Why Gareth Southgate can take on Andrew Tate – with the help of a ‘dad army’

The morning after Netflix’s Adolescence was first screened, I got a message on WhatsApp from my daughter. “Just seen that Steven Graham thing,” it read of the drama in which Graham excels as the father of a teenage boy charged with murder. “Am now in a bit of a panic about Bobby.” The mother of an 18-month-old, she shares the anxieties of all new parents. A blank canvas, anything could happen to her boy. He could turn into anyone. And watching Adolescence, with the young debutant Owen Cooper’s astonishing portrayal of a sweet-faced 13-year-old charged with the brutal murder of a girl who snubbed him, was to witness the most horrible prediction of all.

This is what great art does: it articulates common neuroses and projects them back at its audience with discomfiting immediacy. And this screenplay could not be more pertinent, addressing as it does the alarm of the older generation about the forces at work on their children, the pressing concern about what they are watching on their smartphones in the privacy of their bedrooms and the damage it will inflict on their transition into adulthood.

For teenage girls it is a diet of impossible-to-match beauty influencers, creating a generation of the fearful and unconvinced. For boys, it is a barrage of pornography and misogyny, turning them into emotionally repressed conduits for toxic masculinity.

But even as the all too plausible examination of every parent’s worst nightmare plays out, on television right now there is an alternative view. Sir Gareth Southgate’s delivery of the BBC’s 46th Richard Dimbleby lecture offers an antidote to this sinking pessimism.

Speaking without notes for 45 minutes he addresses much of the issues that Adolescence co-writer Joe Thorne so brilliantly explores: what does the future hold for a generation of boys embroiled in tech? He acknowledges that this is a world he, like all of us parents, has little understanding or connection with. In his speech, he also references a report that states that boys are more likely to own a smartphone than to live with their father.

However, he uses his experience of building a culture of mutual support, tolerance and watching each others’ backs to seek solutions to such issues. While he recognises the problem seems insurmountable, his prescription is simple. Rather than sneering and snarling, convincing ourselves that the world is going to the dogs, older men need to show young men an alternative path. One of empathy and sympathy, courage and resilience. One in which, moreover, character is more important than status.

The poison of the Andrew Tate worldview, in which so many young men are indoctrinated, is not simply the misogynistic assumption that women are to blame for all men’s problems. It is also that male success can only be quantified in material terms, that real men have 10 Ferraris.

Southgate suggests that dads and granddads, mentors and youth leaders can only counter such negativity by challenging the next generation. Not in order to see them fail, but to help them learn from setbacks and to develop the resilience which will fuel proper growth. Most of all, there is a need, he adds, to ensure that young men are not facing their struggles alone. That they have someone sympathetic and empathetic to turn to. “The culture we create today will shape the kind of men we inherit tomorrow,” he concludes.

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For those with longer memories, there is an irony here in a football figure delivering moral and societal advice from the most establishment of platforms. Such a person would certainly not have been considered a legitimate speaker back in 1985. Just over 40 years to the day that he was addressing his distinguished audience, a riot at an FA Cup match between Luton Town and Millwall presaged one of the darkest times in the history of the game, one which reached a nadir when 39 spectators were crushed to death at the European Cup final at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels months later.

Back then, Margaret Thatcher reckoned football was exercising a malignant force on wider society, and that it was at fault for Britain’s faltering standing on the world stage. For her, football hooliganism was the biggest internal threat the country faced. Like Teddy Boys, mods and rockers, television, drugs, hooliganism fuelled the moral panic of masculinity of that era.

Perhaps encouragingly given our own current fear, it is from a man forged in football that we now seek advice. Not that Southgate for a moment suggests that simply getting every boy in the land to kick a ball will somehow solve all our ills. Indeed, there is a sequence in Adolescence that neatly skewers any such assumption. In it, Cooper’s character recalls going along, at his dad’s insistence, to play in a youth game. Uninterested and unathletic, the boy recalls at one point in the match seeing his father wince at his obvious incompetence. In a later frame, Graham recalls the same incident. He does remember squirming. But rather it is embarrassment at his own wilful exposure of his son to such humiliation. The shame was entirely both ways.

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Those of us who have stood on the touchline watching our boys engage in the sport will know precisely that feeling. For 10 years I coached my youngest son’s junior team, and some of the things I saw still make me weep in reminiscence. Not least the time we were at a summer tournament, billed as a fun family outing, when the father of a lad on the team we were playing berated his son so much for giving away a penalty, the boy ran off the pitch and climbed a nearby tree where he sat for the rest of the afternoon. His father’s reaction? Shouting in his direction: “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” The boy, incidentally, was nine years old.

But what Southgate suggests, much like the cricketer did in the magnificent TV series Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, is that sport, along with drama, music, the Boy Scouts – any outside interest – is just one of the avenues that can provide an environment for mutual support, team development and learning. This is the kind of empathetic male mentoring that can ultimately change lives and give boys and men true confidence.

The thing is, none of us really knows how best to do this stuff. As Southgate points out, his parents were much softer on him than their parents had been on them. In turn, he was much softer on his children than his parents were on him. He imagines his children will be much gentler on their children than he was. Where that gets us, he does not know.

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But what he is arguing for, what he thinks will make the difference is for adults to spend time gently encouraging youngsters away from the solitude of smartphone life and into the communality of wider society. Anything that offers a challenge and builds character, anything where the fear of failure – whether that is being snubbed by a girl or an employer – can be overcome. Anything where shame can be made irrelevant.

It can be done, he says. Far from being already lost, the younger generation are a brilliant curious bunch, forever keen to find out what they can learn from those who have gone before. It is now up to fathers, uncles, older brothers and friends to be present enough to teach them.

There will be those who argue that Southgate is in no position to offer advice about negotiating success, given that he twice, as England manager, fell at the last hurdle. But that is exactly his point. In everything, even football, in which victory is ultimately defined by the lifting of a trophy, there are incidental successes along the way which are just as valuable as the procurement of silverware. Perhaps more so.

In charge of England, what he oversaw was a group of men who worked together, strove together, laughed together and, yes, cried together. Like Flintoff, it is in the creation of that positive collective spirit and bond among “brothers” that he reckons lies the best remedy for the malevolent influence of Tate. And it is up to all of us older blokes to help ensure it happens.