Gareth Southgate: our part in his downfall
It's the end of an era, and probably the right time to go, but the vituperation that he received in his final few weeks didn't reflect well on English football.
After eight years and more than 100 matches in charge of the England men’s national team, the most consistently successful manager in the history of the team has left the building.
And it’s understandable. You can pick away at the vituperation of the way in which he’s been treated over the last few weeks (months or years), and it seems at least as likely as not that this will have been a consideration on his part, but in a broad sense it’s difficult to avoid the feeling that this is just a cycle that reached the end of its lifespan. It’s best for everybody to just move on. Things can’t stay the same forever. Best to embrace the change.
But there is no question that it’s the end of an era, and what an era. So much has Gareth Southgate changed the face of the England men’s national team that it can feel difficult to recall just how desperate things had gotten by the late summer of 2016. The Sam Allardyce farce was the icing on the shit sandwich, of course, but the rot ran so much deeper than that.
It wasn’t even just Iceland and the debacle of Euro 2016. Even this came on top of having failed to get out of their group stage—for the first time since 1958 and only the second-ever time—at the 2014 World Cup and having finished bottom for the first time. By the time that Allardyce took a slug from his pint o’wine and accidentally spilled his beans a couple of months after Iceland, we were all watching on with stifled giggles at what this organisation, which seemed to have taken on the character traits of Norman Wisdom, might do next.
Expectations were low, and that they are so high eight years on tells a story in itself of the transformation that he has overseen. There is no other manager who can touch his record of two finals, a semi-final and a quarter-final. Over multiple tournaments, no other England manager really comes close. No, not even Sir Alf, whose overall record was patchier than most.
The transformation of the perception of the team has been staggering. For decades, playing for England required players to carry it like an albatross around their necks, a burden of weight that seemed to physically weigh them down when they needed it the least. That no longer seems to be the case, and the results on the pitch have been dramatic.
Up until 2016, England had reached one and three semi-finals in the previous 86 years. In 1966, they won with a little assistance from a lack of goal line technology. Two years later they lost to a late Yugoslavian goal in the semi-final of a tournament unrecognisable from the Euros that we see today. In both 1990 and 1996 they were beaten on penalties after excellent term performances.
Some have said that draws have been favourable to him, and it’s difficult to know what can be said in reply to that beyond, “Well, that’s kind of how it works and I’m not sure what anyone is supposed to do with that opinion”. The draw is the draw. Everything else is conjecture. And unbalancing the draw is something that we accept in the first place through FIFA rankings and seeding. This was never really a ‘fair’ criticism of him.
The complaints over the ‘quality’ of the play weren’t either, really. Firstly, the question of what constitutes ‘good’ football is entirely subjective. Secondly, if the purpose of football is to win matches then he was extremely successful and delivered what people wanted. To expect a team to win both consistently and in style is not only breathtakingly arrogant, but also vanishingly unlikely.
If his teams were set up cautiously, this was because of the players at his disposal. I’ve talked before about how tournament football is different to club football, about how it’s just not possible to drill complex tactical instructions into players at such short notice. The England manager—or any international manager—can only do so much with any player. Shortcomings in their game will always primarily have to be addressed by their clubs.
Who’s the replacement going to be? Jurgen Klopp sounds like a fanciful name to be heading any wish lists. Would a manager who’s just left a club—and especially one of whose supporters are increasingly embracing a ‘Scouse not English’ identity—that he clearly loves to take a breather be interested in a job in which in which the previous incumbent built the most consistently successful team they’ve ever had still receives a dog’s abuse?
Klopp might be the choice that England supporters would want, but it does feel as though they’d have to drop pretty much every way of behaving with regard to England managers that they’ve developed over the last sixty-odd years for him to be remotely interested in taking it. It seems unthinkable that it would be Klopp. Certainly not right now.
The early favourite is Graham Potter, and this makes sense as Continuity Southgate. He’s got a beard. Scrunches up his face a bit when things aren’t going so well on the pitch. Squint a little and it could be him. But Potter’s success at Brighton came about within a Premier League structure. It was about canny use of the transfer market and sophisticated tactical formations. Does he have the thinking-on-his-feet credentials that could really elevate an England men’s team? Serina Wiegmann is another possible contender but again, why would she want the hassle? She's already an England manager.
Whoever that replacement ends up being, they've got a tough act to follow. And perhaps that’s the ultimate tribute that can be paid to Gareth Southgate, a man ultimately hoisted by the petard of other people’s hubris while carrying himself with a level of basic decency that some of his detractors frankly didn’t deserve.
There may well end up being a morality tale to be told one day about the England manager who improved the team so much that people started hating him when he couldn’t quite reach the summit of international football, but that’s for another day. History will be kinder to him than many have been, this last few months and years.