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This football book is oddly dull, yet strangely captivating. Its title causes confusion. The Dear England title already belongs to a successful theatrical production, an forthcoming television program, and a open letter written by Gareth Southgate in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England is not officially tied to any of those. It exists as an oddity in the Dear England Multiverse, a volume about leadership: a typically uninspiring top-level coach subject that Southgate sticks to doggedly, employing the words “leader”, “guiding” or “management” no fewer than 500 times across its 336-page length.

Themes Explored

“What are leaders? What actions do leaders take? What insights do leaders have?” the author questions early on, setting out his position, but declining to address “When are leaders?”, questions presumably saved for a future volume.

Beyond that, this publication features a notable absence throughout. It’s an exercise in indirectly hostile self-justification, in coming close without actually stating the actual thing, jumping adeptly from unresolved issue to raw emotion across a collection of pie charts, corporate platitudes and references about 16th-century statesmen.

Reading Experience

Engaging with the text is like eavesdropping on your family members having a polite but deeply felt argument in the nearby area while you’re striving to concentrate on a business seminar titled “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also challenging to stop reading, as Southgate keeps coming close to something you truly want to hear about, before abruptly shifting focus.

Insights

Readers will find inevitably controversial revelations in works in this genre, such is the peeled-eyeball obsession with England managerdom. The best examples are: the manager decided he was definitely going to step down as England manager after fans tossed cups at him at the tournament; he came very close to abandoning the game at mid-match against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his players were targeted with slurs; he pioneered the idea of set-piece coaches and all teams in the English football is now copying him; he has now misplaced his passion for soccer, a shocking admission briefly included in a single paragraph at the end.

Leading England through a period of anger, aspiration, upheaval and pandemic restrictions was a grueling journey. The scars are obviously still unhealed.

Generic Content

Throughout much of the book, the text is saturated with an robotic linguistic mush of standard guidance discourse. Review editions of this book were provided with critics under non-disclosure agreements ahead of publication, likely out of apprehension someone might reveal that “difficult conversations can, by their inherent quality, be difficult”, that you should always look before you leap, that management happens where transformation meets empathy.

Emotional Core

There is nonetheless real sentiment here. Managing England through a time of anger, optimism, turmoil and pandemic restrictions was a harsh journey. The bruises are evidently still raw, albeit conveyed in a buzzword-filled reinterpretation of the traditional coach narrative: why I was actually right about everything from the start.

Detailed Instances

The book’s opening passage, presented as thrilling accounts of the final of Euro 2024, is all about how effective he in fact was at player changes (the major Southgate gripe centering on he was not good at substitutes). Further on, he delves into extensive analysis about how he managed the deciding game of 2021 perfectly – notably the unsuccessful tiebreaker – because he complied with a established procedure, which suggests that introducing young players very late to take the crucial attempt of their careers was reasonable and right.

That approach was confirmed by a victorious penalty decider against the Swiss team four years later after a game where England spent the full duration looking as if they were attempting to don a sweater the backwards. “Our commanding performance in that penalty decider was absolutely exhilarating,” Southgate writes, in between likening the performance to US Navy Seals neutralizing Osama bin Laden. Oh Gareth.

Withheld Details

When we do get close to a revelation, Southgate withdraws from identifying individuals or sharing the details. We discover there were challenging England squad members who demanded more focus, maybe because they were pampered early in their professional journeys. But as you expect eagerly, he is already diverting into a topic titled The Culture Code, which asserts that instead of a collection of qualities or ideals, culture is in fact a phenomenon that is formed by, unfortunately, stop, no more.

Notable Sections

Included in the better bits are when he explores about the piecemeal method of building mental toughness in youth, or how he tried to define what it means to be English more coherently and more helpfully than any public personality in the limelight. Best of all, there is a really absorbing narrative of that harrowing night in Sofia where England’s players of color were subjected to vile treatment (and afterwards defended robustly by their coach).

Heartfelt Conclusion

Perhaps the most heartfelt section {comes|arrives|appears