There were a few eyebrows raised when Gareth Southgate was confirmed as the FA’s new head of elite development at the end of January 2011. He had only just turned 40 and was working as a pundit for ITV, having been sacked as Middlesbrough manager 15 months earlier.
Yet even though Southgate insisted at the time that becoming England manager was not on his agenda, the significance of that moment in the history of English football is now undeniable. Initially appointed to work alongside Sir Trevor Brooking and tasked with “the key objective of bringing through better players and coaches to aid the national team” in response to the 4-1 thrashing by Germany at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, the former Crystal Palace and Aston Villa defender has been the chief architect of England’s renaissance since then.
During his 18-month spell as head of elite development, Southgate was partly responsible for implementing changes that had been recommended by the FA youth development review a few months earlier, which included new restrictions on children playing 11-a-side games on full-size pitches until they were 13. He also played a key role in the opening of the new national training centre at St George’s Park in 2012, outlining his belief that having the same base for all of England’s senior and youth teams would be crucial to fostering team culture for future generations.
“If we are successful at under-16 and under-17, the players will carry the mindset through to the senior team that England is a place we go to and win. Like the Spanish are experiencing, like the Germans do,” Southgate told the Guardian’s David Conn a couple of months after his appointment. “Rather than insisting to clubs, saying we want mandatory release of players, we’d like players to want to come and play in England squads.”
Nick Levett was working as the FA’s national development manager when Southgate took over. “From day one, Gareth wanted to see how it all worked and how everything fitted together,” he recalls. “I’d been there under Fabio Capello and Sven-Göran Eriksson and neither had a huge interest in the youth pathway.
“That was probably the biggest thing that Gareth brought to the FA – he thought: ‘How can I connect everything together to make sure we have a better flow of high-quality players coming into the senior team?’ Between him and Dan Ashworth, they were really able to shape the strategy.”
Ashworth, who began working as Manchester United’s new sporting director last week, is also credited with developing the pathway and playing style – coined as England’s DNA – from youth level to the senior team when he was appointed as the FA’s director of elite development in September 2012.
“It’s almost like a good school that has a culture and the older kids teach the younger ones what it is,” says John Allpress, who was the FA’s national young player development coach between 2000 and 2013. “If you have all the teams working together and the under-15s turn up and they see the under-18s working in a certain way, then that helps it to develop that bond between the age groups.”
While Southgate had asked not to be considered for Ashworth’s post, he was back at the FA less than a year later when he was chosen to succeed Stuart Pearce as the under-21s manager. England finished bottom of their group at the European Under-21 Championship in 2015 with a team that included John Stones and Harry Kane, and it wouldn’t be until the following year, after Southgate replaced Sam Allardyce following a four-game spell as caretaker, that things began to change.
In a few months, Dean Henderson had helped the under-20s win the World Cup in South Korea and Aaron Ramsdale, Reece James and Mason Mount were part of the under-19s squad who were crowned European champions. Then England’s under-17s won the World Cup in India with a squad that included Marc Guéhi, Phil Foden and Conor Gallagher. According to Levett, that success was partly down to a drastic decision in 2015 not to enter the traditional Victory Shield tournament against home nations at under-15 and under-16 level and instead target the big competitions in older age-groups.
“We didn’t want to go to the Under-17 World Cup having never faced an African or Asian team,” says Levett, who now runs the Rivers of Thinking coaching consultancy and brought Jude Bellingham and Jamal Musiala into England Under-15s when he was the FA’s talent ID manager. “So we ditched the Victory Shield to give the under-16s more of a varied games programme that would set themselves up for later rounds at the under-17s. It was that level of thinking about connecting the whole pathway. That has now all come together because there were a lot of players who were part of the group that won the Under-17 World Cup in 2017.”
England’s recent success at youth level has also yielded three consecutive victories at the Maurice Revello Tournament – formerly known as Toulon – another European under-19 title in 2022 and a first at under-21 level since 1994 last summer thanks to Cole Palmer and Anthony Gordon.
Allpress, who has also worked for Tottenham’s academy, believes another key factor in the transformation of their fortunes has been a vast improvement in the type of coaching young English players in academies receive. While the introduction of the elite player performance plan by Premier League academies in 2011 aimed to develop “more and better homegrown players” with a more holistic approach, he explains that the FA’s youth award that began in 2009 continues to “educate coaches about developing not only young footballers, but young people”.
“We realised that we didn’t have a workforce who had the right skill set,” says Allpress. “We needed to create an atmosphere where kids could experiment and explore without being vilified for their mistakes. The coaches have to have the kids’ backs so they can have the opportunity to flourish. There is much more awareness of the need to do that and that has created humble players who know that they need to learn and keep practising to improve.
“You could see that with the penalty shootout against Switzerland – that doesn’t happen by accident. It’s down to their mental attitude and how much they have been preparing for that situation. They are willing to put dedicated work in to get the rewards.”
Besides Southgate making history as the first England manager to reach the final of a major men’s tournament overseas, Levett believes he deserves credit for his ruthlessness in dropping players such as Jordan Henderson and Marcus Rashford and placing his trust in a younger generation. “He’s been brave to bring players in even if it was an unpopular decision,” Levett says. “I think that is the perception people have of Gareth from the outside. He’s a nice man but if there is a tough decision to be made he doesn’t shirk from it.”
