England’s World Cup Team Tries Sticking to Sports
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In the opening scene of “Dear England,” a new, four-part BBC bio-pic by James Graham, the camera focusses on a dot of white paint on a grassy surface. The year is 1996; the dot is the penalty spot at Wembley, the home of English soccer; and Gareth Southgate, a player for the national team, is about to miss a kick that would have kept alive his country’s hope of winning the European Championship, a feat that, in the words of a popular song of the time, would have ended “thirty years of hurt.” (At that point, England had not won a major international tournament since 1966, when it lifted the World Cup.) Cut to 2016—fifty years of hurt, and counting—and an older Southgate (played by Joseph Fiennes) is sitting in a corridor at England’s Football Association, where he is about to become the team’s manager, initially on an interim basis. (He’s waiting while his predecessor, Sam Allardyce, who lasted one game before undercover newspaper reporters ensnared him as part of a corruption investigation, is being told to resign.) Southgate seems to sense that England is badly broken, not only in its national soccer program but as a country; he was appointed weeks after the Brexit vote, and “Dear England” doesn’t shy from establishing this context. All the while, he remains haunted by his 1996 penalty miss. He wonders, at one point, whether there’s an alternate universe in which he’d scored, and England became “a happier, more confident place as a result.”
A decade ago, when Southgate took the England manager’s job in real life, it would have been hard to imagine him as the protagonist of a politically inflected prestige miniseries (never mind the hit stage play on which it was based). And yet his portrayal as a proxy for a nation’s broader sense of itself is no mere narrative contrivance: Southgate really did position himself, and his players, at the center of such questions, with a dexterity that was unprecedented for a British sports coach and would lead the Athletic to dub him “arguably the most important person” in the past two decades of British public life. In 2021, after some England fans booed the players for taking a knee in protest of racism, Southgate penned an open letter (from which “Dear England” would take its title) in the Players’ Tribune, a website founded by Derek Jeter to publish first-person perspectives from professional athletes. He outlined a patriotism that was small-“c” conservative—he extolled his grandfather’s military service during the Second World War, as well as the pomp of royal pageants—but also insisted that the rising tide of history would soon wash away the stain of bigotry in British society. “I have never believed that we should just stick to football,” Southgate wrote, citing his players’ “duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice.” The actor Rory Kinnear read the letter aloud on the BBC’s flagship radio program “Today.” Liberal pundits suggested that Southgate had set out a more cohesive case for Englishness than the empty nostalgia offered by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson—and even that Southgate might do a better job. Frank Luntz, the veteran American pollster, hailed the letter as one of the best he’d ever read. He added a word of advice for politicians grasping for the right words: “Be more like Gareth Southgate.”
Not bad for a man who—as Barney Ronay, a sportswriter at the Guardian, put it following Southgate’s hiring, in 2016—has the aura of “an ambitious young geography teacher hurrying into class three hours early to set up his papier mache sedimentary rock bed.” Indeed, back then, Southgate faced questions not only about his personal gravitas but also about whether he was up to the job in a sporting sense. His most recent predecessors had all boasted glittering, or at least steady, track records and still could not get England further than a major-tournament quarterfinal; Southgate’s managerial experience—an undistinguished spell at Middlesbrough, then a Premier League also-ran, and a stint running an England youth squad—was comparatively thin. And yet, he would succeed where glitzier names had failed. His England team reached the semifinal of the 2018 World Cup—an overachievement that turned the waistcoat-clad Southgate into an unlikely international sex symbol and fashion icon—and the final of the Euros twice, in 2021 (post-letter) and in 2024. Neither ended in a win, but when Southgate stepped down, after the 2024 final, the head of the F.A. said that he’d made “the impossible job possible.” Politics aside, the soccer, it turned out, wasn’t bad, either.
Except, sometimes, it was. The vibes of the 2018 semifinal campaign were joyous, but England didn’t always play well, and the team’s ultimate defeat, to a Croatia side it perhaps should have beaten, was born of excessive caution; much the same thing happened in the 2021 Euros final, when England scored early against Italy, then sat back, labored, and eventually lost on penalty kicks. (Plus ça change.) Despite reaching the final for a second time, the 2024 team served up turgid fare in most of its matches, so much so that frustrated fans threw plastic beer cups at Southgate following a goalless tie against the minnows of Slovenia. That England avoided what would have been an embarrassing last-sixteen exit to Slovakia was thanks mostly to the individual brilliance of Jude Bellingham, its attacking prodigy, who scissored in an acrobatic finish at the death.
It’s still unclear, from today’s vantage point, whether Southgate’s generational skill as therapist to the nation and father figure to his players got the most out of a flawed roster, or if his tactical shortcomings held back a team that was, at least by the end of his tenure, good enough to win. After Southgate resigned (seemingly to spend less time on soccer and more fretting about the social ills plaguing young men), the F.A. moved to replace him with Thomas Tuchel, a world-class coach and proven winner—an approach that could end sixty years of hurt, but itself carries risks. In “Dear England,” Southgate acknowledges to a psychologist, whom he had hired to work with the players, that “I know I’m not the best manager in the world,” and she replies by asking, “What is ‘best’ ?” England is about to find out.
