Gareth Southgate was in no mood to reflect on his legacy late on Sunday night when he gave his sombre press conference underneath the Olympiastadion. In what was his last public act as England manager, Southgate said that it was “hard to reflect so soon after a defeat like this”.
For the second time in three years, he had to stand and watch with his tearful players as the opposition lifted the European Championship trophy instead of him. “To take England to two finals has never been done before,” he said. “But we came here to win and we haven’t been able to do that.”
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On Tuesday morning we learned that this was indeed the end of the road for Southgate — so there will be little other than legacy litigation over the next few weeks. And maybe we are too close to this right now to have any perspective, like standing at the foot of a mountain struggling to take it all in.
So much of the discussion will hinge on those two unavoidable points above: first, that Southgate took England to two major men’s finals, a level of game they had only played once in their history, in 1966. Second, that he was not able to win either of them, or either of his World Cup campaigns either. He raised the bar higher than anyone in generations but in the end still missed his final jump.
This is Southgate and England, though, so there is more to it than just arranging the team on the pitch. This became a matter of politics and culture, of relationships with the public and the media, of national priorities and national narrative.
For many, it comes down to values, for what Southgate stood for and how he made them feel. In February, I interviewed Southgate and asked him what he would like his obituary to say. He made it clear where his priorities lie.
“’He was a decent bloke’, hopefully,” Southgate said. “Nothing else would be that important. Sadly I have had to go to funerals recently or talk about former England managers, Terry Venables and Bobby Robson. And the first things that came into my head were how they were as people. Then you had admiration for how they were as a coach and everything else. But the starting point was that they were good blokes, good people.”
Let’s start with the obvious part: Southgate is clearly the best England manager of the modern era. He stands head and shoulders ahead of everyone since Ramsey, even Bobby Robson. Southgate has taken England to four tournaments. He has reached a World Cup semi-final, a European Championship final, a World Cup quarter-final, and then a second European Championship final.
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Remember for a second how rare it is for an England team to play in games like these. England did not reach a single major tournament final between 1966 and when Southgate took them to Wembley in 2021. They only reached two semi-finals — 1990 and 1996 — during those long wilderness years between Ramsey and Southgate. They did not even qualify for the World Cups in 1974, 1978 or 1994, or the Euros in 2008. When Southgate took the job, England had just been humiliated by Iceland at Euro 2016. Even the Sven-Goran Eriksson era — three straight quarter-finals — felt like a standard that England were unable to get back to.
Remember how broken the England team felt at that moment or when, three months later, Hodgson’s replacement Sam Allardyce was forced to resign just one game into his tenure. They were at that point an awful team: confused, brittle, somehow both complacent and timid at the same time. They had stunk out the last four tournaments on the spin, and the one before that they had not even reached — the best team they beat across the 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016 campaigns was… Sweden.
In truth, they had not played well since Euro 2004, 12 years before he took the job.
But pre-Southgate England were more than just a bad team. They looked fundamentally damaged. They were struggling to find their place in a national football landscape dominated by the wealth and power of the Premier League. While that competition became richer and more glamorous with every passing year, the national team was the portrait in the attic, increasingly withered away, paying the price for the league’s shining life of luxury and greed. Their struggles were a window into the warped priorities of the English game. The future of this team was to be squeezed out of our minds, just the price we had to pay for importing so much of our football identity rather than building anything ourselves.
Southgate had always wanted to restore the standing of the national team in English life and repair its reputation abroad. It pained him for the England team to be something ignored at home and laughed at in other countries. He wanted to restore their credibility and make them a force in international football again. Even without a trophy, he has done that.
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If you are an England fan under 35 years of age, then all of your greatest memories supporting this team will have come under Southgate. If you are in your late thirties, and remember Euro 96, things may be slightly different.
For years, watching England in a major tournament made you curse the accident of birth that had you supporting this team in this era. Southgate’s team delivered a sequence of wins that made fans feel lucky to be alive.
Tunisia in 2018 kick-started the whole era. Colombia, their first-ever World Cup shootout win. Sweden, the first quarter-final win since 1996.
Germany in 2021, the first knockout win against a major nation (just last week Southgate snapped when it was put to him this was a weak German side). Ukraine in Rome and then Denmark, grinding out a semi-final in a nearly-full Wembley, putting England into their first major final for 55 years.
