"Dear England" takes a sport I have little interest in and turns it into a compelling meditation on a nation's inability to support their heroes in the face of failure.

I find it very difficult to care about football. Although I grew up in a household head-over-heels for our hometown heroes - up the Saints - it has never been a sport that enticed or gripped me.

Despite this, and despite everything else going on in the world at the time, the time of the UEFA Euro 2020 finals in the summer of 2021 had me glued to my screen. For a brief moment, I cared about the outcome of a game of football.

“Dear England” mythologises and satirises the rise of the national English football manager, Gareth Southgate (David Sturzaker) - or “just Gareth”. He is the latest in a long line of former bosses, in a position as temperamental as… well, prime minister in the same era. Brought in initially as a temporary position holder, Gareth’s ‘revolutionary’ way of looking at the sport (but mostly his match wins) secured his permanent appointment, and he set about making changes at an institutional level — recontextualising how the players thought about themselves, each other, and the country. 

Much of the drama, aside from whether the English team wins or loses, stems from the players' and management’s reactions to this “touchy-feely” management style, and from the introduction of Dr Pippa Grange (Samantha Womack). Her psychological practices gnaw at the heads of the team and of Gareth himself, regardless of whether he wants to admit it or not.

Gareth sets up a ‘story’ within the play - a beginning, middle, and end of the next three major tournaments across five years, with the goal being to win the third, to allow England to be proud of their country and team again. Giving football a narrative beyond the immediacy of whether a team wins or loses, and making you care about the players and team, is a surefire way for an effective narrative. 

You become immediately lost in the camaraderie of the group, and quickly forget that you are, in essence, watching grown men run around a stage and pretend to take penalties. An intrinsically goofy concept.

The performances all feel either naturalistic or bombastic, depending on effectiveness. Sturzaker’s imitation of Gareth is commendable and delivers the titular Dear England letter with gravitas for a man not known for inherent charisma or extroversion. Womack is a grounding presence for the boisterous footballers, and a sequence in which she helps a player talk to his recently passed-on grandmother was a touching highlight. But it is the England team themselves who serve as a highlight; a cacophony of likeable archetypes and bantering boys, who break down the expected tribalism to become a cohesive whole. They provide much of the comedy, which, while it was leaned into too much, taking away from the successes of the previous drama, also form this intense brotherhood that centres the piece.

My one issue is that, for a sports drama, you expect the team to end in a certain way. It isn’t a spoiler to say that there’s no Tarantino-esque rewriting of history here, and they still end up losing the World Cup in Qatar. It means that there’s an inherent lack of catharsis from how things end off, and while Gareth’s departure is tinged with an attempt at recognising his accomplishments, it rings hollow. “Dear England” attempts to demonstrate that it's okay to lose, but this is another example that maybe, if we had won, it might have made a better story…

What is apparent, though, and was my biggest fear for the whole piece, was that if you take a sport I have no interest in and pile it high with likeable characters, a compelling narrative, and a throughline touching on the state of the nation, then maybe… just maybe… I could start to care about football.

Dear England remains at Mayflower Theatre until 17th January, and you can buy tickets here: https://www.mayflower.org.uk/whats-on/dear-england-2026/