Sven-Goran Eriksson, urbane England coach with a colourful side

That the England team had both image and results problems was obvious from the manner of Kevin Keegan’s departure in October 2000. After less than two years in charge, Keegan quit in a lavatory cubicle immediately after a loss to Germany in the last game at the old Wembley.
With the national side enduring familiar failings, the FA’s thrusting chief executive Adam Crozier resolved to try a fresh approach. The Scot appointed Sven-Goran Eriksson as England’s first foreign manager.
The 52-year-old Swede was mild-mannered, diplomatic and blessed with a healthy sense of perspective, which was more than could be said for some of his critics. The decision to hire a foreigner caused a fuss even though a Frenchman, Arsène Wenger, was revolutionising the domestic club game at Arsenal. Jeff Powell of the Daily Mail fulminated that “the mother country of football” had “sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness”.
Terry Venables, the England coach at Euro 96 and the bookmakers’ favourite to replace Keegan, claimed the decision showed “we are not a power any more” and said it would be hard to support an England side not managed by an Englishman. “It’s like saying, ‘we’re in the war and we’ve got no generals’,” he told the BBC. “Well, what’s Rommel doing? Is he available?”
Eriksson had no national team experience but significant pedigree in European club football and was ending a trophy-laden spell in Italy with Lazio. He was thick-skinned and ready for the criticism. “All [England managers] have been declared idiots at some times in their career, even Sir Alf Ramsey,” he observed. “I knew what to expect. I didn’t take the job for the money or the weather. I took it because it’s England.”
At least no newspapers would caricature the urbane and courtly Swede as a turnip in the manner of one of his hapless predecessors, Graham Taylor. Eriksson read Tibetan poetry and cited Japanese proverbs. In Rome he lived in an apartment at the foot of the Spanish Steps, while in London he moved to a multimillion-pound property near Regent’s Park after assuming the post in 2001. With his sharp suits and rimless spectacles he resembled a Stockholm architect more than a typical dugout tactician; one report claimed he owned 150 bespoke suits.
Sceptics were silenced when Eriksson became the first England manager to win his opening five games. The seventh was to prove his finest victory, as England stunned Germany — and their own fans — by winning 5-1 in a World Cup qualifier in Munich in September 2001, an indelible night spearheaded by a Michael Owen hat-trick.
Automatic qualification for the 2002 tournament was secured ahead of Germany with a 2-2 draw with Greece at Old Trafford, England equalising at the death through a magnificent David Beckham free kick. With a “golden generation” including Beckham, Owen, Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand, it increasingly looked as if Eriksson was the man to steer England to a first big trophy since 1966.
Optimism was heightened in the World Cup group stage when a Beckham penalty was the difference against another familiar nemesis, Argentina. The other two group games were unconvincing draws against Sweden and Nigeria, but Denmark were brushed aside, 3-0, in the round of 16 to set up a mouthwatering quarter-final clash with Brazil in Shizuoka, Japan.
Owen gave England the lead but Rivaldo equalised in first-half stoppage time and a looping free kick from Ronaldinho, who was later sent off, bamboozled the goalkeeper David Seaman for the winner. It was a meek exit. The defender and future England manager Gareth Southgate memorably remarked that for the half-time team talk “we needed Winston Churchill but we got Iain Duncan Smith”. He was not alone in wondering if there might be a happy medium between the emotional incontinence of Keegan and the studied impassivity of a manager nicknamed “Iceman”.
Euro 2004 was wide open and the England squad better than in 2002, with Eriksson adding the teen sensation Wayne Rooney. The Three Lions opened the group stage with a deflating 2-1 loss to France as Zinedine Zidane found the net twice in stoppage time, but Switzerland and Croatia were crushed, Rooney scoring twice in each game.
• Former England manager Eriksson dies aged 76
This set up a quarter-final against the hosts, Portugal, which England lost on penalties after a thrilling 2-2 draw. Owen scored early on but England faded after the talismanic Rooney went off injured. Critics blamed Eriksson for cautious tactics and poor substitutions.
Retaining the trust and respect of the players, if not the media, it was on to the 2006 World Cup via a worrying defeat in qualifying by Northern Ireland. Despite his conservative reputation, Eriksson sprung a huge surprise by naming the 17-year-old Theo Walcott in the squad even though the Arsenal winger had never played in a Premier League game.
The unready Walcott went unused in Germany as a tepid England topped their group thanks to wins over Paraguay and Trinidad & Tobago and a draw with Sweden, then squeezed past Ecuador, 1-0, in the round of 16 to set up a repeat clash with Portugal. England paid for their lack of gumption when Rooney was sent off in the 62nd minute for stamping on Ricardo Carvalho, ending any goal threat, but hung on grimly to reach penalties after a scoreless 120 minutes. The shoot-out brought the expected outcome and the Eriksson era was over.
A media frenzy surrounding the presence of the players’ wives and girlfriends in Baden-Baden near England’s base had not helped, but Eriksson was hardly in a position to demand complete separation of work and private lives. If his awkward demeanour and bland pronouncements to reporters along the lines of “first half good, second half not so good” implied that Eriksson was a tad gauche and dull, his off-pitch existence turned out to be anything but boring.
In Rome, Eriksson became close to a then-married Italian-American lawyer, Nancy Dell’Olio. She moved with him to London, where her spirited personality and individual sense of style turned her into a minor celebrity. Dell’Olio stuck with Eriksson after it emerged in April 2002 that he had been “playing away” with a fellow Swede, the television presenter Ulrika Jonsson, 19 years his junior. And Dell’Olio stood by her man when he had an affair in 2004 with another much younger woman, Faria Alam, then an FA secretary. “After he’d filled the dishwasher, he led me up the stairs to his bedroom,” Alam informed the press.
