Three reasons I have changed my mind on Gareth Southgate and England

England had a pretty good World Cup, even though they lost in the quarter-finals, so it’s time for one of our writers to revisit a pre-tournament Southgate opinion.

Mea culpa. On the eve of the start of the World Cup finals I wrote this: ‘There comes a point at which it’s time to step back and consider whether this might have just run its course.’ It’s not a hill that I would have wanted to die on, but it was based on a genuine feeling that performances over this calendar year suggested that England and Gareth Southgate had gone as far as they reasonably could.

None of this was criticism of Southgate. He is by a long way England’s most successful manager since Alf Ramsey and has transformed an England men’s team that had been consistently underwhelming over the previous ten years. The England team of 2022 would have been close to unimaginable after the absolute sh*tshows of the 2014 World Cup and Euro 2016. Tenure lengths in international management are shorter than in the club game, but six years is still a reasonable crack.

The downturn in results in 2022 had looked more substantial than a mere ‘blip’, and perhaps this air of fatalism is what defines my experience as a ‘supporter’ – albeit in a very loose sense – of the England team. Well, England were pretty good for a while and got the rub of the green with a couple of tournament draws. It was fun while it lasted. That sort of thing. The keener-eyed amongst you may have picked up on hints of Tottenham Hotspur in there, too. You develop a resistance to optimism.

But what changed my mind was essentially threefold. Firstly, since the start of the World Cup I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences in the roles that are required for club and international management. The pool of available players are an obvious jumping-off point. The club manager is, whether involved in the process of transfers or not, at the behest of a financial system. The international manager has a smaller pool of players, but once capped at senior level, transfers aren’t an option.

Neither does the international manager have to deal with the fierce schedule of the club game. The international manager’s job is more nurturing. They will have maybe only a dozen games per season, and everything will be focussed upon those. It’s a systems job, fine-tuning every element of the set-up to ensure that the players peak at the right time. It’s also an ambassadorial position. They are a…