Football is a national obsession that reaches the heights of excitement and levels of social cut-through that only tea and chocolate Hobnobs can otherwise reach. Dear England taps into that fervour – it’s an upcoming four-part drama about the England team’s rise under the leadership of Gareth Southgate between 2016 and 2024.
Based on a hit play about “the pressures of elite sport, and the role of the national men’s football team in the national psyche,” it stars an eerily lookey-likey Joseph Fiennes as Southgate, alongside Jodie Whittaker as psychologist Pippa Grange and Jason Watkins as FA Chairman Greg Dyke.
The play, described as “exceptional – part history, part therapy session for football fans,” opened at the National Theatre to great acclaim in 2023, followed by a West End run, a return to the National and then a UK tour.
It won the Olivier Award for Best New Play, and led to a bidding war between networks as to who would get to adapt it.
Despite a big-money offer from Netflix, the BBC won the deal and put the show into production in 2025.
Olly Courtney/LeftBank Pictures
What’s Dear England about?
Following the appointment of Southgate as caretaker manager of the England team after Sam Allardyce’s departure, the new manager and psychologist Pippa Grange (Whittaker) reject the old, muscle-through-the-pain, boys-don’t-cry culture of football and encourage the players to embrace a new way of thinking and feeling about the game.
Screaming is out, nurture is in. The players learn to face their fears and express them rather than bury them, and the team rises and rises as a result. Anyone else getting Ted Lasso vibes? It’s totally Ted Lasso, but without the American angle.
Who stars in Dear England?
You can expect to see the following stars in the TV adaptation:
• Joseph Fiennes reprising his role as Gareth Southgate
• Jodie Whittaker as Pippa Grange
• Jason Watkins as Greg Dyke
• John Hodgkinson as Greg Clarke
• Ben Chapman as Luke Shaw
• Daniel Ryan as Steve Holland
• Sam Spruell as Mike Webster
• Adam Hugill as Harry Maguire
• Josh Barrow as Jordan Pickford
• Lewis Shepherd as Dele Alli
• Will Antenbring as Harry Kane
• Edem-Ita Duke as Marcus Rashford
• Francis Lovehall as Raheem Sterling
• Abdul Sessay as Bukayo Saka
• Jacob Greenway as Jude Bellingham
• David Shields as Jordan Henderson
• Hamish Frew as Eric Dier
• Alfie Middlemiss as Phil Foden
• Riess Fennell as Jadon Sancho
• Daniel Quincy Annoh as Ollie Watkins
• Bobby Schofield as Wayne Rooney
• Dom Rayner as Cole Palmer
• Alexander Parsons as Jesse Lingard
• Lee Chapman as Jamie Vardy
Dan Fearnan/LeftBank Pictures
When can I see Dear England?
The BBC haven’t announced a release date yet but filming began in the summer of 2025, which means we can expect to see the finished product either in the summer of 2026 during the World Cup, or more likely at the beginning of the domestic football season in September.
What other sports dramas can I watch right now?
Have we got you in the mood for some off-pitch action? Well, there’s the aforementioned Ted Lasso – a great place to start if you love heartwarming comedy that takes football seriously but doesn’t require an interest in the game itself. You can see that on AppleTV.
If you fancy something a bit more campy, there are five seasons of ITV’s Footballers’ Wives from the early 2000s in ITVX, made back when the world first fell in love with WAGs.
Cast your mind back to 2020 and you might recall The First Team, a comedy-drama from Inbetweeners creators Iain Morris and Damon Beesley about three premiership footballers’ adventures on and off the pitch.
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Editor, Digital Spy Chris has over 25 years’ experience as a writer and editor, having worked as a journalist covering TV and movies since the ’90s. Starting out as a TV listings editor at the Press Association, he was quickly hired by the nascent Heat magazine, where he rose to become Senior Editor, interviewing the likes of Simon Cowell, Boris Johnson and Paris Hilton. Over the years he has written about entertainment with clarity and wit for Heat, Elle, Q, The Telegraph and of course Digital Spy, and has served many times as a judge in the Royal Television Society awards. He has written and recorded a novelty single with Lord Lloyd-Webber, written scripts for the National TV Awards, made Noel Edmonds cry, accidentally punched an Inbetweener and stolen a small piece of rubble from the Battle of Hogwarts movie set. (They can’t have it back.) LinkedIn