Jac Williamson offers his take on the departure of the England manager.
Well, that’s that then. Gareth Southgate’s announced that he’s stepped down as England’s manager after eight years at the helm. Not, perhaps, the end that he would have liked to his reign, but once the dust has settled, he’ll be able to look back on a successful, if divisive, tenure that saw the national team achieve huge success by any objective metric –
two finals and a semi-final in eight years, compared with a final and two semifinals in the preceding fifty-two.
Objective metrics, however, don’t tell the full story. They never do. This latest iteration of the England team managed to reach the Euro 2024 final without ever really convincing. Throughout the final stages of a challenging campaign, Gareth Southgate gave the impression of a man who was trying to concentrate his way to success. Questions from
journalists were met with a bowed head, an intensity of thought, a graveness that suggested that somewhere there was a drawing board not being returned to but being given continuous scrutiny. Even his relatively unfettered celebrations after the semi-final win against the Netherlands seemed to be undertaken with a furrowed brow.
What a contrast, then, to see him leaving the England camp, arm held aloft in thanks, the light shining on him seeming a little warmer, the shoulders sitting a bit higher, the eyebrows working their way back towards a more natural position of repose. It’s hard not to feel happy for Southgate, hard not to hope that he manages to get some rest, and that perhaps life without a constant confrontation with the problem of how to make the most of “The Best Group of Attacking Players in the World” ™ will be a little more pleasurable.
As a Leeds fan, it is my natural inclination to link everything in football back to Marcelo Bielsa. But as I process the complex range of emotions and thoughts created by the departure of Gareth Southgate, I can’t help but feel as though we’re covering familiar territory. Despite the many differences between Gareth Southgate and Marcelo Bielsa as
football managers, it’s possible to identify some similarities between the experience of being a Leeds fan under Bielsa, and an England fan under Southgate.
Both Southgate and Bielsa were managers who re-connected with disenfranchised, alienated, fan bases. They both re-built bridges and allowed us to learn to love (our football teams) again. They both managed to tidy up the mess that immediately preceded them with an apparent ease that belied the complexity of their achievement, and they both created a feeling, a positive feeling, an ineffable connection between fan and football team that was, at times, intoxicating.
Both managers took their teams on incredible journeys, re-connecting with fans and achieving longed-for and hard-fought successes, but the thing about success is you can get a taste for it. Marcelo Bielsa took Leeds United to a ninth-place finish in the Premier League after years in the wilderness of the EFL, but was unable to consolidate that position. A type of success that had for years seemed completely unattainable became non-negotiable and he was sacked.
Gareth Southgate took a perennially underachieving England team, who had most recently been knocked out of Euro 2016 by Iceland (with all due respect) and turned them into a team who regularly reached the business-end of major international tournaments, falling just short at the final hurdle twice. It’s difficult to watch the current iteration of the England team and insist that improvement isn’t possible, but I think it is important to note how far we have come.
Of course, they also both possessed a fatal flaw that led to their respective downfalls – intransigence that meant neither man was capable or willing to alter their approach to management in the face of increasing and ever-louder calls for them to do so. I reiterate: they were, and remain, very different as football managers, but the frustration that greeted late-stage Bielsa and late-stage Southgate is the same. It was genuinely frustrating to watch late era Bielsa’s Leeds persist with a style of play that saw us repeatedly pummeled in much the same way that it was genuinely frustrating to watch Southgate persist with a clearly out of sorts Harry Kane at Euro 2024.
I remember the intense clamour for the removal of Marcelo Bielsa in the weeks before his sacking, and I have seen how his most fervent critics in this period have softened their view of his tenure over time, some even converting to become the most energetic proselytisers in the church of Bielsa. The criticism of Gareth Southgate reached fever pitch over the last few weeks, and as we bid farewell to arguably the second most successful England Manager of all time, I wonder if we might see a similar critical reassessment of Southgate’s legacy in the fullness of time.
Leeds United have had a difficult time replacing Marcelo Bielsa. The past couple of years of being a Leeds fan have been challenging, and, despite the moderate success of Daniel Farke, it’s tempting to idealise the Bielsa era in current circumstances. I’m not suggesting that England are in for a similarly challenging time in the post-Southgate era; Marcelo Bielsa’s brilliance lay in getting the most out of a relatively limited group of players and even the most even-handed critique of Southgate would suggest the group of players he has to hand in the England squad could perform to a higher level. And yet, as discussions of Southgate’s replacement hover around names that veer from the unrealistic to the frankly not hugely inspiring, I feel I can hear the sound of a cliche reverberating off the walls: be careful what you wish for.
To channel my inner Jake Humphries and coin a phrase that you could imagine being posted on LinkedIn by someone you don’t really know or like: when you are so close to reaching the top it can be hard to appreciate how far you have come. The passage of time has worked to decomplicate the legacy of Marcelo Bielsa and give us a fuller appreciation for how much he achieved at Leeds United. Whilst I don’t expect quite the same strength of feeling to develop for Gareth Southgate, I do wonder if the passage of time will detangle the mess of caveats it is currently necessary to apply to any discussion of his legacy, and enable us to look back on the Southgate era more fondly than might have seemed possible over the last few weeks of his reign.
Main image by Ben Scott.
