Gareth Southgate nails his big lecture in a victory for competitive caring

The Guardian

22-03-2025

Say what you like, and the haters – we know this about the haters – will continue to hate, are in effect defined by their hating. But Gareth Southgate has now finally delivered on the biggest stage of all.
This is of course a reference to the stage at Senate House library, venue for Big Gate's big Dimbleby lecture, recorded in front of an audience of silent, rapt, nodding people, and broadcast this week on the BBC. This is what elite big-lecture managers do. They seize the moment. They shut out the noise. Gareth at the Dimbleby? Absolutely nailed it.
It was a bit disconcerting at first to see him back, quietly iconic in deep blue suit, pocket square, no tie. The beard is good. The hair is merino-wool-cardigan-model slick, but also somehow just a bit Spitfire pilot. Mainly it was just delightful to have him, Southgate speaking without notes, steepling his fingers behind his lectern and spreading his palms for preacherly emphasis, like a man continually estimating and re-estimating the size of a side of beef at the butcher's counter.
This was in many ways ultimate Southgate, Peak Gaz. It is what his life has been leading to. Here is a man who should always be stood at a dais saying stuff about the challenges of building a culture while the cameras cut to a frowning Dimbleby.
What was he like up there anyway? Still fluent and endearingly gawky, like an aardvark who is only now remembering it shouldn't actually be able to talk. Above all grave and wholesome, a youthful headteacher inspiring a roomful of children in a porridge advert. And this was the key effect, a reminder of his best bits, that stubborn sense of decency.
There were echoes of the post-Euro 2021 support for his team and their penalty takers. And of the media duties in Bulgaria after England's players had been racially abused, where Southgate also spoke into the lens about morality and doing the right thing, even as the local camera crew could be heard telling him to 'fuck off' from the back of the press room.
These are timely memories, because intentionally or not Southgate was speaking to his critics at Senate House, sub-lecturing the haters, and doing so pre-emptively given Thomas Tuchel's unexpectedly spicy comments a few days later about a lack of focus and drive, too much in the way of politics around the place.
Southgate's reputation will continue to be divvied up in this way. Oddly perhaps given the objective fact of sustained and mould-breaking success. There are only two reasons now for maintaining that England failed under Southgate. Either you don't understand football history, having perhaps only come to the game in 2018. Or you just don't like his politics, the Woke-gate stuff, the hectoring tone, and fancy having a pop back.
In this context his most interesting point, about understanding what failure and success are, about allowing nuance and reflection to enter the chat, will be lost. The fact remains England were bad before Southgate turned up. The players are not the best in the world with an innate entitlement to win tournaments. The style under Southgate was also a bit stodgy and limited in the final knockings. End of story.
There was also just a huge amount of good sense in Southgate's big address. The evils of the unfiltered smart-phone-plus-social-media dynamic. Constant access both to actual porn and to the lifestyle porn of aggressively aspirational consumerism. This is also bad. And improving the lot of young men will improve the lot of everyone, most obviously young women.
There were some issues too with what Southgate said. I slightly worry about him. The England job drives people mad. Is he still living out that battle now in his new incarnation as high-status Man Feelings evangelist? There is a sense with Southgate of competitive caring. He's now going to win at compassion. Which is, to be fair, not the worst thing to win at.
Is the big dichotomy he set up between the internet (bad) and dads (good) really quite so absolute? Sometimes dads are bad. Sometimes it's actually better if they're absent. Sometimes the internet is good. All these things are in the end just made up of people.
Perhaps the biggest problem was the rapt and gushing staging, the director constantly cutting to the faces of hopeful young people gazing at Sir Gareth as if they've just been hit over the head with a rock and it's the greatest thing that's ever happened to them. Every question involved someone agreeing with him, a fawning amplification of his rightness. A more exacting Q&A would have been more interesting, not to mention inclusive.
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For all that, Southgate remains a litmus test. He may be wrong about some things, and he kind of has a right to be wrong, as we all do if our intentions are to understand and be understood. But as ever, in football and life, if you really think the essentially benevolent and competent person over there is the problem, the chances are that actually it's you.
There are two things worth adding as the Dimbleby moment fades. First, it is necessary for Tuchel to reject Southgate-ism. This is a no-nonsense 18-month commercial deal. And Tuchel is bang up to date on the change of tone around sport with his comments this week about no longer commenting on politics, just sticking to football, worrying instead about your vague and directionless teammate. Maybe if they hadn't been up late workshopping a policy on rights for migrant quinoa farmers, eh, eh am I right?
This is the prevailing wind now. There is a weariness out there. Increasingly power is simply seen as right, morality bending its knee to the loudest voice, the greatest dictator. Russia will soon be back in full sporting competition. Israel isn't even an issue. Donald Trump is co-steering the next World Cup with his great friend Gianni Infantino, whose nose remains pressed eagerly against the Oval Office window, another gift bag in hand.
But it is also the case that to overtly reject politics is also to accept politics of another kind. Talking about it may be awkward. Not talking about it, playing your part in an industry so clearly propaganda-led in its staging, is acquiescence and complicity.
Stand in respectful silence next to a despot waving a trophy. Allow the flag to be draped across your shoulders. Smile through Donald Trump's needy, electioneering World Cup. No-dissent is assent when all that gravity is only going one way. It remains entirely right and legit that a football manager may want to stay silent on matters beyond the pitch. But let's not pretend this isn't a kind of politics too.
For now Southgate deserves his flowers. His attacking patterns may have been stodgy. The energy may have ebbed by the end. But he has at least occupied a space that many others have simply vacated, talking about men and boys and doing the right thing in a way that almost no one else in public life does.
He remains a good man trying to do good things. He nailed the Dimbleby. Although, he did also kick it all off by making the point, once again, that one missed penalty kick at Wembley in 1996 did not define his life, while spending 20 minutes expanding in peeled-eyeball detail on how one missed penalty at Wembley in 1996 would go on to define his life. It's a process Mr Southgate. We can talk about this again next week.