In Dear England, Wayne Rooney has a full and dark head of hair – clearly we are in a world of dreams and wish-fulfilment. Ostensibly, this is a BBC drama about the English football team, from 2016 to the present, an adaptation of a James Graham play (the embourgeoisement of the game is officially complete). But really it is the story of Gareth Southgate’s “England”: the Garethiad, the Epic of Southgate, “Penalties Lost”. And it’s a true story, in four acts that you’ll remember: the four tournaments played under Southgate’s leadership. There was the long, hot summer, unexpected and drunken. There was the great Covid burst, wild and Janus-faced, euphoric promise followed by post-match mayhem. There was the winter tournament, played in the desert heat. And there was the last, lost chance.
I remember the motions of each act very well. I remember some of the goals (L Shaw 2′, and forever J Bellingham, 90’+5), the giddiness, and the inevitable fall. I also remember the discussion, the debate, the meaning that English football had during those tournaments. If you squinted just slightly, the football team seemed to become the incarnation of a progressive national consciousness. Briefly, physios and nutritionists seemed to vacate the technical area for writers and cultural critics. One of them was James Graham. And here we see his attempt to substantiate and codify the meaning he found in Southgate’s team, to turn an unassuming, modest man into a piece of English mythology, a saint’s life for a secular age.
As a piece of nostalgic naturalism, an impersonation of events and characters, his drama succeeds. Joseph Fiennes plays Southgate, and nails him, for good and for bad. He’s got the Tommy Atkins nobility, the horsey grin, and that voice, like the worst Michael Caine impression ever. In 2016, Fiennes’s Southgate takes over a team in the doldrums, just after we’d been defeated by Iceland (their coach, by comparison, balanced football around his work as a dentist in Vestmannaeyjar). And turning that squad of tabloid brats into a cheerful, inspiring and winning team was a substantial achievement, and it is well dramatised here. Graham’s dialogue is always watchable, in a hacky, snappy sort of way. Southgate is quickly established as a protaganistic angel, buying almond croissants for his staff and introducing therapeutic techniques to the dressing room to overcome England’s penalties curse. “I’m afraid of hurting people,” he falteringly tells the squad, on a team-building trip to a Royal Marine training camp, and encourages them to try journaling.
But it is as Dear England begins to assert its epic quality that it quickly drags. It is, for a start, incredibly long, much longer than the play: four hour-long episodes cover each tournament the way popular historians cover Second World War campaigns. Some of this is a result of plot contrivance: there’s an ongoing feud between Southgate and the mental health consultant he hired, presumably to justify Jodie Whittaker’s fee (in reality, the psychologist worked with the team for less than two years). And then there’s the strike-by-strike match recreations. Watching your country lose on penalties is already a painful, laborious affair. Try watching actors pretending to relive the event and you start to wonder what you’re doing with your life.
Graham seems to believe he can justify this sprawl because it rests on something solid: the political and social significance of Southgate’s team. This is gestured to from the start, via loaded portent: “Something’s gone wrong in England,” Southgate says as he accepts his appointment. “Come help fix England with me,” he tells an adviser, and he keeps talking about the “long walk” to the penalty spot like he’s Nelson Mandela or something. The profundity isn’t entirely Graham’s invention: in 2021, as England players took the knee and racists took to Twitter, Southgate wrote his “Dear England” essay, an appeal for empathy and tolerance, and his team became, descriptively at least, a symbol of English diversity. Some left-wing commentators talked of “Southgatism”.
But viewed at this remove – and we already know that this spirit did not really return during the 2024 Euros – this phenomenon already feels like a period piece, and one that was overdetermined by all those cultural critics and writers. When interpreting the symptoms of nationalism, wrote the historian Tom Nairn, they “should be treated as a psychoanalyst does the outpourings of a patient”, and when “the patient is roaring drunk into the bargain, even greater patience is called for”. National football – which is almost entirely viewed and debated drunk – must be interpreted as an expression of national consciousness with utmost wariness. But when weighing up the legacy of Gareth Southgate’s England, you find your hands mostly empty.
There’s the athletic ledger. We didn’t win the World Cup, or the Euros. And while we went further in both competitions than we had for decades, it is Southgate’s failures which are remembered and slandered now: his caution in making substitutions, the slackening from the side in the dying moments of that 2021 final against Italy. Far from a great strategist, by his final tournament in charge in 2024, Southgate was becoming an object of scorn among fans for his conservatism. “Fuck Gareth Southgate,” my barber said to me recently, as we chatted about 2026 chances.
The politics of Southgate have not endured. Southgate himself has mostly vanished from public life. And the documents of his moment make for curios, not manifestos. Rereading his “Dear England” letter – which speaks of a steady tolerance, supported by bromides about the Second World War and the Queen – you can sense Southgate’s earnestness, his steady, contemplative hand. But these are tethers that are thinning and fraying. I don’t remember 2021 as some lost moment of bountiful self-confidence. But, still, Southgate wrote, “It’s clear to me that we are heading for a much more tolerant and understanding society.” Is it still so clear today?
The English Question has been vexed and chewed for generations now, but that is no reason to think it will suddenly submit to easy answers. The English football team, and sporting success, is a convenient marriage of symbol and popular feeling – too convenient. And any writer with aspirations to a national role should know better than to spin yarns out of his gossamer dreams.
Dear England
BBC One
[Further reading: How Britain used to laugh]
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