From the start of his career in football there was something different about Gareth Southgate. He arrived for his first day as an apprentice at Crystal Palace dressed smartly in his school uniform while all the other players were in casual clothing. He was articulate and came from a lower middle-class suburban family – his mother was a school “dinner lady” and his father had “a steady job with IBM” - rather than from a tough inner-city estate.

“I was the posh boy … too nice to make it,” he writes in his new book Dear England, which uses the experience of his eight years as England men’s football manager to offer lessons on leadership. “Dear England” is also the title of an essay about national identity Southgate published on the eve of Euro 2020 and an award-winning play about Southgate by James Graham.

Early in his time at Palace, the youth team coach, Alan Smith, pulled Southgate to one side and said: “Gareth, you’re a lovely bloke but if I were you, I’d think about becoming a travel agent.” He recounts how hurt he was by the comment, but it was also a “turning point” after which Southgate knew he needed “to exhibit some steel”. By the time he was 23, he was club captain, a young leader in a dressing room of mostly older “highly motivated misfits”. The manager that appointed him club captain was the same Alan Smith.

After he left Palace, Southgate captained Aston Villa and then Middlesborough. He also played 57 times for England as a central defender who moved well and passed elegantly. But his England playing career was defined by one harrowing moment: missing the decisive penalty in a shoot-out against Germany in the semi-final of Euro 96, during a summer when the St George’s flag became ubiquitous and the anthemic song “Football’s Coming Home” topped the charts.

As he walked up to take the kick that night under the floodlights at Wembley, Southgate kept thinking: “what if I miss?” In the dressing room after the game, he was “broken” and “inconsolable”. Over the next two decades, the “traumatic” and “life-changing” penalty failure would disrupt his sleep, and he would be introduced at public events as the “guy who missed that penalty”. A fall guy. A loser.

Southgate was not a loser. He had a distinguished playing career and the penalty miss he understands now helped him “build fortitude”. Yet when the Football Association asked him to apply for the England manager’s job in 2015 (he was then coach of the under-21s) he declined. He was fearful and assumed the worst. “Highly skilled managers – Graham Taylor, Glenn Hoddle, Kevin Keegan - had endured awful periods of abuse.” But no sooner had Sam Allardyce accepted the job, then Southgate had regrets. “Shouldn’t I have been bolder? Was I still allowing myself to be held back by an event that had happened twenty years earlier.”

When a second chance came much sooner than expected – Big Sam was humiliated in a tabloid sting and resigned after one game – Southgate accepted the challenge, initially on a four-game trial in a “caretaker” role. He was widely considered by fans to be a safe, uninspiring choice but turned out to be more than a football coach. For Southgate wanted nothing less than to remake the entire culture of the national team.

He had reflected on something Arsene Wenger, the great Arsenal manager, once said to him: “We should manage as if we are going to be here for ever in the realisation that we could be gone tomorrow.”

Southgate accepted he might be gone tomorrow but while he was here, he would develop a long-term strategic plan and have the courage to implement it. He read and consulted widely, visiting the Royal Ballet, Sandhurst and Google’s European HQ as he sought inspiration. He was interested in marginal gains, in “doing the important things better”, and regularly met Dave Brailsford, formerly performance director of British Cycling, as well as Billy Beane, a pioneer of statistical performance analysis whose story is told in Michael Lewis’s “Moneyball”.

Southgate wanted England’s approach to selection and tactics to be “data-informed” but not “data-driven”. He had a “constant desire to improve”. He took the players for commando training at a military camp in Devon. He hired Owen Eastwood, a performance coach, who specialised in the “area of belonging”. Dr Pippa Grange, “head of people and team development” at the FA (and a leading character in Graham’s play), worked with Southgate on a blueprint for “a new culture”. Media and social media strategies were developed. A set-piece coach was hired.

Why is England so dear to Southgate? He attempted to explain why in his essay “Dear England”, styled as an open letter to fans, in which he “set out some ideas” about belonging and national unity, “from the heart, as a proud Englishman”. It was a fascinating political document. Here was a football coach no less grappling with some of the defining complexities of our time - national identity, social cohesion, the mental health of young men, patriotism and its absence – and asking fundamental questions about what makes diverse multicultural secular democracies cohere.

Southgate is both a traditionalist – one of his role models is his maternal grandfather, a Second World War veteran – but also an innovator. What matters to him are virtue ethics: integrity, courage, empathy, resilience. “What you ‘know’ as a leader,” he writes, “gives you the best possible chance to make the right decisions.”

What does Southgate know? Why did he succeed as England manager – reaching two Euros finals, a World Cup semi-final and quarter-final – when those before him who seemed more experienced and better qualified had failed, crushed by the expectation of the job?

Southgate’s England never played with great style or flair but were always resilient, pragmatic, and hard to beat. Most importantly, he changed the culture. The early years of his tenure were characterised by intense polarisation in the country – Corbynism, the Brexit wars. He offered a better, more communitarian vision of England, his world view a kind of fusion of Blue Labour and one nation Toryism.

During the 2018 Russia World Cup, which coincided with a long heatwave in England, the writer Alex Niven coined the term “Southgateism” to characterise the mood of celebration that prevailed during those heady weeks. It did not last. But this book reminds us why Southgate and Southgateism mattered. As a handbook on good leadership – complete with end-of-chapter summaries as if in preparation for future PowerPoint presentations – it is thoughtful, though unremarkable. What is remarkable, however, is the insight it offers into Southgate’s psychology and motivation: what sustained him through the darkest times and ultimately enabled him to become an exemplary leader.

“What if I miss?” Southgate asked himself all those years ago as he stepped up to take the penalty. He missed that night - but in the years that followed, by confronting his own fear of failure and challenging the culture of entitlement surrounding the England team, he proved that true glory does not depend on victory alone.