In the years between 2016 and 2024, England and its pseudo-colonies of southern Spain, the Algarve and Pattaya City in Thailand, were involved in a toxic romance with a 40-year-old man from Crawley. He had a crackling voice, a perpetually worried eyebrow and a love of Marks and Spencer Autograph Collection pieces and conciliatory liberalism. Looking at it today, even with the revisionist light of Dear England fresh in our minds, Gareth Southgate appears as one who never was; a Kinockian, Al-Gorian figure. However, it would be grossly unfair to describe him as a bureaucrat who never had “the touch” because, when he wanted to, Southgate had the ability to bring England to its knees – at the wit’s end and beyond.
Under Southgate’s careful let’s-remember-why-we’re-here-boys stewardship, England became a rudderless republic of mouthy ecstasy. A place where, every two years, the collective consciousness collapsed into a blaze of foam, flames, flags, improvised methods of transport and arguments about Jack Grealish. For most of this time it looked like Southgate could not control what he had created, his pleas for calm ignored like an Ikea regional manager on Black Friday.
During the tour the national mood oscillated between anarchy, irony, sentimentality, degradation, pigheadedness and nostalgia. Emotions were flying like a pigeon stuck in the back of a truck. There was a time when England fans lost perspective, lost control of football itself, fell in love with being ‘up there’ and parachuted in rockets lighting up their behinds. They then sobered up and looked for a “proper” manager, only to fall for Southgate again in the next tournament.
And then, he left. Four tournaments, zero trophies, so many memories and so many questions. Brexit was never reversed (as Gareth clearly wanted) but English football was somewhat “backwards”.
Today, we are in the midst of a very different reality of English football. The team is five games into the World Cup and only now is the mood starting to rise. In the early days of Tuchel’s tour, the atmosphere was a marked departure from the earnest theology of Southgateism; determined, purposeful, secular, sober. Beer madness, Benidorm karaoke of “Sweet Caroline” replaced by longing, anthemic “Wonderwall”. A song about Harry Maguire drinking high-strength spirits and having a “massive head” usurped by a TikTok remix of a Sting song. You can chalk some of this up to the tournament itself: the late start times, the uncertainty of what a Maga World Cup would look like, the scale and magnitude of it all. But you can also watch a relatively unknown defence, the avoidance of Cole Palmer and the cold, clenched-jawed pragmatism of Tuchel. Going into this competition, it felt like we were being asked to suffer.
But then, the Mexico game. It took a punishing, sharp, fractured saw of a game against a host nation who genuinely believed this was their moment to show England fans what Tuchel does best. Which is push, bark, claw, roll the dice and never give up. After that victory came a kind of release—one that was no doubt exacerbated by tens of millions of dazed, zero-REM hangovers. Within hours, we had our first memes, our first real memories of the tournament: John Stones bicep dance at Ocean Beach, Jordan Henderson breaking his wrist in shame in ecstasy, AI slop videos of Jordan Pickford and Dan Burn as Crusaders, Harry Kane turning into a frog. It’s as if a common mood, an aesthetic, a sound, a glow has finally arrived.
The Mexico result didn’t quite inspire chaos on the Southgate scale, but it did seem to give the public more license to express their Anglicism, their Englishness. Driving back from the pub in south London in the blue dawn of a Monday morning, I heard bus drivers honking their horns to their fans in an endless rhythm of “dun-dun-dundundundun” and a young man standing up through the sunroof of a hatchback speeding down Kennington Lane.
There is a hint that now, it may be time to commit to chaos. The nation’s presence among the big boys in the quarter-finals suddenly seems very real. Harry Kane looks very much like a contender this tournament, Jude Bellingham is canceling the Talksport wars and Anthony Gordon’s Roadrunner routine is starting to make sense.
The next game against Norway is probably when it will really go off, when the lampposts will start to bend, when the shorts will start to sag in anticipation of the first blast. But in front of England stands one of its most powerful adopted sons, Erling “Braut” Haaland, a player born in the leafy suburbs of Cheshire (during his father’s time at Manchester City for the oil money), raised in Match of the day and George Graham’s tactics that his father brought home to the garden, now a plundering king is returning.
Overcoming Haaland is as important as overcoming Norway itself. In front of him stands Mbappe, Yamal, Messi. But somehow they seem less scary, less imposing, less contextual than a man who would simply find it too funny to knock his second home out of the World Cup. Tuchel’s greatest achievement so far has been to knock irony and inferiority out of England’s equation. But he is fortunate in the way that he has not had to fight some of the same battles that his predecessor did.
Southgate, whether he wanted to or not, had to deal with many questions about England, about Englishness; about race, class and hate. He offered strong but nuanced statements about many of them – becoming the spokesman for a better Britain that the writers of Dear England he wanted to remember it. However, it also left him with many detractors on both the right and the left. He was a political manager and this could often get in the way of football matters.
Tuchel does not have to ask such questions. Part of that is because he’s pitched his stall like a German who doesn’t need to sing the anthem to do his job. But it’s also because English football feels more confident in itself. Part of this can be attributed to the complete absence of tabloid pressure, the absence of a potential “turnip head” or “dentist’s chair” moment. Beyond this, however, there is something potentially much deeper. The extreme right has given up on football.
Although the British far right is very visible and very mobile (as evidenced by the “White Man’s March” in Liverpool last week) they are not so much using football as a recruiting ground. Today, British gall now arrives downstream of American culture rather than terrace culture. The Football Lads Alliance has been overtaken by the bold, church-filled Unite the Kingdom movement. Goodbye Charlie Bright “Remember Charlie Kirk” became. The modern football fan mourns Michael Olise NO identifying as English, rather than being English. That’s not to say there aren’t football shirts at Tommy Robinson marches and there aren’t Tommy Robinson fans watching England games, but the two now seem split at the hip. Indeed, many right-wing accounts of X are inclined to throw out lines like: “Grown-ups should fight for their country instead of supporting football-kicking millionaires” rather than debating who is and who isn’t English.
Perhaps this is the ultimate evolution of the “embargoisation” of the game, the one that began with the price of hooligans who left the Premier League in the early 1990s. But today, in addition to their price, they are being drowned out by a loud, inclusive, hyper-globalized football culture, where every incident of abuse is quickly turned into an inspirational Nike campaign and/or a prison sentence. Today, England might as well hire a German manager, and detractors are confined to the darkest reaches of radio.
That will likely change, grimly, if England go out, but it seems this England team has transcended the discourse and is now able to express itself as a footballing unit, rather than an extension of a troubled identity. If football extremism was the thesis, and Southgateism the antithesis, the synthesis seems to be that very rare thing in English public life – maturity. Tuchel may be embarrassed by Haaland on Saturday, he may still end up with a far inferior record to Southgate, but there is a sense that many of the battles beyond football have been won. That the team can probably get on with things. That it’s not the tattoo on an attacker’s leg that’s the problem, but the attacker’s legs themselves. And you can imagine, this is exactly the kind of breakthrough Southgate wanted all along.
(Further reading: Football is a losing game)