In Qatar, when the team was arguably at its peak, they beat Senegal in a tough last-16 game, but then went out.
Even in Germany this summer, where England didn’t play as well as they had done in the past, departing from methodical Gazball to play a more individualistic game, they delivered three of the most memorable and thrilling wins in English history. The comic-book turnaround against Slovakia, Jude Bellingham’s last-gasp equaliser saving Southgate from his own personal Iceland moment. The nerveless penalty shootout win over Switzerland. And the Ollie Watkins winner against the Netherlands.
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So what underpinned it? How did Southgate — after three years at Middlesbrough and three with the England Under-21s — manage to unpick more of the problems than his more decorated predecessors? Why was it that Southgate was the man to almost find his way out of the escape room?
You could start your explanations from what England did well on the pitch: mastering set pieces and penalties, switching between back three and back four systems, following best practice from other teams who have won tournaments. But all of that is downstream from what makes Southgate who he is.
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The first thing Southgate brought to the job is humility. No one was more aware of the failures of the England team than Southgate, the player whose one small mistake caused one of their most painful-ever moments. Here was a man with no illusions about what English failure looked like. He had stared directly into the sun himself. The fact Southgate took the job three months after Iceland only strengthened his case over how historically poor England had been, why they must take nothing for granted, be humble and start again. Even this month, on the eve of the quarter-final, Southgate slapped down a question he took as suggesting Switzerland would be an easy opponent, saying it was “a classic example of the sort of entitlement we have as a nation”.
This humility gave Southgate the capacity to learn. He studied what made other teams successful at major tournaments. He knew that it was not just about deploying your best players onto the pitch and blowing the opposition away. Tournament football is about patience, nous and flexibility, keeping clean sheets, keeping your best players fresh, turning to a back-up system when required. It is not about dominating every game from the start.
Southgate learned about psychology, clear decision-making under pressure and how to give his players the best possible chance of winning a penalty shootout. He could not control the outcome, but he could set the process to help them.
American psychoanalyst Salman Akhtar tells a story about two identical ornate china vases which sit alongside each other, only for one of them to be blown over, shattered and then repaired. The cracks are just about visible in the repaired vase, but that vase has an advantage over the intact one: the wisdom of knowing what it means to be broken and then recover.
How fitting, then, that it should be Southgate who taught England how to take penalties. During his tenure, England have had four shootouts and won three. When they beat Switzerland in Dusseldorf, they made penalties look like the easiest thing in the world.
At the root of all of this, the one thing that explains everything else is enjoyment. Southgate knew how playing for England used to be an almost physically uncomfortable experience on and off the pitch. He knew that the team would have no chance if the players did not want to be there. So he built a culture — inclusive, trusting, cooperative, fun — which the players wanted to share in, because it was a culture that gave them agency. The famous inflatable unicorns did not have magical powers of their own. If they had been introduced in Rustenberg in 2010, England would not have beaten Germany. But they represented something real.
Perhaps the most important moment early on in ‘Dear England’, James Graham’s play about Southgate’s tenure, shows Southgate wrestling with the issue of why England underperform. He knows that he is not seeing something. “Before black holes were discovered, they didn’t know why things behaved the way that they did,” the dramatised Southgate says. “They just knew that objects were bending around something, some great unseeable thing affecting the behaviour of the universe. So what can’t we see?”
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The great insight of the real Southgate was to see those unseeable things, that none of his predecessors could, that were always holding England back. And his great achievement was to remove those unseeable things and build something new in their place.
That is how we got to HMS Gazball, the ship that Southgate steered through four major tournaments. More than any other England manager before him, he gave the impression of having a clear plan to guide him through choppy waters. Moments that would have sunk his predecessors — a penalty shootout, a game against Germany, going behind in a big game, still being behind with the clock ticking down — were calmly negotiated.
Many Southgate critics will point out these waters were not quite as choppy as we thought, that England had generous draws, especially in 2018 and 2024. Southgate himself would say this is a reward for consistently finishing top of their group. Critics would reply that England generally lost to the first elite side they faced. With the exception of Germany in 2021, that criticism sticks.
You cannot assess the Southgate era without staring directly at the four eliminations, the four times the ship was sunk: Croatia, Italy, France and Spain. For some these are the nights that will define Southgate, even more than the good ones. They were never humiliating like Iceland or demeaning like Germany in Bloemfontein. Perhaps they were more painful because this was a good England team losing, rather than a bad one, and because they lost within clear sight of the finish line.
