demanded more attention, possibly because they were pampered at the start of their careers. But as you lean forward hopefully, he is quickly shifting into a topic named a leadership concept, which asserts that as opposed to a collection of characteristics or values, culture is in fact a phenomenon that is created by, alas, please, that’s sufficient.

Highlights

Among the better bits are when he discusses about the incremental nature of developing fortitude in youth, or how he tried to articulate Englishness more coherently and more helpfully than any other figure in the limelight. The standout section, there is a really absorbing narrative of that distressing evening in Sofia where England’s black players were targeted with hatred (and later supported robustly by their manager).

Heartfelt Conclusion

Maybe the most heartfelt segment {comes|arrives|appears