Gareth Southgate’s culture war

As widely expected, England football manager Gareth Southgate has stepped down after his team’s second consecutive European Championship final defeat on Sunday.

The abiding image of his eight years in charge will not be his energetically awkward celebrations after England beat Colombia on penalties at the 2018 World Cup. It won’t even be his magnanimous embrace of triumphant Spain manager Luis de la Fuente after England’s defeat in this weekend’s final. No, it will be the sight of Southgate after the dismal nil-nil draw with Slovenia last month, marching purposefully towards the England fans as they flung choice words and empty beer cups his way.

It’s an image that captures the antagonism that characterises his time as manager. Not just the antagonism between Southgate’s dour brand of uber-defensive football and the demands of fans for something vaguely uplifting. After all, countless England managers before Southgate have faced the wrath of the fans for terrible performances. The much-loved Bobby Robson was barracked by fans after a two-nil loss to the USSR in 1984, and again after three straight defeats at Euro ’88. Even Terry Venables, fondly remembered for his side’s derring-do at Euro ’96, came in for considerable flak in the run-up to that now nostalgia-soaked tournament.

No, it’s an image that captures something more, something specific about the Southgate era. Not just the sporting failure, but also the politically charged, cultural antagonism between Southgate and the fans. The conflict between this smartly dressed representative of the new elites and those sweary England supporters. Between, as our media elites have it, ‘the handsome middle-aged man’ and the ‘ugly’, unruly masses. Between Southgate the righteous, right-on missionary and the barbaric, flag-waving natives.

In many ways, this conflict has been a long time coming. Ever since the middle-class colonisation of football during the 1990s, the beautiful game has often found itself being used as a vehicle to educate, enlighten and discipline its supposedly backwards, still largely working-class fans. Professional players have been asked to double-up as so-called role models. And the game as a whole has frequently served as a site for an assortment of ‘awareness-raising’ campaigns and identitarian crusades. Yet the manager of the national team had largely confined himself to, well, managing a football team. The likes of Sven-Göran Eriksson, Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello showed zero interest in espousing their political views – which is probably just as well given Capello’s admiration for General Franco. The likeable, erudite Roy Hodgson, who was England’s manager when Brits voted to leave the EU in June 2016, even kept his counsel during those febrile days, despite constant pressing from the media.

But this all changed with the appointment of Southgate in the autumn of 2016. The then England under-21s manager was initially only given the job on a temporary basis after his predecessor, Sam Allardyce, had suddenly resigned after just 67 days in charge, following a newspaper sting in which he was recorded boasting about getting around rules on player transfers while seemingly drinking a pint of wine. With the demeanour of a trendy vicar, and bereft of any hint of scandal, Southgate no doubt appealed to the English Football Association after Big Sam’s indiscretions. And so, following a few decent results, Southgate was given the job full-time in November 2016.

Right from the start of his tenure, Southgate struck a different tone to his predecessors. While they kept their political views largely hidden, Southgate seemed only too happy to give his an airing. He wasn’t alone, of course. The vote for Brexit just months earlier prompted many among our cultural and political elites to vent their loathing of the masses. Still, it was something of a surprise to hear the England football manager so happily echo these prejudices.

At his first press conference as permanent England manager in March 2017, he said that English football had ‘to get off the island and learn from elsewhere’. He spoke as if he was not just trying to improve a football team, but correct society, too. Unsurprisingly, the Remainer-dominated media quickly warmed to Southgate. At last, it seemed they had one of their own in charge of the England national team. His ‘talk of throwing off the small-minded island outlook feels appropriate’, remarked the Independent at the time, calling it ‘a statement for the Brexit age if ever there was one’.

Southgate continued in this Brexit-baiting vein in the run-up to the World Cup in Russia in 2018. In one football podcast, he seemed keen to present his England team more as a riposte to Brexit than as a realistic contender for the World Cup. He talked up its diversity (itself utterly unremarkable for England teams) and waxed lyrical about the ‘progressiveness’ of young people. At the same time, he contrasted all this with the vision of England supposedly animating the vote to leave the EU – that ‘pining for something that isn’t there anymore’, as he put it at the time. ‘We’re a team with our diversity and our youth that represent modern England’, he asserted. The implication was clear: older Brexit voters represented an out-of-date England. Later that year, Southgate was more explicit still about what he felt had driven the vote to leave the EU. He told an ITV 4 documentary that he thought the ‘undertones of voting on Brexit were racial undertones’.

