Gareth Southgate has always been a man interested in life outside the football circus. When he played for England, I remember chatting to him at the carousel at Fiumicino airport before a vital France 1998 qualifier in Rome. As he waited for his bag (there’s always baggage with England), Southgate reflected on what he would see on this visit to the Eternal City. Sistine Chapel? Colosseum? La Dolce Vita? No chance. His itinerary was airport, hotel, training ground, hotel, stadium, airport; basically the External City. Southgate accepted his professional lot and looked forward to the day he could return and explore.
He certainly made up for it when he moved to punditry. Covering England and Champions League matches with ITV, Southgate organised outings to see Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ before an AC Milan game, to the Prado before a Real Madrid match and to the Warsaw Rising museum when giving expert, occasionally critical, analysis of England at Euro 2012 in Poland. As manager, Southgate is a prisoner to the schedule. Every ounce of energy and second of time is dedicated to reaching Berlin for the final on 14 July. So he cannot see the extraordinary world around him. Only 500 yards from England’s training pitch is an exquisite 900-year-old church. Ten miles away in Weimar is one of the few remaining Bauhaus buildings. A few miles west of that lies Buchenwald concentration camp. If anything puts the strains and squabbles of a sports event into perspective, a visit here does.
The English are quite a sight at tournaments. In a Frankfurt hotel before the Denmark game, I saw a waistcoated Southgate lookalike, as friendly as the real one, pretending to lay out his tactics on a pool table and being approached by two young women in England crop tops who turned out to be OnlyFans ‘models’.
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