It took until 16 July, 2024 for Gareth Southgate to unite every England supporter. His critics thought it was time to go, for someone to inevitably take this team onto major tournament victory with free-flowing, attacking football. His acolytes saw him weary and ready for a break, eroded by the volume of the censure.
Southgate had come to the end of his tether, ready to run away from the circus and return to his family. He has given his all. He has done his best.
In his farewell message, Football Association chief executive Mark Bullingham spells it out in black and white. In the 25 tournaments that followed the 1966 World Cup, itself an end to fallow years, England won seven knockout matches; Southgate won nine. Before Southgate, the longest continuous time that England spent in the world’s top five was seven months; he kept us there for six years. He is, statistically, the greatest England manager of the last 50 years.
There will be dissenting voices now; there always were, both high-profile and across the nation. Some of those clearly focus on valid strands of criticism: the tactical conservatism, the late substitutions, the tendency to sit back on leads, the last tournament not being his best, something that often tends to shape the reputation of England managers past. He only beat bad teams in lucky draws, you see.
This criticism both makes valid points and yet, counterintuitively, provides the greatest compliments to Southgate. I started school in September 1990, an age at which my football obsession began to take hold. Between that first day in primary and Southgate’s appointment, days after I had turned 31, I saw us win, without penalties, two knockout matches: Ecuador and Denmark.
I, and so many others, grew from a child into an adolescent into an adult, from single life to relationship, from football dreamer to football realist; supporting England was an unmitigated dirge.
England failed to beat, failed to qualify or were eliminated by: Sweden (twice), Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, Romania (twice), Nigeria, Russia (twice), Algeria, USA, Costa Rica, Iceland. Only beat the bad teams? Where were you when we never even did that?
Then, England were their own punchline, a systemic, endemic failure of coaching development, player development, passion-over-technique blindness and the rising chasm between the dominance (emotional, financial, televisual) of English club football, and the international game.
They were that least attractive of combinations: inherent arrogance and entitlement with a vacuum where anything to back it up should exist. We taught the game to the world, you see. And then they showed us how to play it.
The accusation over recent weeks that Southgate has somehow wasted a uniquely elite class of English footballer, the retort is swift and obvious.
Here is a list of players from England’s Euro 2008 qualifying campaign when they failed to even make the tournament: Gerrard, Terry, A. Cole, Ferdinand, Lampard, J. Cole, Rooney, Beckham, Owen, Barry, Hargreaves, Campbell, Carrick, Neville, Carragher. Those careers overlap to form two decades of nothingness. If talent had ever been enough, this country would not be so beset by existential angst about our post-1966 reverse Doomsday Clock that counts incessantly up.
Instead, Southgate realised that only through a shift in culture could the England team ever be rebuilt. He came with little club experience as a coach but as a product of a system into which he invested entirely. He brought young players into a highly pressurised environment and then absolved all of that pressure himself, even if it meant walking towards boos and booze and beer cups. He never once lost his cool, even when all of us would have cracked.
And so England’s players loved playing for him and playing for England too. That should always be the case, and maybe now always will. It certainly wasn’t always.
I go back now to something I wrote in July 2018, after England had won their first ever penalty shootout at a World Cup, just another first under Southgate. It felt like England had played and won an entire tournament on that Tuesday evening against Colombia, such was the release and the relief. We watched Ian Wright in tears and Harry Maguire leading England’s fans in serenading victory songs and we longed to remain in one glorious, eternal present.
We still watch the BBC montage of those penalties back because it places us back there, an island on which there was only hope and expectation and pride. We watch it back because international football had rarely come wrapped in such purity before. We watch it back because, after two decades of them and us, here we finally believed there were 23 players and a manager who cared as much as we did. Southgate, this relatively unknown coach and this company man, changed the rules of engagement.
It was, still, my favourite moment as an England supporter (although it was rivalled twice in Germany – Trent Alexander-Arnold’s penalty and Ollie Watkins’s winner). Not because England had won anything or even overachieved, but because they had reinforced what it means to follow a national team that you believe in and, more importantly, that represents the best elements of its country under a manager that does the same.
That isn’t and wasn’t actual truth, only a construct of reality that we wanted to believe. There were more hurdles to jump because there are always more hurdles to jump. Quarter-finals follow last-16 ties; 2026 follows 2024 follows 2022.
Football is not a pursuit of perfection and gives you precious little time to stop and take breath. People will always want more.
That was Southgate’s greatest attribute that ultimately became his cross to bear. He was a manager created by a system and a process of progress who will be remembered for astonishing individual moments. He reconnected a national team with a population that then lost its connection with the manager himself. He opened our eyes to competing at the sharpest end of tournaments and then fell short on the stage he built.
History will judge him well, whatever happens now. Either England fall back into previous normality, the cracks of club cliques appearing and presenting Southgate as an emphatic exception to be celebrated. Or Southgate’s replacement will build upon permanent foundations and England will stay strong. We know enough about an otherwise private man to be sure that he will be desperate for the latter to be true.
For six years, Southgate was the great survivor who made supporting England feel like living again and then paid the price for our hearts beating faster. His replacement will not have to fear things that everyone else in this job had to before them. He lasted longer, did better, took us further than anyone since Sir Alf Ramsey – go back to 2016 to appreciate how astounding that is.
This position has been known as the impossible job for so long that it has become a painful cliché. That is Southgate’s legacy: turning impossible into improbable into imaginable into apparently so imminent that only major tournament glory will do now.