Whatever the result in Sunday’s European Championship final, Gareth Southgate’s personal legacy is now assured. As by far the most successful England manager of the last half century – and clearly a Very Nice Guy to boot – Southgate can probably now count on never having to buy himself a pint again (though one would imagine his tactical approach to recreational drinking is far more Arsène Wenger than Brian Clough). So far as such things matter, it would seem a nailed-on certainty that Southgate’s OBE will be upgraded to a knighthood at some point in the early hours of 1 January 2025.
But if Southgate is a national figurehead, what exactly is he a figurehead for, and how should we remember the way he has made us feel about ourselves over the last eight years? Back in 2018, in the wake of England’s uncommonly strong showing in that year’s World Cup (an early breakthrough for the Southgate project), I lighted on the term “Southgatism” to describe the peculiar national mood his team seemed to both reflect and recreate.
I was writing a book about “Englishness” at the time, and frankly struggling to see any coherent meaning at all in the concept. England, it seemed to me then (and still does now), is a more than usually ambiguous nation, with a more than usually ambiguous sense of self. A country but not a nation-state (and with little in the way of autonomous legal, political and cultural structures), England is mostly a sort of ghost realm which sacrificed its historic identity to become the dominant power in the United Kingdom (and subsequently the even more dispersed motherland of the British Empire).
Because of this underlying political reality, Englishness is maddeningly difficult to define as something separate from more geopolitically grounded notions of Britishness (Britain – or rather the UK – being after all the actual country of which we “English” are citizens). But there was, I concluded, a major exception to the rule when it comes to the chimerical beast that is English selfhood. Perhaps this is a personal impulse, but it has always seemed to me that the one national institution capable of embodying a coherent sense of what England is, or rather could be, is the national football team.
At certain key moments in our post-imperial history (notably in 1966, 1990 and 1996), the England team has succeeded where countless politicians have failed: in genuinely unifying a large portion of the English nation, and in suggesting how we might come together on the ground of what the Welsh writer Raymond Williams once called a “common culture” (which he argued was a precondition of any kind of socialist state).
Southgatism might be seen as the culmination of this long, post-war, post-imperial narrative. As in the Sixties and Nineties, Southgate’s 2018 England team seemed to briefly point the way to a unifying strain of Englishness that was authentic, inclusive and successful, largely because it was so different from the traditionalist clichés which typically dominate discussion of England and its national soul.
In the thick of an unusually hot summer, and at a time when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party was pulling ahead of the Tories in opinion polls (after having almost toppled Theresa May’s government in the previous year’s general election), England’s confident, even ebullient march to the World Cup semi-finals in 2018 gave expression to a mood of optimism and possibility that bubbled under the surface of the otherwise gloomy and crisis-ridden late-2010s.
Under Southgate’s cautious but quietly affirmative leadership, English football seemed to have turned some ineffable corner. Gone were the underperforming, often rather venal players who dominated the so-called Golden Generation era of the Noughties and early 2010s. In their place: a cohort of young, ethnically diverse, emotionally intelligent millennials who came from all corners of England and played a vivacious brand of attacking football, one which ultimately garnered captain Harry Kane (the son of an Irish immigrant) the Golden Boot.
Here was a youthful, joyful Englishness grounded in the diverse reality of 21st-century, progressive, working-class England. Southgatism had arrived, and it had absolutely nothing to do with stiff-upper-lip, knowing-one’s-place and the Last Night of the Proms (still less the anti-immigrant, sometimes openly racist forms of English nationalism politicians of all parties spent much time and energy trying to appease and emulate in the darker moments of the 2010s).
In the years since 2018, Southgatism has aged and mellowed. But it retains much of its utopian potential to gesture at a sort of “dream Englishness”. In the last Euro tournament in 2021, Southgate’s rightly celebrated “Dear England” letter took aim at racist trolling and praised a “special group” of players who were, in his elegant telling, “humble, proud and liberated in being their true selves”. And after an anti-climactic performance in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Southgatism has slowly, rather combatively come to the fore once again in 2024.
After a shaky start probably due to banal on-the-pitch problems like Bellingham’s positional play and full-back/wing-back selection quandaries, Southgate’s England team have grown and grown during the course of Euro 2024 to once again become a fulcrum for national hopes and dreams. When Bellingham’s bicycle kick hit the back of the net against Slovakia – or at the latest when the last of the Perfect Five penalties was successfully executed against the Swiss – a switch was flicked in the national psyche. Just as it had been in 2021, in 2018 (and before that in 1996, 1990, and 1966), it was now admissible to start to dream about England as a receptacle for possibility rather than pessimism, and, more broadly, to use the football team as a cue for imagining different, more hopeful and liberated ways of national being.
For all that, in the thick of the melee it is hard to say what Southgatism has come to mean at this late, probably final stage of its lifespan. Much has been made on social media about the parallels between Southgate’s “Captain Cautious” approach and Keir Starmer’s “Ming vase” strategy in the recent general election, which saw Labour win a landslide majority after a campaign which had continually emphasised competency and small-c conservatism over grand ideas and personal rizz.
There is surely something to be said for such comparisons, and there is no doubt that both England’s and Labour’s strong performances in 2024 have resulted partly from efficiency in dealing with the world as it is rather than as it should be. On the other hand, it was only really when Southgate’s team grew bold enough to combine competency with flair and idealism (Saka’s quixotic equaliser against the Swiss, Watkins’s impossible-angled winner against the Netherlands) that they – and we – were able to discover any kind of powerfully felt collective identity.
Might there be a lesson here for the new Labour government, about the need to synthesise the maturity and professionalism of 2024 Starmerism with the youthful energy and inventiveness of 2018 Corbynism? Ultimately, this is a question for what seems likely to be the post-Southgate era. For now, all we can do is revel in the moment of the quiet Englishmen, and be grateful for the glimpses of a better – perhaps best – national identity Southgatism has given us.
[See also: The last days of Andy Murray]
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