A NIGHT WITH GARETH SOUTHGATE: I KNEW IT WAS TIME TO GO WHEN ENGLAND FANS THREW BEER AT ME
We have grown accustomed to seeing Sir Gareth Southgate at the theatre, given that Joseph Fiennes spent several months depicting him on the West End stage.
While the newly-ennobled former England manager says he was flattered to be portrayed by the star of Oscar-nominated films, he admits that he never watched Dear England, the play exploring his transformation of the team’s place in the national psyche. It would, he suggests, have been too confronting, too uncomfortable. Plus, he had no financial stake in the production, which has now been turned into a four-part BBC series for release next year. “I don’t even get any image rights,” he mutters. “It’s a joke.” I sense he is only half-jesting.
It has been 16 months since Southgate left perhaps the most-scrutinised role in the land, his spirit crushed by defeat in a second successive European Championship final. He performed his post-match duties in Berlin with customary dignity, shaking every hand and taking every question, but plunging back into the cold bath of domestic mundanity in Yorkshire hit him hard, especially in the knowledge he was leaving the England job for good. “I was cleaning up dog sick at home at the same time the Spanish coach was parading the trophy in Madrid,” he says, ruefully.
He has been typically meticulous in navigating life beyond England, re-positioning himself as a leadership guru and even becoming a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School. But the gossamer thin lines that dictate how you are remembered in sport continue to gnaw away at him. He finds it difficult even to enjoy some fish and chips in peace without a punter trying to tell him who he ought to have played at left-back. Should he have selected different penalty-takers in 2021? Should he have taken the handbrake off during those ponderous performances last year? “I have to accept that I made those decisions,” he says. “I can’t beat myself up for the next 20 years. But they are the decisions that determine whether you’re immortalised or not.”
Southgate enters the auditorium at York acclaimed not quite as an immortal, but certainly as a fundamentally decent man worthy of sincere respect. There are no “Southgate you’re the one” chants, or Gareth die-hards turning up in tribute Marks & Spencer waistcoats. Polite applause greets him as he strides out against a banner of “Gareth Southgate: Lessons in Leadership”, as if he is about to conduct a management seminar. In some ways, he is, with the book he has just written structured less as a chronology of his eight years with England than as an exploration of the lessons he absorbed. It might sound like a recipe for corporate jargon, but there is no doubting his conviction that every life experience can be distilled into logic. Even the visceral ordeal of missing his penalty at Euro ’96 is one he defines here as “not executing a skill under pressure”.
Fortunately, glimpses of the human being still filter through. Southgate admits to being a super-fan of Celebrity Traitors, not disputing a rumour that he appeared on a recent Zoom call wearing a full mock traitor’s cape. “Oh, it’s great, isn’t it?” he says. “Conor Coady introduced us all to the board game version at the World Cup in Qatar. By the time of the Euros in Germany, Marc Guehi, who is the son of a minister, came up to me and said, ‘I’m a traitor and I can’t go through with it, gaffer. It’s really troubling me.”
He is entertaining, too, on the privileged access that his time with England enabled, struggling to choose between a salmon lunch with Prince William at Sandringham and rappelling face first off a cliff edge with Bear Grylls as his ultimate off-field highlight. But there is no escaping the fact that much of Southgate’s tenure beyond football was an agony, as he expanded his responsibilities as a coach into that of a concerned moral guardian. “People thought I went out of my way to comment on society,” he says. “But it was more about the issues that were brought to us as a team.”
While Southgate’s evolution into a spokesman on race relations and English national unity tends to be traced to the pandemic, when the team’s move to take the knee eventually caused a backlash from their own supporters, his worries began much earlier. At a European qualifier in Montenegro in March 2019, he was initially furious with Danny Rose for a careless late yellow card, only to discover that the full-back had been racially abused from the stands. The scenes were even bleaker in Bulgaria seven months later, with England’s 6-0 win stopped twice for monkey chants and coming close to being abandoned.
This sense of solidarity with the team’s young black players, coupled with the Black Lives Matter protests that proliferated after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, strengthened Southgate’s belief that England should stage an anti-racism gesture before every match. “People said taking the knee was a political statement, but it wasn’t,” he says. “I was trying to do the right thing for our players.” The trouble was that repetition not only blunted its impact but implied a tacit endorsement, however strenuously denied, of the more radical political aims of the Black Lives Matter movement, such as defunding the police. Plus, some black players themselves, such as Wilfried Zaha, hated the performative element, refusing to engage on the grounds it suggested subjugation rather than defiance.
The end result was that, at a friendly against Romania in June 2021, one of the first international games marking the return of crowds, the disapproval of some fans was audible. “We took the knee in Middlesbrough and were booed for doing it,” Southgate recalls. “My big fear was that the players would feel the crowd was booing them. But I think it was more about the decision.”
At the same time, Southgate published a remarkable open letter to England fans, seeking to define his conceptions of Englishness. “Dear England,” it began, spawning the title of both a play in his honour and his latest book. Explaining the missive, which ranged across everything from his grandfather’s service in the Second World War to his instincts to speak out on racial injustice, he says: “The letter was recognising that our nation’s identity is changing, that we’ve got to move with that. We have to keep that Englishness, but be aware of other cultures. We have boys who are desperate to play for England but who are also proud of their Nigerian or Ghanaian roots.”
In this, his first week of public conversations since stepping down from England, he has been drawn back to similarly incendiary subjects, not least Gary Neville blaming political polarisation on “angry middle-aged white men”. Southgate has drawn headlines by indicating in a BBC Breakfast interview that the row over flying the St George’s flag risks compromising national “unity”, and on his grand evening in York he readily doubles down. “There’s so much that’s good about our country,” he says. “It really irks me when we just talk about division.”
All through life, Southgate has embraced a calling as the great mediator. Even while doing punditry work for ITV, he persuaded sworn enemies Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira to go for an ice cream with each other. For England, he was so anxious about striking a unifying tone that he would “walk a tightrope” in press conferences, preparing for them as assiduously as for his training sessions. While he would never call it the impossible job – a sequence of semi-final, final, quarter-final, final in his four major tournaments attests to that – he was clearly worn down by the unforgiving criticism. “The Royal family? People think it’s hard work. Prime Minister? Poisoned chalice. But everybody thinks they are the England manager.”
It is telling how he feels, by the end, that he was a divisive influence. For a man whose abiding quest was to have the exact opposite effect on people, it was a painful realisation. Although he conditioned his players to screen out the outside noise, he acknowledges: “It started to affect the team. Once, as a coach, your presence becomes divisive, you have to consider whether it’s right to stay on or not. When fans were throwing beer at me after the game against Slovenia, it was a message that it was time to move on.”
Move on to what, however? Southgate is still only 55 and finds himself repeatedly linked to the revolving door at Manchester United. He scoffs at the idea, arguing that he is content imparting his wisdom to businesses and students. But there is a pathos here, an intimation that having given everything to England, he is at a loss to what comes next. “I’m at a point where I’ve had one of the most incredible jobs, which had purpose, because it was about my country,” he says. “To recapture that is really difficult for me. There is just nothing that will be quite the same.”
The ovation as he exits stage left is poignant. Football made him a knight of the realm, but it also left a part of him forever incomplete.
Recommended
Sir Gareth Southgate on English people flying St George's flag: I worry about unity
2025-11-04T14:05:46Z
