From Crystal Palace to Buckingham Palace
Gareth Southgate, national leader and all-round great guy, deserves a knighthood whatever tonight’s result
AAt 16 Southgate signed for Crystal Palace on £27.50 a week. He was considering journalism as a fallback and did work experience at the Croydon Advertiser
Everybody with the squad, from the coaches to the coach driver, is equally important
personal recollection. In 1996, my then teenaged daughter, distraught at the spectacle of Gareth Southgate missing the penalty against Germany that led to England being knocked out of the Euros, wrote a letter to him saying how sorry she felt for him and hoping he was bearing up. Thousands – tens of thousands – of people must have done the same thing. But my daughter was astonished a couple of weeks later to receive a handwritten reply from the player, thanking her for kind thoughts and enclosing a signed photograph.
It’s a story my family have been reminding ourselves of over the past couple of weeks, watching Southgate, chewing his lip thoughtfully on the touchline as England inched their way to the Euro final, punching the air triumphantly as the team prevailed against Denmark on Wednesday night: What a thoroughly decent and nice man Gareth Southgate is. That has been the consensus about Southgate through all his years as a player and manager at all levels. But we all know what they say happens to nice guys.
The England team has had managers over the years who have been cheeky, inscrutable, elder statesmen, sometimes carrying an umbrella, sometimes well practised in industrial language, sometimes hardly speaking the language at all. But when Southgate took over in 2016 few, perhaps, might have expected that this thoughtful, likeable and dignified man would be the one to bring the national team to the brink of their greatest triumph in 55 years.
How wrong we were. Southgate gate has a keen appreciation of his responsibilities, nsibilities, and the place the England team holds in the nation’s history and nd traditions.
Last month, onth, he published an open letter. “Dear ear England”, on the sports platform, , The Players Tribune, talking about how w in the past year everyone had been directly affected by isolation and loss, but the country has also witnessed countless s examples of heroism and sacrifice, and how he has as tried to impress on his players the significance nce of playing for England: nd: “I tell them that when n you go out there, in this shirt, you have the opportunity to produce moments that people will ill remember forever. You are a part of an experience ce that lasts in the collective e consciousness of our country.” try.”
Southgate gate was born in Watford, but grew up in the West Sussex sex town of Crawley. His father r Clive was a builder who became ame a plant manager with IBM; M; his mother Barbara an office clerk. In his “Dear England” letter Southgate wrote of how much his sense of identity and values has been tied to his family, and in particular his grandfather Arthur Toll, “a fierce patriot and a proud military man” who served in the Royal Marines in the Second World War. Toll was also a stickler for self-discipline and propriety; when he bought Southgate sweets he wouldn’t allow him to eat them in the street.
An outstanding footballer at junior level, at the age of 16 Southgate signed for Crystal Palace as a Youth Training Scheme apprentice on £27.50 a week. (He was considering journalism as a fall-back and did work experience at his local newspaper, the Croydon Advertiser). It is often said that the seven years he spent at Palace were the making of him.
Southgate was regarded by other players as “posh”. His nickname was “Nord”, given to him because his precise enunciation reminded one of the coaches of the television presenter Denis Norden.
Mark Bright, then a senior player at Palace, who is now in charge of the club’s youth development, remembers the manager
Steve Coppell telling him and Ian Wright, “he’s really clever, Gareth; he’s got 9 0-levels”.
Bright replied: “I don’t care how many O-levels he’s got, can he play?” And he could. He was known as being clever, obviously, but not somebody who would be outside the circle at all; definitely in it.
At a youth-team tournament in Tuscany, Southgate overdid the tequila slammers and ended up vomiting over the club’s chairman, Ron Noades, in a hotel lift. Noades’s clothes were waiting outside Southgate’s door the next morning, for him to take to the dry cleaners. It was an uncharacteristic lapse. Southgate would usually be the one ordering taxis to ensure his team-mates didn’t break curfew.
The Palace dressing room was full of big, not to say hard, characters, and Southgate had to withstand banter about his background and the size of his nose.
“People get this image that Gareth was middleclass, had it easy,” says Alan Smith, who succeeded Coppell as the Palace manager. “But everything he has he has had to fight for. He was never given anything.”
At the age of 22, he was made captain, leading the club to the 1993–94 First Division title, and promotion to the Premier league. “He was a natural leader,” said Bright. “The Gareth we see now is just an older version of what he was then. He was never a bawler and a shouter, although he’d give someone a rollicking if it was needed.” Alan Smith recalled an occasion walking into the changing room at half-time when the team were performing badly to find Southgate swinging punches at another player, because he didn’t feel he was giving 100 per cent. “That is a side of him that people have not seen. I was the manager, he was not afraid to argue with me. He could be awkward.”
He would go on to play for Aston Villa and Middlesbrough, captaining both teams, while making 57 appearances for England – only ever being sent off once in his playing career. In 2006, following his retirement as a player, at the age of 35 he went on to manage Middlesbrough, before being sacked following the club’s relegation in 2009.