The more Southgate spoke like this, the more he rehearsed broadsheet prejudices about the Brexit-voting public, the more Britain’s media and cultural elites started to champion him, fetishise him even. He stopped being merely a football manager. He was becoming a combatant in the elites’ culture war against vast swathes of British society. He was playing his own unique role in casting their views and values as ‘wrong’, bigoted and worse. A piece in the New Statesman from June 2018 captured well the cultural-elite embrace of Southgate: ‘After the bitterness and divisions of the Brexit referendum, Mr Southgate… has shown a different face to the world: what we might even call the beginnings of a new progressive Englishness.’

This ‘new progressive Englishness’, or ‘progressive patriotism’ as it is often called, was supposed to strike a contrast with the regular patriotism. As one Southgate-loving leftist fancifully put it at the time, the England manager was taking on ‘the right-wing xenophobes keen to make the St George’s Cross a symbol of white nationalism’.

This was who the new elites were pitching the all-too-witting Southgate into battle against. Not white nationalists, who are a minuscule racist fringe at this point, but against those ordinary English people who are routinely demonised as racists. Those who might not flinch at the sight of a St George’s cross. Those who might have voted Brexit. Those, that is, who make up a large part of English football’s fan base.

It’s clear that from very early on in his tenure, Southgate was increasingly being lionised by the media precisely because he was opposed to the views and values of the average football fan. Precisely because he was prepared to indulge, no matter how gently, in the elite stigmatisation of vast swathes of the public. He allowed the media to cast the replica-shirt-wearing fans as villains to his waist-coat-wearing hero.

By the time a pandemic-delayed Euro 2020 came round in 2021, the cultural antagonism between an elite-backed Southgate and the plebian fans was more explicit than ever. Southgate’s slights against Brexit had given way, in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, to more explicit accusations that fans were racist. Back in 2018, Southgate had merely suggested that there were ‘racial undertones’ to the vote to leave the EU. By the summer of 2020, he was happily talking in the language of critical race theory and demanding an ‘end to white privilege in football’. There are a lot of ‘uncomfortable’ discussions to be held with ‘white people’, he said at the time.

Matters came to a head during the warm-up matches for Euro 2020 in June 2021. For the best part of a year, Premier League footballers had been ‘taking the knee’ in support of BLM before matches. It was always a gesture that was going to irritate a lot of fans – not because they are racist, but because they don’t want to be lectured to by multimillionaires implying that they are racist, and because they had come to learn that BLM was not the noble anti-racist group the media had led us to believe it was.

The players and the league had only been able to get away with this insulting virtue-signalling for so long because, thanks to Covid, the stadiums had largely been free of fans. But that wasn’t the case by the time England came to play their two pre-tournament matches in Middlesbrough that June. And so, each time the players indulged in their kneeling ritual before a game, they were greeted by a chorus of boos and jeers from the crowd. Southgate was outraged. He took fans’ objections to being ‘educated’ by footballers as a personal affront. ‘We feel, more than ever, determined to take the knee during this tournament’, he said after the first bout of booing.

Seemingly convinced that he was now more statesman than sportsman, Southgate then decided that he needed to address the nation. The result was his ‘Dear England’ letter, a masterclass in condescension and woke sanctimony. Referencing abusive messages sent to players on social media, Southgate told fans,’I have some bad news, you’re on the losing side. The awareness around inequality and the discussions on race have gone to a different level in the past 12 months alone’, he continued. ‘I am confident that young kids of today will grow up baffled by old attitudes and ways of thinking.’

It’s difficult to overstate just how remarkable this intervention was from the England football manager. He was setting himself and the England team against a lot of football fans. Indeed, against all those who disagree with BLM and the assumption that we live in a structurally racist society, awash with white privilege. He was identifying himself and his team with ‘progress’, with ‘the right side of history’, and therefore damning restive fans as reactionary, as being on the wrong side of history. ‘Dear England’ was a cliché-ridden exercise in the elite demonisation of the football-supporting masses.

Little wonder Britain’s cultural elites, their snobbery super-charged by the Brexit vote and Boris Johnson’s General Election victory, absolutely loved it. ‘Dear England’ turned Southgate into the posterboy for the right-thinking. The hero for woke-ish, centrist bores across the land. Historian David Olusoga praised the England manager for taking on the ‘toxic racism and swaggering hyper-nationalism that has for decades accrued around the English game… [and] grown deeper in recent months’. Future prime minister Keir Starmer simply tweeted in response: ‘This is England.’ Some even said that Southgate’s letter was up there with the founding event of centrist dad-ism – the 2012 London Olympic opening ceremony. That was quite the accolade.

The reputation of ‘Dear England’ and Southgate himself was consolidated by what happened after the Euro 2020 final defeat to Italy. The three black English players who missed penalties – Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka – were seemingly subject to a torrent of racial hatred on social media. More shocking still, it was reported that a mural of Rashford in Manchester had been defaced with racist abuse. It all seemed to confirm the dystopian portrait Southgate and those cheering him on had been painting of racist, BLM-booing England fans and broader post-Brexit society. Southgate quickly addressed the nation again, calling the abuse ‘unforgivable’ and describing the England team as ‘a beacon of light’ in the darkness.

