What did Joakim Lowe do before guiding Germany to a World Cup win ?
Won the German Cup and was a runner up in the Cup Winners Cup and had won trophies in Austria. But he had a core group of players who were at Bayern Munich and had the benefit of winning pretty much everything in the build up to their World Cup success.
It was a similar story with Spain and their International success.
France is the outlier really. Deschamps is very similar to Southgate in that he's focussed on team harmony and playing for each other and understands the need for defensive balance and discipline rather than throwing a bunch of attacking talent together - probably because that was his role as a player.
Southgate has brought some brilliant memories and whilst we've ultimately failed, I've had some great times following England with him in charge.
I do level our Euro loss last time out at him, because he didn't change things proactively and their goal was coming for a while. It was a similar story to the Croatia semi final loss and he should have managed the situation better. But tournament football goes that way, and arguably we didn't have the experience throughout the team to get over the line - we dropped deep and panicked under the pressure.
His job is to make sure we don't do that in this tournament.
Unless you win a trophy you've failed, but Southgate will have been the best failure we've had.
