World Cup 2018: The Radical Sensibleness of the England Team Manager, Gareth Southgate

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The thoughtful self-composure of the national team’s manager, Gareth Southgate, may be the remedy to the English football establishment, the least sensible body on earth.Photograph by Robbie Jay Barratt / Getty

Gareth Southgate, the manager of the English men’s national soccer team, is a sensible man. Judging from the press reports, he may be one of the most sensible men ever to have walked the earth. Southgate’s super-sensibleness, his profound unflappability, has been the keynote of British media coverage of him in the months leading up to the World Cup. “In Gareth Southgate England have a manager who gets it,” the Telegraph wrote last week, “a manager who understands the mind of the young modern-day footballer and underpins it with his own pragmatic and sensible attitude.” “Sensible Gareth Southgate,” the Guardian calls him in the headline to a story that, in its very first line, praises his “sensible” decisions. Barney Ronay, a columnist generally more drawn to the absurdities of sport than to its infrequent manifestations of reasonableness, notes Southgate’s sports coat and slacks, his “hair slicked touchingly to one side like a 1930s intellectual,” before praising his “increasingly coherent and convincing” management and also his “sound good sense.”

How sensible can one person be? I ask myself, paging through the British papers. (This is not the usual question one asks oneself when paging through British papers.) None of these descriptions of Southgate—and there are more; so many more—is necessarily wrong in itself. Southgate, a sharp-faced, frowning forty-seven-year-old whose neatly trimmed beard does not quite fill out his hollow cheeks, does indeed project a certain levelheadedness. He speaks slowly and gravely. When asked a question, he takes a moment to think about his answer. He touches his chin. He seems like, and apparently is, the sort of manager who can make a decision about midfielders without being guided by fear of the sports-media hell-maelstrom in which all England managers have to operate.

During his playing career, Southgate was a skilled if unflashy defender; he managed the under-twenty-ones before taking over England’s senior team, in the fall of 2016. Since then, his job performance has been steady; you want to describe him, approvingly, with the sorts of adjectives that show up in truck commercials. Solid. Dependable. Reliable. These are not words typically associated with England, a team that has so often exited tournaments in a mild flare of disappointment, a team that, if it were a truck, would have a substandard power-train warranty. Yet Southgate has made a series of small, prudent, correct decisions that, in aggregate, seem to have transformed the squad.

When Southgate thinks the group would be better off without veteran stars, he cuts them, as he did with Joe Hart (aging, out of form) and Wayne Rooney (aging, complexly cursed with the existential burden of Wayne Rooney-ness). When he thinks his younger players are being unfairly maligned by the press, he defends them intelligently, as he did when Raheem Sterling drew flak ahead of the tournament for the tattoo of an assault rifle on his leg. (Sterling’s father was killed in a shooting when Sterling was two; Southgate reminded the media that tattoos have individual meanings, like any work of art.) When he thinks the 4-2-3-1 formation he deployed throughout the qualifying campaign is not the best tactic for the World Cup, he scraps it and installs a system with three defenders, emphasizing the team’s frequently stellar wingback play. The result is that England enters its first World Cup match, against Tunisia, on Monday, with a young, healthy, confident squad, one that has become, incredibly for England, a cognoscenti favorite to surpass expectations at the tournament.

In short: he’s sensible. But the image of Southgate that one takes away from the mass of press coverage is of a man not just sensible but spectacularly sensible, outlandishly sensible, possessed of an extreme and perhaps unprecedented quiet groundedness. You imagine frequent cuts to the touchline during England’s match broadcasts, where Southgate will be standing, possibly wearing a sweater vest, and blazing with a kind of superheroic moderateness. “That’s a sensible man, Kip,” one announcer will say, and the other will murmur, “You can feel it from here, Ed—the judiciousness.”

The story of how English soccer culture reached this point—how one man’s basic sensibleness became a trait demanding round-the-clock news coverage—is one of tragedy, humiliation, and the merciless comparison of at least one adult human being to a root vegetable. Association football was invented in England, and England is the home of the Premier League, the biggest domestic league in world soccer. Yet, since 1966, when England hosted and won the World Cup, the Three Lions’ results on the pitch have not exactly kept Henry V fist-pumping in his grave. Metatarsals have been broken. Penalties have been missed. Germans have been lost to. Tournaments have been exited, not always at the very beginning, to be sure, but pretty often on the early-ish side.

The most visible focal point for the frustration and sorrow resulting from these misfortunes is, of course, the manager, who is also the most visible focal point for the dizzying hopes that precede them. It’s no surprise, then, that the manager of the England team tends to assume an outsize character in media portraits, first in prospective glory, then in empirical scorn. Graham Taylor, who managed the team from 1990 to 1993, found himself ceaselessly pilloried as “Turnip Taylor,” often with an actual turnip superimposed on his head. Kevin Keegan, who managed England to a group-stage loss in Euro 2000, will forever be remembered as a Liverpool legend; he will also forever be remembered for resigning in the toilets at Wembley Stadium after a humiliating loss to Germany. Steve McClaren, who made the catastrophic decision to stand under an umbrella during the loss to Croatia that kept England from qualifying for Euro 2008 (it was raining), was relentlessly mocked as the “Wally with a Brolly” before his ignominious sacking, in 2007.

Because these defeats are felt so deeply and the furors they cause are so enormous, the lessons they propose often seem, in the short term, utterly crucial. If only we don’t do things in this bad, losing way again, the conventional wisdom decides—next time just get rained on, or play Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard together in midfield, or don’t let Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard within a thousand miles of each other—then next time, the outcome will be different. As a result, the English soccer establishment’s decision-making often appears pathological rather than tactical: it tries to find sanity through wild overcorrections to whatever the previous insanity might have been.

Did the wives and girlfriends of England’s best players under Sven-Göran Eriksson party like rock stars throughout the disappointing 2006 World Cup? Then the solution must be to bring in an authoritarian manager, Fabio Capello, immediately nicknamed “the Godfather” by the press, who bans contact with the WAGs at the 2010 Cup in a bid for discipline and control. (“It’s time to put a hit out on Beckham,” Piers Morgan tumescently seethed.) Did the decision to enforce a strict curfew and forbid the players’ cell phones from the dinner table not turn out so well for Capello in South Africa? Then the solution must be to appoint Roy Hodgson, the genial uncle of English football, who can heal his stars’ splintered egos and let them play Counter-Strike as long as they’ve finished their algebra homework. And so on.

Through this sort of clockwise screw-motion of anti-progress, I think, England finally arrived at a point where the quality that was needed was not authority, or kindness, or passion, or cold cunning. Instead, the English football establishment went looking for the remedy to the original mistake, the mistake that was itself. (I do not think this was in any sense a conscious process; culture works in mysterious ways, and sometimes it might choose to guide even pundits and weird administrative fops like the ones who govern English soccer.) Sensibleness, of course, is the remedy to the English football establishment, the least sensible body on earth. That is why Gareth Southgate’s mere thoughtful self-composure fascinates. Prosaic as it seems, it has a charge of revolutionary potential. When your world is mad enough, being boring is the most exciting thing you can do.