Is Gareth Southgate England’s Most Successful Ever Manager?

They say that football is a results-based business, but ultimately the quality of said results is often a subjective, rather than objective, matter.

That helps to explain why Gareth Southgate was such a Marmite figure in his time as England head coach: his results, which included two European Championship finals and a World Cup semi-final, are considered to be either excellent or a mild disappointment, depending on which side of the fence you sat.

It was interesting that when Southgate announced his resignation from the England job in July, there was a tangible outpouring of emotion – even grief – from some of the players that worked with him.

Jude Bellingham described Southgate as an ‘unbelievable human being’, while Declan Rice declared that ‘it’s been a pleasure to play for England under your guidance.’

There’s no doubt that, within the England camp, Southgate was revered. Words like ‘identity’ and ‘togetherness’ get bandied around willy-nilly in sport, but there’s no doubt that the now former Three Lions boss helped to cultivate an outstanding team spirit between a group of people who are, most Saturdays, sworn enemies in the Premier League.

Perhaps that’s ultimately the pinnacle of an international manager’s career if they don’t win trophies: that ability to leave a national team in a better place than they found it. Who knows, perhaps the successor will enjoy the ultimate fruit of the legacy that Southgate has left behind.

As for some fans and those in media circles, it was Southgate’s conservative style of play that ultimately saw them fail to warm to him, as well as a failure to win a major trophy with an ultra-talented squad of players. For all the positives of his tenure, if Bellingham hadn’t equalised with mere seconds to play against Slovakia in the last 16 at EURO 2024, Southgate might have been pushed before he could walk.

But some will argue that Southgate is England’s most successful manager ever, based upon his team’s performances in major tournaments. After all, football is a results based business….

Going Deep

Southgate delivered a consistency as England manager never seen before in terms of major tournament progress.

A quarter-final, semi-final and two finals in four attempts is an extraordinary record – far outstripping the CV of any other England boss:

Major Tournament Record of England Managers

Data above relates to games played rather than the stage of elimination.

No other England manager has taken the country to two major finals, and none other has three or more appearances in semi-finals to their name either. Only Sir Alf Ramsey, with four quarter-finals (two were the final qualification stage), a semi and a final, gets anywhere close to the record of Southgate.

And those bemoaning the Southgate era should have been careful what they wished for: Don Revie, a club management powerhouse with Leeds United, couldn’t guide England to a single major tournament appearance, and neither could Steve McClaren!

Silver(ware) Lining

If you were basing your list of the best ever England manager on trophies won, there can only be one candidate.

Sir Alf Ramsey guided the Three Lions to their sole major tournament trophy, winning the 1966 World Cup on home soil. He was a manager of some repute before taking on the England job, winning the First Division (the equivalent of the Premier League) with Ipswich Town in 1961/62.

Ramsey led England to World Cup glory in ’66, took them to the bronze medal of the European Championships in 1968, and who knows what might have been at the World Cup in 1970 – England actually led West Germany 2-0 with 25 minutes to play in the quarter-finals, before succumbing 2-3 after extra time.

Four years later, Ramsey’s tenure ended in bitter recriminations when England failed to qualify for World Cup 1974, but he will forever be remembered as the country’s first – and so far only – World Cup winning manager.

Ramsey actually isn’t the only England manager to win a trophy – although to describe the others as any more than exhibition tournaments would be a gross overstatement.

The Rous Cup celebrated the career of Sir Stanley Rous, a notable administrator in English football who pushed forward the FA and served as a president of FIFA. The Rous Cup acted as a replacement for the British Home Championship, seeing England take on Scotland and, in later years, another team invited from South America.

England won the Rous Cup in three of its five editions, with Bobby Robson the manager at the helm for each of those trophy lifts.

In 1997, France hosted an international tournament that acted as a warm-up for the World Cup a year later. The Tournoi de France pitted England against the French, Italy and Brazil, and while the competition would become famous for Roberto Carlos’ incredible ‘banana’ free kick, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Glenn Hoddle’s England lifted the trophy after defeating Italy and hosts France.

On this day 1997 Roberto Carlos did this against France at Tournoi de Francepic.twitter.com/HmJq2cd5Ho

— Classic Football Shirts (@classicshirts) June 3, 2019

England also won a tournament under Sven Goran-Eriksson in 2004, although it was so low-key you can be forgiven for not remembering it.

As a warm up to EURO 2004, England’s ‘golden generation’ – Owen, Rooney, Lampard, Gerrard, Scholes, Beckham etc – took part in the FA Summer Tournament, a mini competition designed to put the players through their paces ahead of the major.

The Football Association invited Iceland and Japan, for reasons unknown, to compete against England in a round robin group, and it was the Three Lions who came out on top – they thrashed Iceland 6-1, which meant they ran out as champions on goal difference having drawn with Japan.

It’s long been felt that Sir Alf Ramsey is the only England manager to win a trophy. But Robson, Hoddle and Eriksson also got their hands on some silverware – albeit at a much lower and less grandiose level.

The Win’s the Thing

While Ramsey is England’s only manager to have lifted a major trophy, how did he stack up in a metric that some would consider to be the main arbiter of success for a head coach – win percentage?

