‘Notes slid under doors’: Southgate reveals England’s Traitors obsession

Sir Gareth Southgate has revealed the secret key to the strong bond forged by his England team: they spent their downtime playing The Traitors.

As the nation waits to see whether Joe Marler and company can catch the duplicitous Alan Carr and Cat Burns in the final of Celebrity Traitors , Southgate has said his squad would consistently organise their own version of the game at tournaments and claimed it was among the most effective team-building exercises during his eight years in charge of the national side.

Writing in his memoir, Dear England, which is published on Thursday, Southgate says the craze for playing Werewolf – the “social deduction” game which helped to inspire The Traitors – began at the Qatar World Cup in 2022, with the squad player Conor Coady introducing the game to his teammates.

“Thanks to Conor Coady, we also had ‘Traitors’ to play – our version of the popular TV game,” Southgate writes, with the enthusiasm so high that celebrity visitors also took part.

“All of the players were involved, taking the role of either ‘traitor’ or ‘faithful’, and all spending their downtime engaging in the deception, trying to eliminate their opponents or remain undetected. Even Robbie Williams joined in.

“Conor’s innovation was so popular, in fact, that in future tournaments, such as Euro 24, the wider staff started playing too,” Southgate writes. “Some colleagues took the game incredibly seriously, with notes being slid under people’s doors at night and Marc Guéhi, the son of a minister, anguishing about having to lie if he was made a traitor!

It was fantastic fun and more effective as a team-bonding exercise than anything we could have formally designed.”

Southgate’s attention to detail, his willingness to leave no stone unturned in hunting for improvements in his team’s performance, is one of the consistent threads in the book.

He unpacks at length, for example, the analysis that led to England changing the way they approached penalty shootouts: from managing the time between final whistle and first kick (evaluated by analysts as a period lasting 3.5 minutes), to ensuring that the goalkeeper always passed the ball directly to the next taker to limit interference and practising not only the kicks but the entirety of the shootout in training so as to increase confidence and lower pressure.

After implementing these changes in Southgate’s first year as manager England won their first shootout at a World Cup, beating Colombia in 2018. They won two of three further shootouts under Southgate.