Whatever happens next, this has been a great World Cup for Gareth Southgate. What does this tell us?

The first thing is that, as William Goldman said, nobody knows anything. When Southgate was appointed, the reaction was underwhelming. Nobody said "this guy will take us to our best World Cup performance since 1990." This fits a pattern. "Arsene who?" asked the press when Arsenal appointed Wenger; Sir Alex Ferguson was famously one game away from the sack; and Leicester's hiring of Claudio Ranieri was greeted with scepticism and certainly not with talk he'd win the title.

The point generalizes. Countless best-selling books and films were rejected by publishers and studios, great music acts were ignored, and Dragons Den has turned down profitable ideas.

Great success is largely unpredictable. Pundits and experts know less than they pretend.

Secondly, what matters when you're hiring a manager isn't so much the quality of the manager but the match between his abilities and the job requirements. Southgate might not be the best manager available, but he's the right one.

One reason for the lukewarm reception to his appointment was that his CV was less impressive than that of many of his predecessors most of whom had some success in club management. But at least of the qualities of good club manager are irrelevant to international management. An England manager cannot plug gaps in his squad by going into the transfer market, and he cannot work intensively with his players day-in, day-out. It's possible therefore that better preparation and more relevant experience for the job is working well with the under-21s.

Again, this generalizes. Boris Groysberg and colleagues compared (pdf) the careers of former managers of General Electric. All had similar impressive CVs, but their success in subsequent jobs varied a lot. This was because some managers were better matched to the job than others. If you want your firm to grow, you're better with a marketing man than a cost-cutter. If you want to improve the efficiency of your firm, though, you'll be better off with an engineer than a marketing guy. And so on. It's the match that matters, not just the man.

Thirdly, Southgate's success reminds us that even in our anti-meritocratic world there is a place for what Alasdair MacIntyre calls internal goods. Southgate is a modest and not especially ambitious man; he claims not to have wanted the England job. Rather give us bullshit drivel about drive and passion he has quietly and diligently prepared the England squad as well as he can . He has pursued internal goods - the mastery of a particular practice.

In this sense, he is the diametric opposite of so many characters who dominate and deform our public life - those who seek what MacIntyre calls external goods of wealth, fame and power. The obverse of Southgate is Boris Johnson, a noisy charlatan who never bothered with the hard work of preparing for Brexit.

Fourthly, in being by all accounts a nice man, Southgate has undermined the public image that one has to be unpleasant and ruthless to succeed in management: contrast him to the crude image portrayed by Alan Sugar or Karen Brady in The Apprentice - an image lots of businesspeople hate.

That said, the aggregate data isn't clear here. Guido Heineck has shown that agreeable people tend on average to earn less than others. This might, however, be because they are less good at bargaining rather because they are less effective at their jobs.

It's possible, then, that Southgate's success might lead to managers behaving better at work, in the knowledge that nice can succeed.

If you're with me so far, perhaps you shouldn't be.

Things might have turned out very differently for England. We might well have lost the penalty shoot-out against Colombia: David Ospina came close to saving all the penalties. And even a mediocre Swedish team might have got a result were it not for some great saves by Pickford.

But they didn't. The acclaim Southgate and England are getting is in part due to the outcome bias. Good results cause us to exaggerate a team's strengths and overlook its weaknesses. Success is celebrated even if it's due to luck. And our urge to see patterns in everything leads to articles such as this one, asking what we can learn from such luck.

As I said, nobody knows anything.