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The soccer book is curiously tedious, yet curiously captivating. Its title raises questions. Dear England currently belongs to a hit theatrical production, an upcoming TV show, and a national address penned by the manager in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England isn’t officially connected to those. It represents an peculiar entry in the expanding Dear England universe, a book about leadership: a typically uninspiring top-level coach trope that Southgate follows relentlessly, relying on the words “leader”, “leading” or “leadership” a minimum of 500 times across its 336-page length.

Questions Explored

“What are leaders? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” Southgate inquires at the outset, setting out his stall, but declining to ask “How are leaders?”, themes probably reserved for a future volume.

Additionally, this book has a book-shaped hole at its core. It’s an exercise in indirectly hostile self-justification, in nearly but not entirely saying the underlying truth, jumping nimbly from lingering grievance to fresh pain across a collection of pie charts, corporate platitudes and references about 16th-century statesmen.

Immersion

Reading it is like overhearing your family members having a mannered but profoundly personal argument in the nearby area while you’re trying to focus on a corporate presentation named “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also difficult to stop reading, as Southgate keeps drifting near to something you actually want to hear about, before suddenly shifting focus.

Revelations

Readers will find always news headlines in works like these, such is the peeled-eyeball fascination with England managerdom. The best examples are: he resolved he was definitely going to quit as England manager after supporters hurled containers at him at the Euros; he almost chose to withdrawing from the game at half-time against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his squad members were racially abused; he invented the concept of specialist dead-ball trainers and everyone in the top division is now adopting his methods; he has now abandoned his love for soccer, a shocking admission briefly included in a short passage at the final part.

Guiding England through a era of fury, aspiration, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a harsh journey. The scars are evidently still fresh.

Predictable Elements

Otherwise, the text is saturated with an computer-generated verbal clutter of standard leadership chat. Copies of this publication were shared with critics under non-disclosure agreements before launch, presumably out of apprehension someone might disclose that “difficult conversations can, by their nature, be difficult”, that you should always consider the consequences, that leadership takes place where change intersects with understanding.

Emotional Core

There is nonetheless genuine sentiment here. Managing England through a time of anger, hope, political ferment and confinement was a harsh experience. The wounds are clearly still unhealed, albeit conveyed in a jargon-laden reinterpretation of the standard coach theme: how my decisions were correct about everything throughout.

Notable Cases

Even book’s initial chapter, disguised as thrilling recollections of the deciding game of Euro 2024, is all about how good the manager really was at substitutes (the major common complaint centering on he wasn’t good at substitutes). Further on, he explores significant detail about how he managed the Euros final of 2021 flawlessly – particularly the losing penalty shootout – because he followed a established procedure, which suggests that throwing on young players very late to take the most important kick of their existence was reasonable and right.

That approach was validated by a winning penalty decider against the Swiss team four years later after a game where England spent the full duration looking as if they were trying to wear a pullover the wrong way round. “The control we exerted in that tiebreaker was simply exhilarating,” he notes, amid likening the showing to US Navy Seals neutralizing a high-profile target. Goodness.

Withheld Details

When we approach to a revelation, he backs away from specifying people or giving us the substance. We hear there were challenging England players who insisted on more attention, possibly because they were pampered during the beginning of their professional journeys. But as you anticipate expectantly, he is already diverting into an area named a specific management theory, which states that rather than a assemblage of attributes or principles, organizational ethos is in fact an element that is formed by, alas, please, no more.

Strengths

Included in the better bits are when the author discusses about the incremental process of building resilience in the next generation, or how he tried to articulate what it means to be English more lucidly and more positively than any other figure in the public eye. Best of all, there is a truly absorbing account of that traumatic evening in the Bulgarian capital where England’s African heritage squad members were targeted with hatred (and later defended vigorously by their manager).

Heartfelt Conclusion

Perhaps the most sincere segment {comes|arrives|appears