David Winner Interview 2025: Excerpts from a new England
Sean O'Conor
David Winner is best known as the author of Brilliant Orange, a ground-breaking book that placed Dutch football at the heart of the Netherlands' culture and psychology. He followed that up with a quest for English football's soul in Those Feet, a World Cup travelogue Around the World in 90 Minutes, and a collaboration with Dennis Bergkamp, Stillness and Speed. Winner has been working on a passion project about Johan Cruyff but his new book Excerpts from a new England is a reflection on Gareth Southgate's reign as Three Lions manager, emphasising how he was a unifying figure amid a sea of national turbulence.
How did this book come about?
Ian Ridley asked me and at first I was not sure but he persuaded me. The hope was that England would win the Euros, everyone would love Gareth Southgate and he would still be in post or bow out in glory and statues.
There was also an idea that there was a parallel with Keir Starmer emerging and winning the election around the end of the year when the book came out. That did not really work out because the election came unexpectedly in the summer and Starmer's star is now starting to wane.
The book's format is unique - musings on Southgate interspersed with press cuttings from around the world about different news items
I went to the British Library and the University of London archives and searched for Southgate news and it showed me what was happening elsewhere on that particular day.
If the news was from further afield it made it more interesting somehow. Every nation has its traumas and big stories around a tournament.
You home in on Southgate's character, noting that amid the chaos of Brexit, he appeared a lighthouse in the storm
That is a nice metaphor. He had a sensitivity, an awareness and a caring about things. He is not the first footballer to have feelings but he did stand out and whatever he does next will be worthwhile. He could become the Jimmy Carter of football managers couldn't he?
Was Southgate actually England's most successful manager?
I was reading the Leo McKinstry biography of Alf Ramsey and he comes across as a much more troubled and tragic figure with all these insecurities and blind spots and his record was not as good as Gareth's. Ramsey won the World Cup with home advantage and some lucky refereeing. After that he loses that quarter-final in Mexico and has another humiliation in 1972 and then he does not get to the next World Cup. He was a success in one way but a disaster in others.
England lost the Euro 2024 final but they had been the pre-tournament favourites so Southgate got a lot of stick
Yes there was that unrealistic expectation again and when it does not work, although it nearly did, the punishment is out of all proportion to the offence. There was a lot of hostility to Southgate during the tournament and a degree of venom towards him from some quarters that surprised me.
The consensus was that he should have taken the handbrake off
Well Lee Carsley came in and made him look particularly good didn't he? 'Play an attacking formation' everyone said, he did but that did not work very well. To play cautiously in tournaments is a tried and tested tactic. Didier Deschamps has been doing it for years. You could make exactly the same criticism of him - playing safety-first with all those attacking players. Why do you think Germany have been so good at winning? The attacking teams are the ones everybody loves but usually you have so many romantic failures and tragic heartbreaks - the Hungarians, the Dutch, the Brazilians of '82, the Danes of '86. There is a long, long history of it.
So if the objective is to win the tournament, Southgate's seemed to me to be a legitimate approach. Jude Bellingham - wonderful talent, totally admirable guy, but still very young and not proven over a long stretch. Maradona over the tournament in '82 did not work either, but the expectation and level of demand was just ridiculous.
But still there is a residing sense of chances missed with Southgate - a World Cup semi final and two Euro finals lost, two of those games from winning positions
In both Euros we were not the best team. I thought England were not that good in 2021 and would get found out at some point and they were. England decided to defend after their early goal against Italy, a freak goal really and what felt like their only attack, and that was probably a mistake but they were lucky before the final. Denmark were exhausted emotionally and physically after all they had been through, Ukraine in Rome were very weak and that was England's only game outside Wembley and the Germany game could have gone the other way as well. Muller missed an easy chance to equalise.
In the 2024 final Spain were clearly superior and England were passed to death. Some of the criticism was fair. There were three blinding moments, from Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka and Ollie Watkins - which rescued the team. They played some long and very tedious passages but the extremism of the criticism was not fair.
The one they really could have won was 2022 in Qatar, which was a weird World Cup in timing and location so it does not really resonate properly somehow, but they were unlucky to lose to France. That was on a knife-edge and could have gone either way.