Southgate missed the decisive penalty, in 1996, in a match against Germany. Tuchel, born in Bavaria, did not line up for the opposition that day; he was a marginal player who, at the time, plied his trade semi-professionally for SSV Ulm 1846, a club in the third tier of Germany’s domestic soccer pyramid. A couple of years later, an injury forced Tuchel to retire, aged just twenty-five. Afterward, he studied business and worked at a trendy night spot in Stuttgart, an industrial hub in southern Germany, where he graduated from collecting glasses to mixing drinks—he has joked that he felt like Tom Cruise’s character in the 1988 movie “Cocktail”—and made the acquaintance of a generation of emerging hip-hop and rap artists who patronized the place. In 1999, Tuchel’s former club was sensationally promoted to the top tier, and he was left to wonder what might have been. If “Dear England” makes much of Southgate’s ongoing trauma from his missed penalty, he was, in the scheme of things, one of the lucky ones.
Later, Tuchel got himself back into soccer, first as a youth trainer at Stuttgart’s local team, then, eventually, as the head coach at Mainz, a top-tier side. From there, his rise was meteoric. He moved around, managing several major European clubs, from the German giants Borussia Dortmund to the perennial French champions Paris Saint-Germain, to the London club Chelsea (where he won the Champions League, Europe’s highest club honor), to the even gianter Germans of Bayern Munich. In October, 2024, he was unveiled as England’s head coach. Jingoists howled with rage that a foreigner—no, worse, a German—had got the England job. (The Daily Mail, a right-wing tabloid, declared it “A DARK DAY FOR ENGLAND.”) But those not stuck in a perpetual Battle of Britain reënactment took note of Tuchel’s pedigree, albeit in the club, not international, game. In an imagined exchange at the end of “Dear England,” Southgate and Tuchel meet, and Tuchel observes that “ten years ago, no truly world-class manager wanted this job.” Southgate laughs, and asks, playfully, but with a hint of pain, whether “that’s why I got it?” Tuchel replies, “Well, yes, exactly.”
It’s possible to overstate the differences between Southgate and Tuchel. Despite his touchy-feely reputation, Southgate could be ruthless, shelving experienced players in the name of squad renewal; Tuchel, for his part, has stressed the need for “brotherhood” between his players. Nonetheless, the contrast is, in many ways, stark. More than one expert has described Tuchel as a sort of anti-Southgate; Frank Skinner observed that, whereas Southgate was like a dog-walker who never let his charge off the leash, Tuchel has “a slight madness about him.” (Skinner is a comedian, and not a soccer expert, per se—though he did co-write “Three Lions,” the song of “years of hurt” fame, and as such has a lifetime free pass to weigh in.) If Southgate had the vibe of a geography teacher, Tuchel’s assistant coach has likened his boss’s charisma to that of a movie star. (No word on whether he was thinking of Cruise.) Tuchel has, at least, been much blunter than Southgate in public, both about his squad—he has said that Bellingham sometimes behaves with an aggression that Tuchel’s mother finds “repulsive”—and Southgate himself. Shortly after taking charge, he said that the 2024 Euros team looked too scared to win, and lacking in the requisite “identity, the clarity, the rhythm, the repetition of patterns, the freedom of players, the expression of players, the hunger.” (He did apologize for the Bellingham remark.)
Tuchel is a much more sophisticated tactician than Southgate, but he has flamed out at past clubs, amid reports of fraught relations with players and colleagues. In the run-up to this World Cup, he set records with England. His team qualified with an unprecedented defensive prowess for a European team. He also (albeit in non-competitive games) oversaw England’s first-ever defeats to teams from Africa (Senegal) and Asia (Japan). Last night, England played its first game of the tournament—a rematch against Croatia, in Dallas—and the defensive prowess was a speck on the horizon; both sides scored twice in a breathless first half. Early in the second half, however, Bellingham made it three-two, and a late fourth goal caused the pub I was in to erupt in chants of Skinner’s song.
There’s a long way to go, of course. Whatever happens next, it’s already clear that Tuchel conceives of his role in more narrowly sporting terms than Southgate. It is hard to foresee him penning a manifesto for progressive patriotism in the Players’ Tribune; indeed, he has said that he intends to “hide a little bit behind being not English, and not talk to everything that happens in your country.” (This week, he said that he can’t protect his players from racist abuse online, beyond advising them to log off.) Some soccer journalists have suggested that the job might weigh less heavily on Tuchel as a result; Ronay, of the Guardian, wrote recently that his “lack of baggage” might be “an advantage,” in that “there will be zero England culture stuff. Nobody is going to talk about old maids cycling to church, or the cultural semiotics of cheddar cheese.” Tuchel’s approach might, at least, be grimly appropriate for a tournament whose organizers would surely like everyone to focus on the action, and ignore the stench of corruption and xenophobia in the air. It’s no longer 2021. Southgate’s confident assertion that the tide of history was turning against bigotry now looks utopian, or even naïve. So, too, does the idea that a soccer coach could close fissures that even the well-meaning among career politicians have failed to seal.
Of course, for all that Southgate cast “sticking to football” as a poor moral choice, it might also just be impossible. Politics has a habit of intruding on sport, as Tuchel knows well; he was in charge of Chelsea when Russia invaded Ukraine, and the club’s owner, the oligarch Roman Abramovich, was hit by government sanctions and forced to sell. As the Byline Times has pointed out, Tuchel’s England squad remains a testament to a certain vision of Britishness by virtue of its multicultural makeup, even as it represents a country in which far-right politics are ascendant, and have recently exploded into violence. Perhaps the cleanest rebuke of noisy nativism would be for England to win, and, if Tuchel can take that final step that eluded Southgate, he’ll be immortalized, too—perhaps in a prestige miniseries of his own, and a more straightforwardly triumphal one at that. If he fails, England might find itself lumbered with both the toxic politics of 2026 and the underperforming, disconnected soccer team that Southgate inherited a decade ago. Either way, some hurt feels inevitable. ♦