Lessons in Sporting “Leadership” from Gareth Southgate
Number One: Bend Over & Assume the Position, Whitey

1,677 words

Following last week’s election of Zohran Mamdani as Caliph of New York, completely unrelated publications worldwide seemed all-too eager to demonstrate their Islamophilia by shoehorning spurious mention of him into their pages. Zohran Mamdani is a fashion icon, say fashion websites! Zohran Madani is a gay icon, say gay websites! And, of course, Zohran Mamdani is a soccer icon, say soccer websites!

Apparently, Zohran enthusiastically supports the London-based (which is to say, largely black African) English Premier League side Arsenal, whose previous most famous Muslim alleged fan was Osama Bin Laden. Every time they went to the old Twin Towers of Wembley for the FA Cup Final, did Osama dream about flying a large plane straight into the stadium? I opened the pages of my own newspaper’s Sports section on Saturday to find the following quote straight from Mamdani’s Muslim mouth: “To be an Arsenal fan, to be a leftist, they are an interrelated experience.” [1]

Once upon a time—a time when I still actually liked soccer, as it was still actually a sport, not a mere disguised vector for the propagation of the inescapable globohomo soul-virus—I would have viewed this statement as a laughable one. Now, I feel myself forced to agree that Mamdani is fundamentally correct. But it isn’t just Arsenal who are inescapably leftist anymore, it’s all the other big clubs too, everywhere across Europe, in particular the game’s increasingly contemptible (post-)national teams.

Skilled Left-Wingers

I well recall as a child, whenever England played Germany, British media being full of 1930s tales of previous generations of players from clubs like Aston Villa bravely refusing to perform a Hitler salute when meeting the Jerries on their own heimat. The fact the Nazis had mandated that teams had to engage in such a sinister ritual of public ideological compliance prior to kick-off was always presented us to as being very telling. The overt politicization of sport, viewers were lectured, was a clear and present canary in the coal mine about the dawning of any totalitarian society like the Third Reich.

UK audiences don’t hear about such disturbing historical events quite so often whenever the same teams play one another anymore, though; possibly because viewers might then notice the players of today getting down on one knee in forced televised obeisance towards Black Lives Matter before kickoff too, and draw their own dissident conclusions. (See my previous rant on this here.)

One man only too keen to get down on his knees before BLM was the former England national team manager Gareth Southgate, a complete sell-out to the entire contemporary woke agenda, whose lamentable excesses I have catalogued previously here. Gareth has a new book out this week, not another ghostwritten ex-sportsman’s autobiography as usual, but a sort of self-help guide aimed at middle-management public sector wankers, called Dear England: Lessons in Leadership From a Fucking Lemming, except those final four words there are merely implicit, not actually printed on the front cover at all.

Southgate has never won a single trophy during his entire career as a soccer manager, and was most famous as a player for having missed a crucial penalty against Germany in the semi-finals of the 1996 European Championship tournament. But, these days, success is measured on other metrics than, er, actual success, and when it comes to what our rulers now truly deem important—i.e., DEI-related matters—Gareth is a latter-day Bill Shankly or Sir Alex Ferguson.

Extracts from his complete non-book, which comes with a series of handy bullet points for readers’ further easily digestible moral improvement at the end of each chapter, have been all over the newspapers this week, hymning such suspiciously generic supposed leadership qualities as “Time-Management”, “Creating a World-Class Culture”, “How To Have Difficult Conversations”, and “The Value of Being in the Same Room”. However did Napoleon, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great manage to conquer large portions of mainland Europe themselves without having read a copy?

How To Mount a Negro in Montenegro

In the very same sport sectioo—or politics section disguised as being “sport”, anyway—in my Saturday newspaper in which aspiring Arsenal FC manager Zohran Mamdani was quoted, there was yet more propaganda. The publication’s Chief Sports Writer, Owen Slot, extracted what he felt was the key example of Southgate demonstrating awesome leadership qualities during his time in charge of the team with which he never actually won anything besides the hearts and minds of morons.

