It takes a mammoth effort by today’s leading football managers not to have their personalities bent out of shape by the money and power all around them. Sven-Göran Eriksson refused to yield. He was the last to be guided as much by the pleasure principle as tactical ideas.
Eriksson died as he lived: as his own man, with his lust for life intact, not as a head of department forced by private equity or a nation state to play the earnest tactical genius. Where today’s upwardly mobile coaches hope to convince dressing rooms full of multimillionaires of their credibility, Eriksson impressed his players with a narrow coaching manifesto but a broad appreciation of human nature.
The cool Eurocrat the Football Association thought they had hired hid a flame inside his glacier: the glow of a man who thought chasing trophies and the good life was a single pursuit. Those who cast him as a purveyor of hollow profundities ignored both his CV of 18 trophies and a truth about the top coaches. More than formations, they manage people: their egos, desires and flaws.
Across a successful career in multiple leagues and countries Eriksson travelled the full trajectory, from Swedish backwoodsman to A-lister in the European club game, to the mincer of the England manager’s job and out the other side, in ever-decreasing circles, to near bankruptcy and an ending rich in reflection.
Eriksson ended up back where he started, amid the Swedish lakes and forests of his youth. Along the way he was venerated, mythologised, Fake Sheikh’d, scammed at Notts County and propelled in search of a living to Mexico, Ivory Coast, Thailand, China and the Philippines.
He mastered the art of being driven by money while seeming not to care about it. He met the champagne highs and the inglorious lows of a life lived on the front and back pages with remarkable equanimity. He was at once intensely serious about football as an intellectual exercise and inclined towards ironic detachment from the game’s tribalism and frenzy.
At his zenith, Eriksson was managing England while attracting interest from Chelsea, Manchester United, Barcelona and Inter. Until front-page splashes broke its trance, the Football Association of the time fell into a rearguard to keep him in the England tracksuit. Eriksson was lined up to become the next Manchester United manager until Sir Alex Ferguson reversed his plan to retire. Ferguson would ask United players returning to the training ground from England duty: “What does Eriksson do, what’s his secret, what has he got?”
His not-so-secret visit in 2003 to the London home of Roman Abramovich, who had just bought Chelsea, was the first major warning to the FA of Eriksson’s opportunism. The published snap of him entering the Russian oligarch’s residence was doubtless chosen for the furtive expression Eriksson wore. “If you have ambition you listen to other jobs,” he explained: an answer far too rational for his adopted home, where the England job was still viewed as an office of state, not to be defiled by personal “ambition”.
Managing England offered him a Regent’s Park life, a wildly inflated media profile and plenty of free time in which to find mischief. It also placed him in charge of a rare constellation of English talent: Rooney, Owen, Lampard, Gerrard, Beckham, Scholes, Terry and Ashley Cole, with their mountain of Premier League and FA Cup medals. As football’s celebrity culture went into orbit, ‘the quiet man’ knocked his players off the news bulletins.
The Fake Sheikh entrapment, in which he expressed enthusiasm for managing Aston Villa, and said he could lure David Beckham back from Real Madrid, finally broke his relationship with the FA, which embarked on a doomed quest to hire the Brazilian World Cup winner Luiz Felipe Scolari (Steve McClaren got the job instead).
Here we saw the two sides of Eriksson. One, the operator, seduced by status and power, always open to offers, and at ease with plutocrats. The other – a student of life, with a sense of its absurdity, an ability to see what others in the room couldn’t: that it’s all a game, that we’re all going to die anyway, and that celebrity is an aphrodisiac – handy, for an amorous man.
The FA airlifted him in as England’s first foreign manager to succeed Kevin Keegan and break the insularity of the blazer culture. With league title wins with Benfica and Lazio – and European trophies with IFK Göteborg and Lazio – he was no impostor. In Alan Shearer’s words, Keegan was a “freedom guy, a freewheeler”, out of step with the technical and tactical demands of the modern game. And Keegan had resigned in a toilet block at the old Wembley, before the wrecking ball arrived. English pride and passion had run its course.
The FA’s headhunters decamped to Rome to extricate Eriksson from Lazio, where Eriksson had similarly extricated his then partner Nancy Dell’Olio (“the first lady of English football,” as she describes herself in the Amazon Prime documentary, Sven) from her marriage.
English football thought it was placing a safe bet, on a calming influence, a rationalist who had won big in Sweden, Portugal and Italy. Eriksson’s personal and professional promiscuity didn’t feature in the debit column of reasons not to pay him a FTSE-listed company CEO’s salary. He was low risk, low maintenance, a consistent overachiever.
Except that he was steeped in the very methodology England were trying to leave behind: direct play, 4-4-2, trying to win tournaments in summer heat without the ball. Eriksson’s earliest education had been in the English way. Later, in Portugal and Italy, he adapted to the more technical norms of those leagues. With England, after a brief flirtation with passing and possession, he fell back on native customs. Ultimately a ‘channel ball’ for quick attackers to chase appealed to him more than ball retention and intricate buildup play.
In his Sunday Times column Wayne Rooney wrote of the Eriksson years: “Under him you always played 4-4-2 or 4-4-1-1 and when you do that you always concede a lot of possession. You look back and ask why we never tried 4-3-3, especially with all the midfielders we had. But we had big characters in the dressing room: why didn’t I say something, or Lamps [Frank Lampard], or Becks [David Beckham]? Why didn’t we, as a group, ask for a change? So, the tactical side, it’s not just on Sven, it’s on all of us as players.”
Unlike Fabio Capello, a martinet who disdained English frivolity, and was the polar opposite of Eriksson, as the FA’s second overseas hire, “Svennis” as he was known back home made no attempt to shift the blame for three quarter-final exits to his players. Eriksson was a manager in control of his ego, and his honour. He was bewildered by English salaciousness, but even his late-life indignation about press intrusion was politely expressed. Eriksson lacked the vocabulary of rage and revenge.
The reasons for his England teams falling short were not to be found in his phone being hacked, his affair with Ulrika Jonsson, or his dalliance with Faria Alam, an FA employee who had also been romantically involved with the chief executive, Mark Palios; or in him allowing England’s 2006 World Cup camp in Baden-Baden to be turned into a sitcom. According to Alam in the Amazon documentary, Eriksson encouraged her to sell her story to “make some money” when she found work after the FA hard to come by – a neat encapsulation of the famous (in this case Eriksson) denouncing media excess while endeavouring to gain from it.
The real explanation for England repeatedly hitting the buffers at the ‘kvartsfinal’ stage was to be found on the pitch, where they reverted to type with a style of play the Golden Generation had mostly left behind at their clubs. Foreign influence on Premier League coaching was steadily shutting down Route One. But Eriksson stayed on that road. His two emotional peaks during five years in charge were not in tournaments but in qualifiers: the 5-1 win in Munich – the apogee of quick, long-range forward passing – and Beckham’s free-kick against Greece at Old Trafford in 2002 World Cup qualifying.
The last chapter of his England reign was his laissez-faire management of the Baden-Baden circus, a social satire more compelling than the actual World Cup campaign. From there, Eriksson seemed to lose control of his own destiny. His sure touch deserted him, in volatile environments at Manchester City, Notts County and Leicester City, before hired gun roles in the Far East largely removed him from view, until a £10m loss from investments returned him to the news.
But his recent standing ovation at Anfield and grace under the pressure of terminal illness affirmed his finest qualities: modesty, enthusiasm, kindness, dignity. His parting messages brought the real Sven-Göran Eriksson back into focus, and returned the gold rush of which he was part to its proper proportion. For much of his time on earth, Eriksson beat the system. He won the game of life.