“The important thing about football,” wrote the late novelist Terry Pratchett, “is that it is not just about football.” Any fan of the sport knows this innately: the 90 minutes of a football match can seem to contain humanity in all its multitudes. It’s an idea that playwright James Graham pushed to breaking point in 2023, when he wrote Dear England, a self-serious state-of-the-nation play about Gareth Southgate’s tenure as the manager of the England men’s national team. Now, that play has been made into a four-part BBC series – one that somehow makes Ted Lasso seem like a work of subtlety and restraint.
Joseph Fiennes, reprising his Olivier-nominated stage role, bafflingly plays Southgate with the sort of tortured intensity usually reserved for films about war veterans. When he takes the England job, in 2016, he inherits a talented but discordant squad in disarray; he is a man less concerned with winning football matches than with cultivating a vibe shift. (“My goal is to get people smiling again,” he says.) As we all know, his perestroika worked wonders: the “yes, more Mr Nice Guy” approach took the team to two international finals, a semi-final, and a quarter-final.