Scarred by the experience, Southgate took a break from football, before returning to a coaching role with the England Under 21s. The team qualified for the 2015 European Championship but were knocked out after coming bottom of their group.
In 2016, following England’s humiliating dismissal from the Euros by Iceland in the round of 16, the manager Roy Hodgson left, to be replaced by Sam Allardyce, who was then forced to resign after one game, after The Daily Telegraph’s investigation into alleged corruption in football.
Southgate took temporary charge, initially balking at the job, worried at the effect that such a high profile might have on his family.
Morale and esprit de corps were at rock bottom. In one of his first team talks he addressed the question of the future, drawing on his own experience of that infamous penalty miss, saying “what’s the worst thing that could happen?” The question was greeted with silence. “Well, it already has,” Southgate said.
Within two years he had taken England to the semi-finals in the World Cup, the first manager to do so since Sir Bobby Robson in 1990.
In a moment of self-appraisal, Southgate once wrote “I have never been good at gambling, drinking, fighting, tantrums, celebrity”.
He is a self-effacing man who dislikes talking or reading about himself, and has had to overcome a natural shyness to meet the public demands of managing the national team. His personal life has been as unblemished as his professional one.
He met his wife Alison when he was playing for Crystal Palace. She was working in a boutique, where he would go and pretend to be buying clothes, so self-conscious about his appearance that it was almost two years before he summoned the courage to ask her out. They married in 1997, and have two children, Mia, 22 and Flynn, 18. The family live in a Grade I listed 16th-century mansion near Harrogate, which Southgate bought for £3.5million when he played for Middlesbrough. He has a particular affection for Yorkshire, in particular the people, as he told a local newspaper “and their hardworking, no nonsense attitude, good values, honesty and humility that really shines through. All things I associate with”.
“If you’re a coach it’s a bit like being a parent,” he mused this week.
“You’ve gone past the moment when it’s about you, and it’s about what you pass on to others.”
Like a good and wise parent, Southgate strives not to show he has no favourites, and to ensure that everyone feels valued. As the Telegraph chief football writer Sam Wallace pointed out, one of the first players Southgate sought out to embrace after the final whistle in the
4-0 victory over Ukraine was the third choice goalkeeper Aaron Ramsdale. A model of emotional intelligence, he talks constantly to the players, in groups and individually, phones and texts them – and he listens to them. As Bright puts it “You would never feel he was giving you the rubber-ear – pretending to be listening to what you’re saying, but it’s just bouncing off. He’s got time for everybody. I’ll message him and say have you got a minute to talk about youth development and he’ll call you back and talk for half an hour.”
Southgate likes players who are “low maintenance and high performance”. There is no room for egos, and he has instilled in the players that everybody associated with the squad, from the coaches to the coach driver is equally important and deserving of respect.
Under Southgate, the days of wags, drinking binges and players gambling among themselves have become a distant memory. Michael Owen once wrote of how it was the “boredom” of being away from home on World Cup duty that resulted in him running up debts of £30,000 in the players’ card school. Poker has now been replaced with the children’s game Uno.
Dramas are dealt with quickly and efficiently. When, last year, during the Nations League competition, Phil Folden and Mason Greenwood broke Covid guidelines by inviting women back to their hotel room, they were dropped from the squad within hours. After a suitable period to ponder on his sins, Foden was welcomed back, saying how much he owed to Southgate. And so loyalty is built.
He has also changed the relationship between the media and the players, in which the media were often regarded as the enemy, treated with a suspicion bordering on outright hostility. Rather than the “say nothing” attitude of some of his predecessors, Southgate has encouraged players to talk about their background and upbringing and so has done much to change the perception of them as pampered, overpaid prima donnas to young men who have had to struggle and make sacrifices.
It is obligatory, of course, for every manager of the national team to talk of the pride in pulling on an England shirt, but you feel it means more to Southgate than most. He has spoken of how walking onto the pitch for his first England game was the proudest moment of his life, and this week he talked of “this incredible country” and how he “couldn’t be prouder to be an Englishman”. At a time when a reckoning on what it means to be English has never been more a matter of debate, he has not been afraid to step into the fray. “At home, I’m below the kids and the dogs in the pecking order,” he wrote in his “Dear England” letter, “but publicly I am the England men’s football team manager. I have a responsibility to the wider community to use my voice, and so do the players. It’s their duty to continue to interact with the public on matters such as equality, inclusivity and racial injustice, while using the power of their voices to help put debates on the table, raise awareness and educate”.
In the midst of the controversy over whether England players should take the knee, Southgate’s view was that it should be their choice. They voted to continue, and he backed them.
When England play, he says, “the result is just a small part of it. There’s much more at stake than that. It’s about how we conduct ourselves on and off the pitch, how we bring people together, how we inspire and unite, how we create memories that last beyond the 90 minutes, that last beyond the summer, that last forever”.
Whatever the result tonight one outcome is assured. Arise, Sir Gareth.