It involved a now retired (probably on “mental health” grounds) black full-back called Danny Rose, who, just before the final whistle in a 5-1 England victory against Montenegro in 2019, foolishly got himself sent off the field of play for an unnecessary violent tackle on an opponent. In the dressing room afterwards, Gareth initially shouted at Rose for his ill-discipline. However, what Southgate didn’t realize at the time was that, during the game, Rose and other black England players had “been on the receiving end of appalling racial abuse.” Once his staff members informed him of this fact, he stood up and addressed the whole squad, beginning by issuing “a personal apology to Danny for the disgusting abuse he had been the victim of in the match.” Why? Was it Gareth himself who was making all the monkey noises?

The so-called manager then “apologized for my lack of understanding in the dressing room”, realizing that “as I spoke, I knew that ‘apologize and move on’ simply wasn’t going to cut it.” What did Gareth mean by this? That, stung into action by events—and subsequently morally re-educated by his own Maoist daughter—Southgate was no longer going to be content merely being an ordinary football manager, but to become an actively anti-racist football manager instead!

This was a great idea, because repeatedly coming out and making pious and tedious statements about homosexuals, black men, toxic masculinity, and the mentally ill is a far easier thing to succeed at than winning soccer tournaments, thus guaranteeing Southgate’s continued secure future employment with the English Football Association. Gareth was now busily “building a culture” for the English FA, not building a winning team for it, a trivial and outmoded aspiration which no longer seemed to matter.

Managing Expectations

For once, this proved to be a true tactical masterclass from Gareth, whose teams were generally even more boring to watch than he was boring to listen to. Praising Southgate for “the courage, the moral backbone, the emotional intelligence and the requisite art of communication” he had shown by acting thus, my newspaper’s Chief Sports Writer Owen Slot explained that:

In the book, Southgate doesn’t leave the racism issue at this apology to Rose. This incident leads straight into Southgate gripping the whole racism issue. He drives the discussion at the FA and with the team to a point where they know where they stand on racist abuse and how they wish to respond to it. I don’t think a few bullet points [at the end of each chapter] can equip us for that level of leadership.

What “level of leadership”? A black player gets sent off, complains he only did it because some total strangers in a footie stadium said nasty things about him, and then his supposed “leader” demonstrates “leadership” by bending over backwards to make excuses for him? That isn’t leadership, it is a prelude to racial slavery. Gareth should have told Danny to grow up and get on with it, and then dropped him from the team for clearly being far too gay to play.

By demonstrating such incredible “leadership” qualities here, and then having them eulogized all over the place in the British press, all Gareth Southgate is really doing is helping advance the ongoing subliminal mental reprogramming of the general UK population to think that, if you’re black, you can swan around doing whatever the hell you want, because racism, and that, if you’re white, it is your eternal ethical duty to let them. The end result will not be white men like Gareth being employed in any true leadership roles in the future; instead, they will be being led through the streets with a rope through their noses by their new masters like Danny Rose.

Also Spracht Garethustra

The same week as Southgate’s new book was released also saw another former English soccer player, Joey Barton, in the news. Barton was found guilty of “malicious communications” offenses, one of these supposed “malicious communications” being a comment he had posted online to the effect that a miserable-faced black Nigerian woman named Eni Aluko who used to play for the England women’s team was a crap soccer commentator, and only got on TV in the first place because of her holy skin color and her genitals. Aluko simulated a foul, cried to the police, and now Joey could potentially face a large fine and as long as two years in prison. [3].

The very day Joey got his guilty verdict, he reposted another tweet quoting his intellectual hero Friedrich Nietzsche, to the effect that, “It is the end of a people or a race once it becomes tolerant, grants equal rights, and no longer wishes to be the master.”

Just like Gareth Southgate, Joey Barton never won anything in his career as a football manager either. But, if the new, post-Southgate role of a football manager is now actually to provide the general public with Important Political Messages, not to secure any meaningful victories on the pitch, then I’d far prefer Barton to be managing all future England teams and shouting inspiring Nietzschean quotes at the nation via videolink from his prison cell.

Spinelessly coaching an entire nation to forfeit its very existence isn’t “leadership”, Gareth. It’s more like treason.

Notes

[1] The Times ‘Sport’ section, 8 November 2025; supposedly, the quote came from an interview Mamdani gave to the left-wing website Vox, but I can’t find it anywhere online.

[2] The Times ‘Sport’ section, 8 November 2025, p.8

[3] Unless you want to join Joey in chokey, please do not abuse Aluko in the comments section. She is a qualified solicitor and seems very litigious.