All four defeats were narrow: extra time, penalties, and two 2-1s that were on the line right until the end. Only in the Spain game were England outplayed, although they barely had a kick in the last hour against Croatia. Between the four you can see some continuities. Most obviously, a struggle to keep the ball when it mattered, to play through the opposition pressure, to control the tempo rather than being dictated to. Hearing Southgate bemoan the struggles in possession in the Olympiastadion on Sunday night was to feel like you had gone back in time to the Luzhniki six years ago.
In those first two tournament exits, Croatia and Italy, there was a sense that Southgate had lost control of the game in the second half, that he was insufficiently brave or imaginative from the bench to change the course of a game that had turned against England. Maybe so but against Spain, Southgate made brave substitutions, introducing Watkins and Cole Palmer, the latter scoring the equaliser that briefly made it feel as if England could turn the tide.
It is hard to be too upset by England’s defeat to Sunday, simply because they were well-beaten by a superior opponent. And yet the fact that they lost in that way makes the Italy defeat three years before even more painful in hindsight. Because everyone knows that Italy team was not nearly on the level of this Spain side. England were genuine underdogs on Sunday, but that fact only makes clearer the advantages they had in 2021, 1-0 at half-time at home against a canny but limited opponent. If the 2018 campaign was a free hit, because it was Southgate’s first tournament, it was Euro 2020 which will hang over this era as the greatest missed opportunity of all.
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Any one of those four eliminations would be easily explicable as just the sort of contingent outcome you get in tournament football. If England had just scored a second when they were on top against Croatia, or if Marcus Rashford had scored his penalty against Italy, or if Kane had scored his second penalty against France, or if Mikel Oyarzabal had been offside, then maybe things would have turned out different. But if you take all four together, draw a line from the Luzhniki to Wembley, to the Al Bayt to Berlin, you can make out a body of evidence which also speaks for itself. And which suggests that, as far as HMS Gazball took England over the years, maybe there was also a limit to how far it could go.
Yes, Southgate won nine tournament knockout games during his tenure, which was as many as England had won in major men’s tournaments in their history before he took over. But maybe he was destined to be English football’s Moses, the man to guide England towards the promised land but not to take them all the way into it.
Southgate’s true legacy is bigger than just the sum total of the four tournaments he managed. Over time, he came to stand for something more than just his job. He might not put it this way but he is arguably the most important person in the public life of this country in the last 20 years.
For such a private man, Southgate has found himself more publicly known and more publicly contested than any other England manager. Everyone has an opinion about him, for better or worse, right down to his decisions over the timing of substitutions. Everyone has a view on how he dresses, and during the 2018 campaign he became so associated with the waistcoat that he essentially altered the meaning of the garment in this country. Lookalikes across the UK would dress up as him. Atomic Kitten re-recorded a song about him. There was also a hit West End play about him.
It always felt as if there was an extra element with Southgate that chimed with people, that touched something within us. How else to explain why this modest patient man was able to become such a folk hero to so many? You can imagine Graham Potter replacing Southgate this summer, you might even imagine him winning the World Cup in the USA, but it is hard even then to picture someone writing a play about it.
Maybe it was as simple as the backstory, the sense of quest that came from his own time as a player. But Kevin Keegan and Glenn Hoddle were great players for England who fell short at international level and it was never the same as them. Also remember that, for any England fan born in the 1990s or 2000s, Euro 96 was something they learned about second-hand. It always felt as if there was something inherent in Southgate’s personality that made him loom so large.
People came to trust him as the steady hand at the wheel of the ship. This is part of the message of ‘Dear England’. Remember that Southgate took over two months after David Cameron resigned. He took England to Russia when Theresa May was prime minister, lost the Euro 2020 final with Boris Johnson in the crowd, went to Qatar when Rishi Sunak was in charge and then finally lost the final of Euro 2024 under Keir Starmer.
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“I do think there’s something about the juxtaposition of his constancy against the backdrop of a chaotic and unstable national life that we’ve been living through,” says Graham, “from Brexit through to five Prime Ministers, through to the shortest-serving Prime Minister of all time. In all areas of English life, we’ve been lacking a national figurehead who’s stayed the course and has been a steadying influence on our national psyche. Gareth has done that.”
