Gareth Southgate has proved that quiet competence can lift a nation – it’s a lesson that goes far beyond sport | Jonathan Freedland

The England football manager was once derided as woke' and soft'. But he has succeeded where his predecessors failed

It's just a game, right? Wrong. You don't have to be on nodding terms with, let alone a fan of, the beautiful game to see that Sunday's final of the European Championship - and the fact that England are in it - has a significance that goes beyond sport. It has implications for all the things that usually preoccupy us on these pages: politics, culture wars, race, masculinity, identity and our national story - and, unusually, most of those implications are good.

We can dispense swiftly with the most obvious. Keir Starmer likes to say his favourite Labour leader is Harold Wilson, the man who was in Downing Street the last (and only) time England's men won a major international football tournament. Wilson milked that 1966 success the same way he capitalised on Beatlemania, and who could blame him? Success in Berlin on Sunday would give a feelgood boost to the country and be one more bit of luck for a new prime minister who, in recent weeks at least, seems to have been gifted with a crateload of magic lamps and a full squad of genies.