"I have never believed that we should just stick to football." Gareth Southgate wrote that in 2021, and it became the defining line of his tenure — not a tactical setup, not a transfer target, but a public commitment to something messier and more contested than a back four.
A new BBC four-part series, Dear England, dramatises how the man who missed the decisive penalty at Euro 96 ended up running the national team two decades later — and accidentally became one of the most significant public figures in modern British life. Joseph Fiennes plays Southgate. The Athletic called the real one "arguably the most important person" in British public life over the past twenty years. That's not a comparison anyone would have made in 2016, when the Guardian's Barney Ronay described him as having the aura of "an ambitious young geography teacher hurrying into class three hours early to set up his papier mache sedimentary rock bed."
A thin CV, a defining record
Southgate's managerial credentials when he took the job were genuinely threadbare — a forgettable spell at Middlesbrough, then a stint with England's youth sides. His predecessors had sharper CVs and still couldn't get England past a quarterfinal. Southgate took them to the 2018 World Cup semifinal, then back-to-back European Championship finals in 2021 and 2024. Neither ended in a trophy. But the F.A. chief, on his departure after the 2024 final, said he'd made "the impossible job possible."
The 2018 run made him an unlikely fashion icon — the waistcoat became a cultural moment. The 2021 Euro run came after he published an open letter in the Players' Tribune defending his players' right to take a knee, following boos from sections of England's own support. American pollster Frank Luntz called it one of the best letters he'd ever read. Liberal commentators suggested Southgate was articulating a clearer sense of national identity than then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The BBC's flagship Today programme had actor Rory Kinnear read it aloud on air.
That's the territory Dear England is operating in — the show frames Southgate's story against Brexit, fifty years of tournament hurt, and the question of what England actually means as an idea. It's heavier material than your average sports drama.
What it means for England now
With Southgate gone, whoever inherits the job steps into a role that has been fundamentally redefined. He raised the floor — two finals is two more than any England manager had managed in a generation — but also raised the expectation that the manager will engage with the country, not just the squad. That's a harder brief than it sounds.
England never won the tournament under Southgate, and that absence sits at the centre of the whole story. The 1996 miss haunted him. Two final defeats added to it. The show is worth watching precisely because the football and the politics are genuinely intertwined in his tenure — not manufactured, but lived. "An alternate universe," Southgate wonders in the drama, where he scored in '96 and England became "a happier, more confident place as a result."
They're still waiting to find out.
