English football fans may never agree on Gareth Southgate’s footballing legacy, and will long debate whether he deprived the so-called golden generation of ending 58 years of hurt. But what cannot and should not be disputed is that Southgate has fundamentally reshaped England men’s football off the field.
It’s not just that when English footballers gather together they no longer carry their fierce club rivalries into the England camp (Liverpool players dining apart from the Manchester United contingent, say). It’s that by breaking down barriers no other England manager has ever done or even attempted, he has created an inclusive, caring team ethos. His successor, whoever he is, will not be able to ignore the changes he has made, let alone go back to a past where an England manager was sublimely incurious of anything outside the field of play.
What makes this story truly remarkable is that Southgate could not have been a more unlikely person to effect such a change.
He grew up in the 1980s, when the ideas of inclusion and diversity, which today not even the most rightwing anti-woke warrior would dare rail against, were barely discussed, let alone accepted. With a very middle-England background he would have had few opportunities to meet the children of the Windrush generation, as many of his white Crystal Palace teammates did. And it is worth recalling that in the 80s Palace, despite being the historically dominant south London club, was almost exclusively a white enclave in the midst of one of the most concentrated black communities in the country. It was as Southgate was making his way through the youth ranks that the club acquired some of the iconic black players of that generation: Ian Wright, Mark Bright, Andy Gray, Chris Powell, with whom he played in the youth team; he later recruited Powell as part of his coaching setup. But this was still a world so far removed from ours that in south London in the 80s, after training on a Friday afternoon, Palace players had white v black matches, the white team calling itself Great Britain and the black team Brazil. As Alan Pardew, who played for Palace, told me: “When I look back now it’s just bizarre really that we did that, but at that time it didn’t feel abnormal.”
Move forward to Podgorica in Montenegro in March 2019. England win 5-1 but Raheem Sterling and Danny Rose are subjected to monkey chanting noises from the crowd, which Montenegro’s manager says he has not heard. Southgate not only heard, and not only said the FA would complain to Uefa, but shunned the all too familiar desire for the English to take the moral high ground in such situations, saying: “I’m not sitting here just criticising what’s happened tonight. We have the same issue in our country, we’re not free of it.”
Southgate, of course, has his critics, particularly among the anti-woke warriors who have never forgiven him for supporting players for taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and saying: “White people have to speak up about it as well, because the reality is that some of the thinking that has to change is within the white community and the people that can make some of these decisions, that need to be made, are white people and so it can’t just be left to our players, it can’t just be left to organisations like Kick It Out alone … I know where my players would be on this and I can understand the anger, the passion, the sadness.”
This flowed from the fact that, as he put it in his famous Dear England letter: “I have never believed that we should just stick to football … I have a responsibility to the wider community to use my voice, and so do the players.”
Southgate’s failure to make sure football came home might make it easy to dismiss his legacy. But before the critics hit the keyboards they may care to go and see the play inspired by the Dear England letter. My wife and I watched it with members of our family who have no interest in football, and I was fearful that the story would mean nothing to them. I could not have been more wrong. Back in 1966, on the day England won the World Cup, my wife, interested in showjumping, was upset that the men were watching the World Cup and not helping out with the ponies. By the end of Dear England, she and the rest of the family, like everybody else in the theatre, felt we were part of the same team. Southgate could not emulate Alf Ramsey, but he has put down a marker about the national game and sport that no other sports administrator has ever done. That is no mean achievement.
Mihir Bose is the author of Thank You Mr Crombie: Lessons in Guilt and Gratitude to the British
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