On… Euro 2024 #1: Home is Where The Hatred Is
Gareth Southgate and the Delusion of English Fans
Gareth Southgate is Worse than Hitler
southgate fuckd a chicken and spunkd in 90secs
FUCK OFF GARETH SOUTHGATE YOU PIECE OF SHIT YOURE BAD LUCK
garath southgate is sabotaging england on purpose hes a useless cunt who you should have sacked 4 years ago hes wasting this talent pool we have
Waistcoat Gareths beard makes him look a bloke on a warning poster outside a school playground, he definitely gets a stonk on watching yt clips of Get Your Own Back and his teams can’t trigger presses properly
Of those five tweets above, only two were made up by me. Let me know in the comments which you think are the real ones.1 The rest were written by actual human beings using their fingers to type words formed in their brains, which they then published to the world.
Here we go again, as the Brigadier said upon seeing the 4th Doctor for the first time. It’s a tournament summer, and England fans are already reaching the delirious levels of a Rodong Sinmum editorial on Kim Jong Un’s birthday.
Euro 2024 is only two days away, with England's first game coming on Sunday night against Serbia. As always with major tournaments, the build-up has become swamped beneath the usual tide of exceptionalism, outrage, hope, and ahistorical takes by YouTuber cretins.
Unless you are talking about the pre-war period, or the brief stretch in the mid-60s, England have never been a top international team.2 This is not to say that pretty much each generation hasn’t produced brilliant, often world-class footballers, of course we have. But England’s international accomplishments are essentially a century of failure. Not even failure in the almost-but-not-quite sense of, say, the Netherlands, but a failure so endemic that it’s difficult to imagine the history of football without it. It is stitched into the very fabric of football lore that the English always fail.
In a century of international football, we have only reached five semi-finals. This can be raised to six if you count Euro 1968, which, given there were only four teams in the tournament, would be an almighty stretch. It would be like Liz Truss arguing she wasn’t that bad because she outlasted a tomato.
Yet at every tournament, English football fans, journalists, and ex-players say the same thing: we should win, we are going to win and if we don’t then blame the manager.3
Of course it is Gareth Southgate, a man seemingly moulded by crazed scientists hoping to create the embodiment of centrism in human form, to whom this outrage is currently howled.
The doomsters and gloomsters4 scream that his football is boring and conservative and he’s wasting our best players by not playing a 1-2-7 formation. This is despite Southgate being objectively England’s second-best manager of all time. Prior to him taking over in 2016, England had won just nine knockout games in the history of international football.5 Southgate has since won six. He is the ONLY England manager in history to win a European Championship knockout game in 90 minutes.6
But beyond the raw numbers of wins and losses, arguably his most impressive achievement is the creation of an England team that is tactically, if not astute, then at least flexible.
At Euro 2021, England were able to move between tactical systems and formations from game-to-game. They were able to change the way the team played based on what the situation required. Now, this may seem like something most football teams should be able to achieve, but for most of the last century, this has proved almost impossible for England. We became stuck in systems like decades old chewing gum to school tables. Whether it was the W-M or 4-4-2, England have nearly always played football without form.
Which is not to say his tenure is without criticism. He is certainly conservative, sometimes a touch too much, particularly in regards to the double pivot he persisted with until 2022. The fact he is only now finding a place for both Phil Foden and Trent Alexander-Arnold perhaps also speaks to a lack of tactical imagination. He does have a generational squad of players, including the best players in the English, German, and Spanish leagues last season. Which pretty much no England manager has had at their disposal before. However, to describe his time in charge as anything but a massive success is ludicrous.
But that doesn’t mean the exceptionalism that has defined English football, going all the way back to the 19th century, is still justified.7 England do have some incredible players, although the team itself has some serious flaws. If Bellingham, Kane, Saka and Foden have the tournament of their lives, there is a chance England could win.
The key difference between England and France, Germany, Italy, etc, is that their histories weigh on their backs with both failure and success. Holding the weight of victory is far easier than a century of endless fuck-ups. So when England fans say we should be winning every tournament we enter, the answer of history is surely, well, why?
Shameless marketing. You always become the thing you despised as a teenager.
“Like comparing Arab thoroughbreds to farm horses." Quote from Gabriel Hanot, a French football journalist and creator of the European Cup, comparing the Uruguayan national team to England in the 1920s.
“Look across our national team and there isn’t one player who wouldn’t walk into any side in Europe… why is it, before every tournament, we start believing we’re overrated?” A quote from Tim Lovejoy’s book Lovejoy on Football, published a month before England’s 3-2 loss to Croatia and failure to qualify to Euro 2008.
I wouldn’t mind seeing a Venn diagram of these types of fans and Leave voters…
Three in 1966, one in 1986, two in 1990, one in 1996, one in 2002, and one in 2006.
See the 0-0 draw between England and Scotland in 1872 as evidence of this. One of the biggest upsets in football history in the first ever international match.