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The football book is curiously uninspiring, yet oddly captivating. Even title is confusing. The Dear England title currently is used by a hit play, an forthcoming TV show, and a open letter penned by Gareth Southgate in 2021.

This iteration of Dear England is not formally connected to those. It represents an peculiar entry in the expanding Dear England universe, a book about management: a typically dry top-level coach theme that the author follows doggedly, using the words “leader”, “leading” or “leadership” at least 500 times across the book’s entirety.

Themes Raised

“Who are the leaders? What actions do leaders take? And what do leaders know?” he asks in the opening, establishing his stall, but declining to explore “How are leaders?”, topics presumably set aside for a future volume.

Otherwise, this publication has a significant gap throughout. It’s an attempt in passive-aggressive self-defense, in nearly but not entirely saying the actual thing, hopping adeptly from unsettled score to unscabbed wound across a collection of pie charts, corporate platitudes and discussions about Thomas Cromwell.

Immersion

Reading it is like eavesdropping on your family members having a controlled but intensely emotional debate in the adjacent space while you’re trying to pay attention on a business seminar called “Numerous Justifications for My Ultimate Victory”. But it is also difficult to put down, as the author keeps drifting near to a topic you truly want to discover, before abruptly changing tack.

Disclosures

The book contains typically controversial revelations in works like these, due to the rapt interest with leading the national team. The best instances include: the manager made up his mind he was certainly going to quit as England manager after supporters threw cups at him at the Euros; he came very close to withdrawing from the game at mid-match against the Bulgarian team in 2019 after his team were racially abused; he introduced the idea of specialist dead-ball trainers and all teams in the English football is now copying him; he has now misplaced his love for football, a surprising admission thrown away in a brief section at the final part.

Managing England through a period of fury, aspiration, turmoil and confinement was a grueling experience. The scars are clearly still raw.

Commonplace Material

Otherwise, the narrative is overrun with an AI-style verbal clutter of standard management talk. Review editions of this publication were shared with journalists under confidentiality clauses before release, probably out of fear someone might leak that “tough talks can, by their very essence, be tough”, that you should always consider the consequences, that guidance takes place where evolution intersects with understanding.

Genuine Feeling

Readers will find nevertheless real emotion here. Guiding England through a period of anger, hope, turmoil and lockdown was a grueling ordeal. The scars are evidently still fresh, albeit conveyed in a buzzword-filled reinterpretation of the traditional coach story: why I was actually right about each issue all along.

Detailed Instances

Even publication’s opening passage, presented as gripping accounts of the championship match of Euro 2024, is entirely focused on how effective he really was at substitutes (the big Southgate gripe revolving around he wasn’t effective at altering the lineup). Subsequently, he delves into extensive analysis about how he oversaw the Euros final of 2021 flawlessly – particularly the losing spot-kick decider – because he adhered to a set protocol, which suggests that introducing young players in the closing stages to take the biggest shot of their careers was reasonable and accurate.

This was proved right by a successful penalty decider against Switzerland at a later tournament after a fixture where England spent the entire match looking as if they were trying to don a sweater the wrong way round. “Our commanding performance in that penalty decider was truly thrilling,” the author notes, amid likening the display to special forces killing a notorious figure. Goodness.

Avoided Revelations

When we do get close to a insight, he retreats from specifying people or providing the details. We discover there were challenging England individuals who insisted on more focus, maybe because they were spoilt at the start of their professional journeys. But as you expect expectantly, Southgate is already veering off into something called The Culture Code, which claims that instead of a assemblage of characteristics or values, organizational ethos is in fact an element that is developed by, gah, enough, that’s sufficient.

Strengths

Included in the more compelling parts are when the author explores about the incremental method of developing fortitude in the next generation, or how he sought to define national identity more clearly and more helpfully than any other figure in the spotlight. Best of all, there is a really compelling narrative of that distressing match in Sofia where England’s players of color were targeted with hatred (and subsequently protected robustly by their leader).

Genuine Ending

Possibly the most heartfelt part {comes|arrives|appears