But this is about more than just longevity. It is also about what Southgate has stood for over the last eight years. Southgate has found himself talking about topics that none of his predecessors would have been expected to pronounce on: race, politics, human rights. At his best Southgate tried to articulate a form of progressive patriotism, perhaps more successfully than anyone else in the country.
One of the formative moments of this England era was Southgate’s support for the players when they decided to take the knee to protest against racism. The first time this was done in front of England fans, in Middlesbrough before the last Euros, the reaction was mixed at best. It has always felt as if one section of the fanbase has never fully forgiven Southgate for it.
Southgate eventually gave the impression of feeling that his role had been politicised, and it was striking how little he wanted to say before or at the Qatar World Cup. By that point, Southgate just wanted to win. He could not undo the image people had of him, for better or worse, or the sense that some saw him as a combatant in the culture war. Once you are woke-coded, it is hard to go back, no matter how enthusiastically you talk about the royal family or the armed forces. But even if Southgate tried to step back from politics, he still had a role that set him apart: he was a spokesman for the soul of the national game.
No other England manager has spoken as much or as convincingly as Southgate. No other England manager has so successfully articulated a sense of what the England team is meant to be about, what it stands for and why it matters. This was one of the issues Southgate inherited, given how the national team had almost fallen through the cracks of the English game. No one would say now that the England team is a victim of the wealth of the Premier League, the damaged portrait in the attic.
This has been Southgate’s obsession for years, long before he was England manager or even England Under-21 manager. After being sacked by Middlesbrough, Southgate was the FA’s director of elite development, struggling against the fact that in England, youth development was controlled by the clubs rather than the association. After he left the role, he told me in a 2012 interview that the country had to ask itself whether it actually wanted to find a place for the England team. “At some point we’ve got to decide: are we really serious about our international team, or is it just an add-on?”
It was only when Southgate returned to the FA as Under-21s manager in 2013 that he was able to start changing things. He launched ‘England DNA’ with Dan Ashworth and Matt Crocker, derided at the time but offering a clear continuous pathway for young players between the England age-group teams and the seniors. Since then, England have won multiple junior tournaments and many of those players have stepped straight into the senior team, and flourished there too. Southgate has always seen his job as overseeing the whole England setup, rather than just the team that he picks.
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This is one of the many ways in which Southgate will be irreplaceable. No one who comes in after him will have the same holistic view of English football, youth development and the Premier League, and how they all fit together. No one who comes in will be able to articulate in quite the same way why the England team matters, why it must be defended, and how to allocate resources accordingly. The FA might find a better coach than Southgate this summer, if he leaves, but it is impossible to see them improving on Southgate’s skills at this.
But underpinning all of this — more than the success, the penalties, the backstory, the articulacy, is the simple decency of Southgate. He is not just a good talker but a good listener.
“What I noticed about Southgate,” Starmer says in Tom Baldwin’s biography of him, “is that he listens – he’s not trying to dominate the whole room.” Anyone who has spent any time with Southgate knows his ability to make the person he is speaking to feel important and feel heard. He is like that with everyone. It is why the players like playing for him so much. And there is no hiding place in eight years in such a public-facing job as this. The scrutiny means you are revealed to the world as you are.
As Southgate said to me about Robson and Venables, “the first things that came into my head were how they were as people.”
“For all the cynicism that might come from certain sections of the stands that want that alpha-male, traditionally masculine aggression,” says Graham, “I suspect the majority of us really really leant into a sort of old-fashioned, quiet, decent English value that he represented. And that’s why everyone went mad for the waistcoat. Which just seemed to represent really clearly those different English values we like to pretend we still have: of being a gentleman, of being kind, of being fair, of being decent, of not showing off, of being humble. I think we just f*cking love that.”
So, yes, no trophy after four attempts, and four painful defeats that can be picked over on Wyscout. Maybe that was enough to make the case that someone else should have a go. Few managers who get to a fifth major tournament in the same job do well. But to look at where England were in 2016 and where they are now, what this team has meant to people, the games they have won as well as lost, it feels absurd to argue that Southgate’s impact was anything other than momentous.
And it is the side of the job away from the training ground — articulating a vision, carving out a space for the national team, representing a set of values, connecting with people — that will make him so impossible to replace.
(Top photo: Tom Weller/picture alliance via Getty Images)
