You may remember the time Gareth Southgate took the England team to train with the Royal Marines back in 2017. Many now view it as a key moment, winning hearts and minds of players previously burdened by England’s past, enabling them to reach semi-finals and finals of major competitions for the first time in a generation.
However, Raheem Sterling didn’t see it that way when he turned up to England’s end-of-season training at St George’s Park in June 2017, only for the Royal Marines to burst in and tell him to surrender his phone and get on a bus to the commando training centre at Lympstone.
“To be fair, at first I was not interested,” said Sterling. “I was thinking: ‘Oh my goodness gracious me!’ In my head, I was: ‘No! No!’ Because you just know what the marines is! I’ve gone off to play football, come to camp with no knowledge [of what lay ahead] and all of a sudden you’re getting this marines thing and you’re thinking: ‘Nah, not today.’”
And it was a little like being arrested. Players could make one call to loved ones to say they wouldn’t be in contact for 48 hours before handing in phones. The disruptive dislocation was intentional: the original plan was to fly there by helicopter but the Football Association couldn’t get permission.
Stripped of tracksuits on arrival, players were issued military fatigues, 21kg backpacks, boots and bivvy bags, and bundled on to trucks to begin a yomp across the Devon hills followed by a night under the stars, a 5am start and a requirement to complete the marines’ notorious obstacle course, which famously broke HRH the Duke of Edinburgh when the then Prince Edward dropped out of training in 1987. The sheep dip, where you’re submerged in water and dragged through a tunnel, is the most traumatic experience for most. Safe to say, not everyone was onside with playing soldiers in the run-up to a World Cup qualifier. “Intellectually shallow,” wrote one critic.
But Sterling loved it. “They made everything fun but at the same time there was structure, teamwork and you kind of understood throughout the sessions what we were doing there,” he said. “It was like: ‘That’s my brother next to me, that’s my other brother next to me.’ We’d have good fun and laugh when we were camping or chilling on the down time.
“And then, when it was go time, there was teamwork and you understood how that associates with football. A lot of players have our own agendas and that was a massive part in making everyone understand we’re all in this together first and foremost and the reason is to come away with a World Cup or a major trophy. I felt like it was another stepping stone that brought everyone closer together.”
Say what you like about Gareth Southgate – “Release the handbrake!”, “Tactically inept!”, “Too woke!”, “Terrible cardigan!” – it’s impossible to deny he has transformed the culture of the England national team in his almost eight years in charge. That much has been clear writing the new book in which Sterling speaks, Dear England: The Real Story of the Three Lions Rebirth, which is published next week.
Sterling is an intriguing Southgate advocate. The manager once made him sit out a game after a bust-up with Joe Gomez and many predicted Southgate would lose the trust of his star player. Sterling hasn’t been in the squad since Qatar 2022, so when my co-author Jonathan Northcroft and I approached him, we were perhaps anticipating a reluctance to extol the Southgate era.
But we also knew that Sterling had been the one who had led the team in meetings, embracing more than anyone the culture Southgate created, where players could speak up and where storytelling, vulnerability and psychology were fused with hard-nosed analytics to navigate tournaments better.
“I feel like in football what I’d learned before, everything just came from what the coaches told us,” said Sterling. “This was the first time [we had] coaches sharing stuff and asking for our thoughts on things and how we see things. I just started to express myself.” That’s quite the testimony from a player who had just started being coached by Pep Guardiola.
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Whatever happens in Germany this summer – and England’s preparations kick off with a friendly against Bosnia and Herzegovina at St James’ Park on Monday – England are a national team reborn. That’s not to say they will win. They could even limp out at an early stage, though that seems unlikely with Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden and Harry Kane in your team.
But Southgate, with his touchy-feely footballer-whisperer style of management, has reached parts Sven-Göran Eriksson and Fabio Capello never could. “He just shook it up really and did things that made you feel more relaxed when you were on camp,” said Sterling. “Instead of just sitting in the dining hall and having food, we were having barbecues outside. Loads of things that meant you weren’t just training and going to your room. Getting to know each other better, getting to know the staff better, getting to know everyone, their personalities better … I do think it was something massive.”
England had previously tortured themselves over why their teams were considerably less than the sum of their parts. In 2018, Southgate turned that maxim on its head and made them much more, defying expectations to reach a World Cup semi-final.
His challenge now is to show he can repeat the trick when he has much better players than then. It is fair to say that his tactical decisions in that World Cup semi-final against Croatia and against Italy in the Euro 2020 final may mean he has missed his best opportunities to win England their first trophy since 1966. But if Sterling, who has no particular reason to praise Southgate right now, is saying this manager completely changed the way England players feel about their experience of representing the national team and hence improved their output, then it’s hard to argue.
And maybe the Royal Marines may take a small measure of the credit as well.