The only problem with all this was that the abuse and the mural defacement were not what they were hyped up to be. After an extensive investigation by the UK Football Policing Unit, it turned out that just 34 racist messages from 34 accounts had been sent after the final from within the UK. That’s 34 too many, but it’s hardly enough to tar fans as a swaggering racist horde. The vast, vast majority of the abuse had come from trolls overseas. Furthermore, it emerged that while the Rashford mural graffiti was certainly post-watershed, it wasn’t racist. Someone had written ‘Shite in a bucket, bastard’, with a cock and balls pointing at Rashford’s mouth. It was standard football-fan fare. It was most likely written by a Man City fan, bitter rivals to Rashford’s Man Utd, given it was in Man City light blue. Police soon made clear the motivation wasn’t ‘racial’, but no one was listening and another myth was born.

Facts didn’t matter to those convinced that Britain was heading to a post-Brexit hell in handcart, and eager to think the worst of their fellow citizens. Against the hysterical background of seemingly rising racism, the ‘Dear England’ letter cemented Southgate’s role in the culture war. He was now firmly on the side of Britain’s cultural elites against the fans, conceived as a proxy for the racism-riddled Brexit- and Tory-voting demos. Indeed, so important was this letter for the elite sanctification of Southgate that it has even formed the basis for a cringey stage play, Dear England, which the BBC – who else? – is currently turning into a four-part drama.

In many ways, 2021 was Peak Southgate. He had managed to thoroughly ingratiate himself with Britain’s smart set. They were busy lauding him, writing columns celebrating him, penning plays mythologising him. Not because of his team’s relative success – reaching the final of Euro 2020 – but because of his role in the broader culture war against fans and the public. Because of his willingness to strike the virtuous pose, his eagerness to hype up the alleged bigotry of those who paid to watch the tedious fare his teams served up. He had demonstrated just how willing he was to front up the latest elite crusade, from BLM to trans rights, against the supposedly backwards masses, forever cast as being in the wrong.

And it worked for a while. Until the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, that is. Not only did England themselves flatter to deceive before being beaten by the first decent team they faced – France – in the quarter-finals. But Southgate’s woke posturing was also exposed for the performative, hypocritical charade it always was. Having spent the previous four years castigating England fans’ alleged bigotry, Southgate struggled when confronted by the actual institutional discrimination practised in Qatar. This is a place where people are punished for homosexuality, where migrant workers are subject to genuinely racist and exploitative labour laws. But there was no ‘Dear Qatar’ letter this time. Instead, Southgate claimed that migrant workers, countless numbers of whom had died during the construction of the World Cup stadia, ‘want the football to come to Qatar’ because they ‘love’ it – much to the consternation of assorted NGOs. England even dropped plans to wear pro-LGBT, ‘One Love’ armbands for fear of upsetting the local authorities or being punished by FIFA.

Southgate’s aggressive virtue-signalling, so easy in Britain where it is effectively backed by the ruling elites, proved impossible in Qatar. That World Cup cost him dearly. Not just the support of fans, tired of the crap football and the constant demonisation. He also lost the full-throated support of the woke, who accused him and the FA of ‘timidity’. Suddenly, in their eyes, the knee-taking hero of Euro 2020 appeared as a mere mortal after all.

Southgate remained one of their own to the last, though. Hence, throughout this European Championship, England fans have been under attack from the media and beyond for criticising Southgate. For tiring of the endlessly defensive, reactive football, leavened only by luck and a few moments of individual brilliance. We’ve been told again and again just how successful England have been under Southgate. And more than that, we’re told again and again just what a ‘good’, ‘virtuous’ man Southgate is, and – sotto voce – just how bad and uncouth the fans are. It’s as if Southgate is too good for us. As if we don’t deserve him.

Indeed, ahead of Sunday’s final, an Observer columnist wrote that ‘the real gift we should all be grateful for – win or lose – is leadership of this emotional timbre’. This was a telling-off directed at those who just a few weeks earlier had flung their beer-cupped criticism towards Southgate after he managed England’s stars to that nil-nil draw with the less-than-mighty Slovenia. An admonishment to all those moved to boo Southgate for the tedious football his team have unfailingly delivered. Be grateful, fans were told, not for Southgate the football manager, but for Southgate the leader.

And that’s the problem. Those who have been hectored and branded deplorable by Southgate, those who he said are on the ‘wrong side of history’, don’t want a leader. They just want to watch an England football team have a go, rather than the England manager have a go at them.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.