A former England men's under-21 football team coach said that whilst he is disappointed with England’s loss to Spain in the Euro 2024 final, he is pleased to see the progress that the squad has seen under Gareth Southgate’s leadership. Nick Levett said: “I think we have got to take some pride in the journey that we have been on so far, but it is always going to be a disappointment – what could have been a fantastic Monday as opposed to a slightly more sombre Monday.” Report by Covellm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00For someone that worked in the game for as many years as I have done, it's disappointing and I wanted us to win for Gareth as much as anything else, really.
00:11But I look a bit more pragmatically about where we've come from and the progress that we've made so far.
00:19And if I go back to 2016, we weren't very good and now we're competing at major finals, semi-finals.
00:27I think we've got to take some pride in the journey that we've been on so far.
00:31But yeah, it's always going to be a disappointment and what could have been a fantastic Monday as opposed to a slightly more sombre Monday, really.
00:38So I think he's probably shifted the England team hugely from where we were at the time to where we are now.
00:46A lot of that's built upon, I think, his leadership skills.
00:49So he brings this real kind of brilliant approach to relationships.
00:54He's great with people. He's very smart with it in the sense that he regularly checks in from camp to camp because a player's life might have changed since then.
01:04They could have had a baby or could have been divorced or could have been near relegation or the Champions League and everything kind of flips and changes.
01:11And he's very good at checking in with people in relationships.
01:13And I think he's always been really curious about wanting to understand the youth teams and the pathway and how that all kind of works.
01:21And having worked previously with the FA for many years when Fabio was there and Fabio wasn't really bothered about the England youth teams, whereas Gareth had this real kind of curiosity to connect it all.
01:32So I think that that's made a massive difference in bringing everything through to where we are now.