What has Southgate achieved to deserve a Lucrative new deal now?
England manager is only as good as his next tournament, not a thrashing of Albania, so rush to retain him is mystifying
The spectacle of 80,000 souls snaking up Wembley Way for a drizzly November qualifier against Albania offered quite the validation of the Gareth Southgate effect. Back in the mid-nineties, when England engendered little beyond bleak apathy outside major tournaments, the team would be fortunate to draw even half that audience here. That the night should culminate in a pulverising victory, adorned by a first-half Harry Kane hat-trick, made this ostensibly the perfect moment for locking the manager into a two-year contract extension. A 5-0 scoreline, coupled with the virtual certainty of World Cup qualification: what more proof did the Football Association need for investing until 2024 in the gospel according to Gareth?
It is not an unwise way of thinking: across his 67 matches in charge, Southgate has made a job of once boundless toxicity look something resembling a pleasure, leading with calm, decency, moderation – and no little success. He was euphoric at this latest demolition by his side, trading the usual modest clenched fist for some arms-outstretched jigs for joy. Naturally, he deserved to drink in the satisfaction of steering his country to a third successive major finals. And yet the decision to tether him so soon to a fresh deal worth £5million a year remains mystifying on a couple of levels.
Firstly, why now? Why, with England still a year removed from their Qatar 2022 campaign, are the FA scrambling to fix Southgate’s future until Germany 2024? The inescapable reality of managing England, for all Southgate’s admirable work in redefining what it means to wear the badge, is that you are judged exclusively on what you achieve at tournaments.
Memories of this merciless filleting of Albania, the outcome so preordained that the crowd amused themselves after an hour with Mexican waves, will soon fade into the ether. What matters is whether Southgate can deliver in Doha in 12 months’ time.
Fabio Capello, despite an overall win ratio of 66.7 per cent – higher than Southgate’s 63.6 – is recalled largely for the torpid, joyless football his side served up en route to a last-16 exit in South Africa. Graham Taylor is defined in perpetuity by his failure to qualify for the 1994 World Cup and the superimposing of his head on a turnip.
While Southgate has rightly banked much kudos for leading England to a semi-final in Russia and then a first final for 55 years, he still needs to navigate the complex permutations of a first-ever winter World Cup before he is deemed capable of taking the country forward for another tournament cycle.
The second curious element of the FA’S unshakeable trust in Southgate is the money being offered. As The Daily Telegraph has revealed, he is in line to receive £5million a year, plus bonuses, an estimated 67 per cent increase on his remuneration today. In what other realm of business would this be countenanced, when there is no other offer on the table? Granted, Capello was able to negotiate an eye-watering £6 million salary at the zenith of his fame, but this was a reaction to suggestions he was about to jump ship to Inter Milan. In Southgate’s case, there has been no recent approach from any club, Premier League or otherwise, meaning the
FA are effectively bidding against themselves.
His leverage is drawn, to a significant extent, from the sentiment he arouses. Quite apart from his cultural revolution, he has brought tangible improvements on the pitch, transforming Kane from the lonely introvert we have seen recently at Tottenham Hotspur to a free-wheeling wizard of a striker for England, so cocksure here that he dispatched his third goal with a bicycle kick.
But there are other elements to the Southgate phenomenon that render the FA seemingly incapable of considering anyone else. Bizarrely, for such a mild-mannered man, he has generated almost a cultlike effect at his greatest moments. In 2018, he was the subject of breathless paeans in women’s magazines to his waistcoat choices and his progressive masculinity.
This summer, his achievements led Atomic Kitten to reissue a No1 single from 20 years ago in his honour.
The accumulation of these strange cultural forces risks leaving the FA helplessly in his thrall. It is not that Southgate fails to merit a nation’s gratitude, or that he lacks wonderful virtues as a leader, but that his employers appear to have reached a stage where they cannot contemplate life without him. In any industry, this is seldom a healthy place to be.
In football in particular, contract extensions often end up looking maddeningly premature. Look at the good sense with which Manchester United were credited when they signed Ole Gunnar Solskjaer to another three years. Now it is debatable whether he will even survive the next three weeks.
Nowhere are these vagaries more pronounced than in international management. The truism that you are only as good as your next tournament is inviolate. The fact that England have shown such a promising upward curve in 2018 and 2021 is no guarantee that they will sweep all before them next winter, especially when the Premier League schedule gives Southgate only one week in which to prepare. Judgment should come not in the comforting glow of thrashing Albania, but only once he deals with the most fiendish of challenges in Qatar.
To commit to him irrespective of the outcome feels less like a shrewd piece of business than a worrying hostage to fortune.