Disregarding Sam Allardyce, who won his sole game in charge as England manager before his unceremonious departure, here’s a look at the winning-most bosses in Three Lions history:

Based upon the pure numbers alone, you might think that Fabio Capello is the most successful manager in England’s history. However, as always, context is key.

The Italian only managed England in one major tournament, with their exit in the last 16 at the World Cup in 2010 considered to be a bitter disappointment. Otherwise, Capello oversaw qualification games and meaningless friendlies against some of the minnows of international football – padding out his win record accordingly.

There’s also the context of the quality of player that each manager had to work with. Ron Greenwood, for example, took the helm between 1977 and 1982 – a time that perhaps wouldn’t have been considered vintage for English football. The same could be said for Bobby Robson during his tenure in the 1980s and into the 1990 World Cup.

On the other hand, Eriksson and McClaren got to work with a set of players that has been described as England’s golden generation – the fact that they never went beyond the quarter-final of a major tournament is perhaps reflective of the head coach’s inability to get the best out of those players.

Maybe the same accusation could be levelled at Southgate, whose Euros squad in 2024 (and those preceding it at big tournaments) included a handful of Premier League champions, the PFA Player of the Year, the Bundesliga’s top goalscorer and one of the favourites for the Ballon d’Or.

When you consider it through that prism, maybe reaching the final in Germany was the bare minimum expectation for that England squad….

There are drawbacks to using the raw win percentage data as a measure of success, however, so maybe a better guide is actually the same win % metric but in major tournaments only….

On the Big Stage

Ultimately, it’s how England perform in the World Cup and the European Championship that is remembered the most – does anyone truly recall the successes of the Rous Cup and Tournoi de France?

In that sense, perhaps we get a better understanding of just how good a job Gareth Southgate did for England….

It’s another measure of success in which Sir Alf Ramsey comes out on top, and like Southgate he managed England at four different major tournaments – confirming that he had the quality of results to go with the quantity.

But Southgate deserves a huge amount of respect for becoming only the second England manager in history to win more than 50% of his games in charge at major tournaments.

Some of his detractors will point to the ‘easy’ draws that England enjoyed at the Euros in 2020 and 2024, and it would certainly be true to say that they were gifted success in the rescheduled 2020 edition on a plate after a number of their key games were moved to Wembley Stadium due to the health crisis.

But, even so, Ramsey and Southgate are clear of the rest when it comes to major tournament win percentage, and they – alongside Robson in 1990 – remain as the only managers to have taken England beyond the quarter-finals at the World Cup.

The Long Game

One of the pressures of being England manager is that you know that a poor run of results is likely to see you getting the chop: the Three Lions faithful certainly don’t suffer fools in that regard, while media pile-ons – who can forget the tabloids’ ‘turnip’ front pages about Graham Taylor – also accelerate a head coach’s exit.

In that sense, perhaps an England manager’s longevity can be considered a marker of their success. The longer a manager lasts without being sacked, or carolled into walking away from a job, the more accepted they have been.

Only seven England managers have survived beyond the 50-game mark, while only three – Southgate (102), Ramsey (113) and Winterbottom (139) – made it to 100+ games as head coach.

The success of Ramsey and Southgate ultimately kept them in the job for so long, while Winterbottom’s circumstances were rather more unique. He was originally appointed as ‘national director of coaching’, but in 1946 that man Stanley Rous – you remember him – essentially upgraded Winterbottom’s role to manager.

He had no previous experience as a football manager, but Winterbottom – in an era when sackings were far less prominent than they are today – nevertheless he served as England boss for some 16 years, guiding the Three Lions through four World Cups and reaching the quarter-final stage on two occasions.

Boring, Boring England

Winterbottom can also lay claim to another accolade: England scored more goals per game, on average, under his leadership than any other manager.

That being said, this was an era of high scoring games – most managers deployed a variation of a 3-2-5 formation that would become known as the ‘W-M’. Unsurprisingly, this led to games where attack dominated defence….and large quantities of goals were scored as a consequence.

Critics of Southgate often pointed to his conservative approach as one reason that his England tenure failed, but is such an argument actually born out of fact?

Here’s a look at the average goals scored per game under each serving England manager:

As you can see, only three managers in England’s history have averaged more than two goals per game while in charge – Winterbottom, Capello and Southgate.

So where you hear accusations of Southgate’s side being boring, you can quickly dismiss them as nonsense. Of course, there are opportunities to rack up big scores against minnows in friendlies and qualifiers, but even so this is an average – a return of 2.1 goals scored per game sees Southgate’s era as one of the most adventurous in England’s history.

This dataset also reveals the cult of personality in football management. Southgate is a pretty laconic and stoic individual – not the life and soul of the party, you’d imagine. And yet his team averaged far more goals per game than more cosmopolitan sorts like Terry Venables and Kevin Keegan….revealing that our perception of the manager as a person can perhaps taint our view of their football stylings.

Some might argue that the increased number of games played against weaker opposition on the international football calendar would contribute to the modern-day success of a manager.

Well, here’s a look at the average number of goals scored per England team in major tournaments (World Cups and European Championships) only:

Only one England manager – Glenn Hoddle – saw his team average more goals per game in major tournaments than Southgate’s side.

It’s interesting that the paralysis on the big stage set in for one of England’s most swashbuckling managers in Walter Winterbottom – his team averaged 2.8 goals per game in all competitions, but just 1.4 in the major tournaments.