In eight years as England manager, Gareth Southgate took the team to two major international finals, as well as a World Cup semi. And yet his legacy as one of the national team’s most successful leaders remains contested. Was he too meek? Did he squander a generational chance to bring silverware back to Wembley? And was he too fixated with draining the macho atmosphere that has long surrounded the Three Lions? These questions will continue to spark debate, but it is the latter cause that provides inspiration for Sir Gareth as he tackles his first television documentary, BBC One’s Gareth Southgate: Changing the Game for Young Men.

Almost two years on from leaving his job as England manager, Southgate has a new mission: to improve outcomes for young men in society. “I’ve raised and highlighted a problem,” he says in this documentary, which picks up after his 2025 Dimbleby Lecture on the same subject. “What do you do next?” The plan is to travel around the country – from Teesside to Essex – to speak to struggling boys and the men trying to keep their lives on track. As England manager, Southgate was seen to galvanise a squad that had been dominated by infighting and egos, bringing his trademark middle England diffidence to a set-up famous for braggadocio and bluster. “I’ve had my fair share of tricky team talks,” he tells the crew as he heads into a secondary school classroom. “This could beat them all!”

The programme is, in part, a road trip into the heart of masculine darkness. He visits policy experts at the Centre for Social Justice in London, out-of-work labourers in Middlesbrough, schoolboys at a comprehensive in Wickford, and prisoners at HMP Leeds. Throughout, Southgate offers reassurance (“people are only reading a CV, they’re not actually rejecting you”) while highlighting a generalised sense that boys are falling behind girls of the same age. Whether that’s a consequence of affirmative action initiatives boosting results for girls, or a genuine drop-off for boys, doesn’t receive much scrutiny. Instead, Changing the Game for Young Men is more focused on vibes: the sense that boys are in the midst of a crisis. Some of the stats are stark (only 35 per cent of secondary teachers are male, while a third of primary schools have no male teachers), while others, such as the fact that more boys have smartphones than live with their fathers, are superficially shocking but actually quite obvious.

I like Gareth Southgate, both as a football professional and as a man. And he’s an easy presence on the BBC, which has had its fingers burned by certain outspoken former goal hangers. Affable, inoffensive and as centre as centre-backs come, he’s a good fit for the Beeb. But that also means that the show is determined to avoid complex or provocative answers to its litany of questions. “Some boys are growing up with very little guidance,” Southgate observes, as the programme focuses on the absence of older male role models. It’s an oft-repeated charge, but one that is hard to corroborate or correct. What impact does an absent father have on boys, he asks a social worker at a school. “Lack of motivation, lacking confidence, low self-esteem, emotional literacy is low,” she replies, decisively. But no data is presented to back this up, just a social supposition that allows the thesis to avoid trickier questions like the interrelatedness of poverty and educational performance, the damage done to the fabric of communities by years of austerity cuts, and the Sisyphean nightmare that is our justice system.

“As a society, we’ve got to stop talking about young men as if they’re a problem to be fixed,” Southgate proclaims at the show’s end, having spent the last hour highlighting the problems caused and faced by young men, as well as a suite of solutions. It is a statement typical of the show’s preference for cuddly reassurance over deep analysis. Southgate’s conclusions seem to be that we should “change the language around boys” and provide them with mentorship. But, unlike a show like Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, which used sport as an effective framework for improving outcomes, Southgate wants to pass the ball back to the British population. Addressing the public at a Hitchin Town football game, he finds older men surprisingly willing to offer ad hoc guidance to disillusioned youth. It is a woolly idea (how could it be implemented on anything like the scale required to make a dent in the problem?), which acts like all the issues with toxic masculinity are cauterised in adulthood. The issue of young men having bad role models, as well as absent ones, is given no coverage. Indeed, the focus is so much on intergenerational relationships (parents, teachers, mentors) that no analysis is offered on the impact of boys’ peer groups or the debilitating relationships so many have with social media.

This is a recurring problem with the BBC’s celebrity-led social issues documentaries – such as Idris Elba’s programme on knife crime or Roman Kemp’s look at male mental health – which take vast, multifaceted problems that have vexed policymakers and frontline workers for years, and try to distil them into a one-hour format (and the celeb’s busy schedule). Gareth Southgate: Changing the Game for Young Men is another facile addition to this canon. If there is a problem to be solved – and the programme itself seems conflicted on this idea – it will require a more nuanced and decisive intervention.