Euro 2024: Gareth Southgate and his fateful game against Spain

It was just before midnight on June 26, 1996, when Gareth Southgate positioned the ball at the penalty spot at Wembley Stadium. He took nine steps back and took a run-up. With the inside of his right foot, he aimed flat at the left corner of the goal. But the shot was strangely weak and inaccurate. Germany’s goalkeeper Andreas Köpke was down in time and had no trouble parrying. Southgate stared blankly at the goal for a moment, then slowly walked back to the center circle.

A missed shot. A shot that will change a whole life.

As a result, Germany won the penalty shootout in the semi-finals of the 1996 European Championship, then became European champions in England. The whole world saw Oliver Bierhoff storming across the pitch after his “golden goal” in the final, tearing his shirt off his body in celebration. The English were just spectators in their own country, watching the happiness of others.

Penalty 1996: Gareth Southgate’s big guilt

And all this is only because of his fault, his great fault.

“I failed under pressure. Everyone suffered because of it,” said Gareth Southgate years later. “I carry a personal pain within me that will probably never go away.”

The demons of the past. Southgate carries them with him, just as the whole of England carries them with him, all the defeats, injuries, humiliations over the decades. The last and only major title won by the proud football nation, which in its own opinion gave the world the fascinating game, was in 1966.

It was half an eternity ago, a triumph still in black and white. The third goal at Wembley, Bobby Moore, Bobby Charlton, Geoff Hurst, Martin Peters and all the others, on a lap of honour under the gracious gaze of the Queen. In extra time, the sky over London had opened up, the “Coupe Jules Rimet” shone golden, the sun shone over the lush green that late afternoon, shone over football England as it would never shine again, for almost six decades.

After that, she only ever beamed about other people, not about England, not about Gareth Southgate – despite or perhaps because of the 57 international matches he himself played in the jersey of the “Three Lions”. On the island, they only talk about the “years of hurt”. And perhaps that is precisely why they have a love-hate relationship with this man who has now led their national team to the final of the European Championship as head coach. Southgate, the walking collective trauma, national pain made human.

He has been head coach since autumn 2016. He has brought the English national team back to the big stages of world football. With him, England has reached the semi-finals of three out of four major tournaments since the 2018 World Cup, and even the final twice. That is a record that the DFB can only dream of. But on the island, people still resent him for bringing on players for the penalty shootout in the 2021 European Championship final against Italy in their own country, who then failed. There is also discontent with the fact that he lets his world-star collective, with players like Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane, play a rather brittle defensive style of football – and does not conjure up gala performances on the pitch with sunny ease like the Spaniards do.

Euro 2024: England’s football under Southgate is cautious and sceptical

In fact, Southgate prefers a football of scepticism, of waiting and avoiding mistakes. It is the football of a person who does not feel that life could be good to him. Rather, he believes that happiness must be wrung out of life with caution and calculation. He gave the eternal penalty losers from the island a “task force” for penalty shootouts, scientific analyses were evaluated and experts were consulted. With success: England have won three of the last four penalty shootouts.

Southgate has revamped the entire youth development system. He has hired mental trainers, yoga and breathing experts. He has tried to convey to football England that the boastful claims of their own do not match what they have missed out on in terms of tactical development and talent promotion over the years. These are all things that you don’t like to hear in an English pub, where after the third ale at the latest, the feeling prevails that other nations are unduly interfering because they also want to play in a game that actually belongs to the English.

After the depressing 0-0 draw with Slovenia in the group stage, England’s supporters threw beer mugs at him. Before the semi-final against the Netherlands in Dortmund, they celebrated him – in the form of a German riot policeman who had the misfortune (or luck?) to look remarkably like Southgate.

Now the final against the football world power Spain, in Berlin. All the wounds of the past can be healed today, with this one game. All the demons can be defeated, everything that torments him. “I want to win so badly that it hurts,” said Gareth Southgate before this game.

The man who, with his missed shot, ensured that Germany won the European Championship in England in 1996 is coming back as coach – and can win the title for England in Germany. He embodies the hope of redemption. And yet he is always walking around like a ghost of the past.

Before the tournament, he showed his players the old pictures of the 1966 World Cup victory. And reminded them of what it was really like back then. A weak preliminary round, a 0:0 draw against Uruguay, lackluster victories against Mexico and France. Narrow, hard-earned victories against Argentina and Portugal. And what anger there was because head coach Alf Ramsey left the island’s most successful goalscorer, Jimmy Greaves, on the bench after the preliminary round. Ramsey preferred to rely on Hurst. He scored three goals in the final. Ramsey also did not use traditional wingers. This caused horror. In the end, everyone raved about the “Wingless Wonder” – the miracle without wings – and Ramsey was knighted as “Sir”. A bronze statue with his head in the catacombs of Wembley today commemorates the great man.

Sven-Göran Eriksen turns to Gareth Southgate

On Friday, former England national coach Sven-Göran Eriksen published a letter in the “Telegraph”. Eriksen is 76 years old and terminally ill with pancreatic cancer. “You hear so much about 1966 and Sir Alf Ramsey’s team. You know how much is expected of you to end all those years of pain,” Eriksen writes. “Do it, Gareth. Do what none of us could do.”

If Southgate does it tonight, England will be redeemed – and so will he. It’s quite possible that they will then cast his head in bronze too. And place it right next to Ramsey’s. Be pelted with beer mugs – and then immortalized in Wembley, the holy of holies of English football. It can’t get any better than that. More doesn’t fit into a football life.

All of this would be material for a great novel. Gareth Southgate, the man who lacks the lightness of being. Who, standing behind the curtain, always has to watch others in their sunny happiness. Locked up in himself, knowing about his own, quiet wealth that he carries within himself. And yet unhappy about the limitations of his own existence. Which he can perhaps finally burst open, on this one evening. Today. Now. In the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Or never again.

It’s a pity that Thomas Mann is no longer alive.