This is an oddly dull, oddly irresistible football book. Even its title is confusing. Dear England is already the name of a hit Gareth Southgate play, a forthcoming Gareth Southgate TV show and an open letter to the nation authored by Southgate himself in 2021.
This Dear England isn’t formally related to any of those. It is instead an anomaly in the Dear England Multiverse, a book about leadership: a classically dull elite football manager trope that Southgate sticks to doggedly, using the words “leader”, “leading” or “leadership” at least 500 times in 336 pages. “What are leaders? What do leaders do? And what do leaders know?” he asks early on, setting out his stall, but stopping short of Why are leaders, How are leaders, or When are leaders?, questions he will presumably touch on in volume two.