I got the impression the team were behind Southgate's methods
Yes but they were not very good at it. They were not skilled counter-attackers and most of them came from teams for whom the standard position is to form a horseshoe around a packed defence and pass it around sideways or to the wing.
Football has become very samey actually as everyone seems to know how to attack and defend. If you turn on Match of the Day and ignore the shirt colours you will see the same pattern time and time again. So the England players knew how to do that but not what Gareth wanted them to do and you could see them not being comfortable with it. All the good team feeling, preparation and off-field excellence could not make up for that. That was my impression.
Can English expectations ever change?
The key thing is that the football neuroses about England provided a template or a petri-dish breeding ground for what becomes Brexit politics - the ideas about foreigners and that we have a divine right to be the best because we are English. It was basically an English phenomenon. The stuff you saw around football was politicised for this crazy, wholly destructive, nasty, mean-spirited politics.
Twas ever thus with the national team
Yes and you have to look for reasons beyond the football field, to England's feelings about itself. It's a deep-bellied, primal, weird power that happens and when it gets going it can be very impressive but also disturbing when it is dark. It is all unexamined but it is all to do with status and unprocessed imperial legacy.
It is essentially an Edwardian and pre-World War II fantasy of Englishness that gets loaded onto our national team a hundred years later when the world has changed, football has changed and the English people have changed, so it is a very peculiar thing. Every nation is struggling in one way or another with the past and stories that go wrong and do not fit the present circumstances, but with England the pathology is quite odd.
Are we a nation seeking a new sense of imperialism through football?
Yes and it is very rarely discussed in those terms beyond some academics and writers. But when you talk about it with people you won't find anyone disagreeing. People will often say 'Is it about the Empire or the Second World War?' but they are aspects of the same thing. The war stuff is to a degree a later version of the Empire stuff and the Empire is when football is created. That is what I wrote about in Those Feet, the special neurosis element and I am still sad that no-one ran with that. I thought everybody was going to love this, but they did not or they were too embarrassed to write about it.
It seems too easy for the wrong ideas to attach themselves to our national team
Off the field in 2020 there was a hysteria and a jingoism that was quite uncomfortable all the way through, and there was Boris Johnson and the right trying to make capital out of it. The taking the knee stuff was very admirable - I remember that with great affection and respect.
It could have been more jingoistic if Sam Allardyce had not been caught in that newspaper sting
Interestingly I quote Allardyce saying he would have taken the knee, but he was also a Brexiter, although he has since recanted. He seemed in public to be such a throwback to the doughty old school gaffer but it was always said of him that he was a lot smarter and more modern and sophisticated than he pretended.
What was the F.A. thinking when it replaced Southgate with Thomas Tuchel?
Does anyone ever know? I have no problem with Tuchel - he is not a showman, not a big personality, just an obsessive football man and very good so maybe that is just what we need - someone who will strip away the alternative 'father of the nation' stuff - which Gareth did not set out to be but ended up being.
If you just have a technician who runs the team it takes the heat out of it, which did not happen with Capello and Sven who were quite big personalities in their way. If it were Jurgen Klopp or Pep or a young Arsene Wenger then you could not avoid it of course.
Given Spain's success, do you think Lee Carsely should have been given more time?
Not really. There was the international equivalent of the Anfield Boot Room in Germany with Sepp Herberger, Helmut Schoen, Jupp Derwall and Berti Vogts but there was a spiralling down of quality and it ended up with their football decaying.
As a Dutchophile, how do you feel about our national team?
As a child and as a teenager I was all in on England but then they did not qualify for the 1974 World Cup and Holland were there instead and I was bitten like everybody else was at the time, it just seemed to last longer with me!
The British media were all in on Scotland in that World Cup and in 1978 so I became a bit semi-detached. The more the hooligan fans disgraced the nation and made going to matches a torment I just thought why bother if the fans are horrible and the football is pretty awful. I am not contractually obliged to follow what everyone else is doing.
What will you remember about Gareth Southgate as England manager?
As a human being you could not really find a better person. He was hard-working, sensible, honourable and empathic but the one word you keep coming back to with him is decency and so the assault on him was very indecent, but that is showbiz.
Gareth Southgate Interview 2002
© Sean O'Conor & Soccerphile.com
Buy tickets for soccer matches around the world