Alam also had a fling with Mark Palios, then the FA chief executive, and the consequent turmoil at the governing body placed Eriksson’s future into question. Palios left but an internal FA inquiry found Eriksson had “no case to answer”. However, it was announced in January 2006 that he would leave his £4.5 million-a-year job after that summer’s World Cup with a reported £3 million payoff. The news came after Eriksson was snared in a tabloid sting. He told an undercover News of the World reporter, Mazher Mahmood, better known as the “fake sheikh”, that he was open to joining Aston Villa after the tournament, and made indiscreet comments about some of England’s stars.
He departed with an impressive record of 40 wins and 17 draws in 67 fixtures and his achievement of reaching three quarter-finals was not matched by his flailing successors, Steve McClaren, Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson. Yet despite the novelty of his appointment, the early promise and the respect he merited for his rationality, refinement and resilience, a fug of déjà vu settled over his tenure.
A gifted group of English players again fell short, undone by the caprices of penalties and by timorousness that was partly psychological, partly the byproduct of Eriksson’s wary tactics. He failed to blend Scholes, Lampard and Gerrard into a cohesive midfield, while his colourful personal life undermined any hope that England could graduate from the off-field scandals that had dogged previous regimes.
For his part, Eriksson could be forgiven his bafflement at the priorities of a country where he was faulted for reacting calmly to poor performances rather than delivering teacup-flinging dressing room tirades and where his love life was treated as a matter of national importance. Despite the endless scrutiny he scarcely seemed any less enigmatic by the end of his reign than at the beginning. “The only thing we know for sure is that he likes sex,” one writer mused in 2006.
Sven-Goran Eriksson was born in 1948 in the county of Varmland and grew up in Torsby, near the Norwegian border. His father, Sven, was a bus conductor, and his mother, Ulla, worked in a textiles shop then became a nurse. He spent his youth reading adventure stories, participating in ski-jumping competitions and playing football.
He studied economics, worked as a PE teacher and played in the lower leagues as a mediocre defender. Tord Grip, his mentor and later right-hand man, advised him that although he would never be a great footballer he had the potential to become a top coach.
In 1976 Eriksson became Grip’s assistant manager at Degerfors in the Swedish third division. His aptitude was quickly evident and after replacing Grip he was hired by first-division IFK Gothenburg in 1979. “I was always drawn to the physical strength and commitment of the English game. It was my model in the early days in Sweden,” Eriksson said. A boyhood Liverpool fan, he travelled to Anfield to speak with the coaching staff in the “Boot Room” and visited Ipswich Town to shadow Bobby Robson.
Gothenburg became domestic champions and the first Nordic side to lift the Uefa Cup, thrashing Hamburg in the 1982 final. Eriksson was recruited by the Portuguese giants, Benfica, where he won two league titles and lost to Anderlecht in the 1983 Uefa Cup final.
It was on to Italy and Roma in 1984. The club claimed the 1986 Italian Cup and Eriksson moved to Fiorentina in 1987. After two fruitless years he went back to Benfica and guided the club to the 1990 European Cup final (a 1-0 loss to AC Milan) and the Portuguese title in 1991.
He returned to Italy in 1992 for a five-year spell in Genoa with Sampdoria and the club lifted the Italian Cup in 1994. He agreed to join Blackburn Rovers from the 1997-98 season but wisely reneged on the deal when Lazio came calling. Under Eriksson they won only their second league title in 2000, beat Mallorca in the 1999 Cup Winners’ Cup final, overcame Manchester United in the Super Cup later that year and also twice took the Italian Cup and Super Cup.
After England, Eriksson — earlier linked with Chelsea and Manchester United amid his apparent boredom during long gaps between international fixtures — was hired to manage Manchester City in July 2007 under the ambitious new ownership of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand. The first half of the season was good, the second half not so good, and Thaksin deemed a ninth-place Premier League finish a sackable offence.
Eriksson was promptly named Mexico manager in June 2008 but dismissed after less than a year. After a brief spell as director of football at the ambitious but impecunious fourth-tier club Notts County, Eriksson managed Ivory Coast at the 2010 World Cup finals but they failed to advance beyond the group stage.
In October that year Eriksson took the helm at second-tier Leicester City, piloting them clear of relegation danger, but he left after an indifferent start to the next season. Four years in China followed with Guangzhou R&F, Shanghai SIPG and Shenzhen, before his final management role, a couple of months in charge of the Philippines in 2018-19.
A marriage in 1977, to Ann-Christine Pettersson, daughter of the principal of a teacher training college where Eriksson was a student, ended in divorce in 1994 and produced two children, a son, Johan, a football agent, and a daughter, Lina, a charity worker. His relationship with Dell’Olio ended in 2007. He later lived in a lakeside home near Torsby and had a long-term relationship with Yaniseth Bravo Mendoza, a Panamanian former nightclub dancer 21 years his junior whom he met outside a bar in Mexico City.
In January this year, he was characteristically sanguine as he declared his determination to enjoy his remaining days while revealing a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer: “See the positive in things, don’t wallow in adversity… but make something good out of it.”
Sven-Goran Eriksson, football manager, was born on February 5, 1948. He died of cancer on August 26, 2024, aged 76