Support truly
independent journalism
Sven-Goran Eriksson, the manager in charge of England’s “golden generation” during the early 2000s, has died aged 76.
Eriksson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year after suffering a stroke while out running near his home in Sweden. He told a Swedish radio station in January that he had “at best a year left to live”.
Eriksson bade a final farewell to the public in a recent documentary. “I had a good life,” he said. “I hope you will remember me as a positive guy trying to do everything he could do.”
His death was confirmed by his family on Monday. “Sven-Goran Eriksson has passed away,” a statement read. “After a long illness, SGE died during the morning at home surrounded by family.”
Eriksson’s illness had forced him to step back from his role as sporting director for Swedish club Karlstad, the last job in a long, varied and hugely successful career coaching across Europe and around the globe.
Eriksson had only a modest playing career in Sweden, describing himself as “a distinctly average defender … who rarely made mistakes”. To supplement his income, he taught physical education in schools.
He retired in 1973, aged 27, and moved into coaching under the man who would become his mentor – and later his assistant at England – Tord Grip, who was then in charge of Swedish side Degerfors.
Eriksson took over from Grip as manager in 1977 and his early success, winning promotion to the Swedish second tier, earned him a jump to one of the biggest jobs in the country, managing IFK Goteborg. There he delivered the Uefa Cup in 1982, part of a famous treble with the Swedish league and cup which skyrocketed his stock in the game.
Jobs in the Portuguese and Italian leagues followed through the 1980s and 1990s. Eriksson developed a reputation for his calm manner and shrewd tactical acumen; his structured, defence-first style was well suited to Italy’s Serie A.
He won three league titles with Benfica across two stints and won the Italian Cup with Roma, Sampdoria and Lazio. With Lazio, he won the Uefa Cup Winners’ Cup and finally, at his 13th attempt, he won the Serie A title in 2000. It was only Lazio’s second-ever league triumph and underlined Eriksson’s reputation as one of the best coaches in world football.
At this time, the English Football Association was looking for a new manager following the resignation of Kevin Keegan, who had been struggling to keep England on track to qualify for the 2002 World Cup. Eriksson was offered a lucrative deal by the FA, which prompted him to resign from Lazio and become England’s first foreign manager.
His six-year stint in charge of England would come to define his career. The journey was a rollercoaster, given lift-off with the high of thrashing Germany 5-1 in Munich, perhaps England’s greatest game since the 1966 World Cup. Eriksson led them to the 2002 World Cup, via that famous David Beckham free-kick equaliser against Greece.
But in the three major tournaments that followed, England’s star-studded squad – featuring Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Paul Scholes, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Michael Owen and a prodigiously talented Wayne Rooney – failed to get past the quarter-final stage.
Eriksson was castigated in the English media for his tactical inflexibility, sticking to a rigid and unambitious 4-4-2 which failed to maximise England’s strengths. Scholes was often shunted onto the left wing and the Gerrard-Lampard axis never quite worked. It has often been said that England should have tried another formation, like 3-5-2, to benefit from an abundance of talent in central positions.
Eriksson seemed to have been left behind tactically at a time when other European nations, like Spain and Germany, were developing more sophisticated possession-based play which would deliver World Cups in the coming years.
But he also faced his unfair share of bad luck, with injuries to Beckham and Rooney at crucial moments in the lead-up to tournaments, Ronaldinho’s freakish goal over David Seaman’s head in 2002, two penalty shootout defeats by the Portuguese, and Rooney’s red card in Gelsenkirchen.
“It could have been possible [to win the World Cup] if [Rooney] hadn’t been sent off in 2006,” Eriksson later said. “It was a low point for him and me. In 2006 we all thought we had a good chance to reach a final and maybe win it. When I say we, I mean the players, the staff and myself. We were convinced that there was no better team than England at that World Cup.
“We could have won it but, when you get a red card in the quarter-final of a World Cup, it’s hard.”
Many of the players admitted their own failings and revealed factions in the camp fuelled by their bitter club rivalries. In a segment on BT Sport in 2017, Lampard, Gerrard and Ferdinand candidly discussed how they barely interacted with anyone from another club while on England duty, such was the ferocity of their Premier League feuds.
Eriksson dismissed this notion, however, telling The Independent in 2018: “I never noticed that. If you see two players coming from the dressing room, or from lunch, it’s normally two Liverpool players, or two Chelsea players, because they know each other. But I don’t believe that [they couldn’t play together].”
His biggest gripe was with the British media. Eriksson’s arrival in England coincided with the zenith of the UK tabloid press, before its popularity and power became diluted by the emergence of internet journalism. His colourful and controversial personal life, which included affairs with Swedish TV personality Ulrika Jonsson and FA secretary Faria Alam, made front-page headlines. The media revelled in the idea that this refined, Scandinavian fiftysomething football thinker had a sordid side.
Eriksson later said he had no regrets, admitted his marriage with Nancy Dell'Olio was already broken and that he had fallen in love with Alam. When asked for the one piece of advice he wished he’d been told when he first arrived in the UK, Eriksson told The Independent: “You could easily say, ‘don’t look at women’. [But] you could say, there’s something wrong in this country that you talk so much about the private life.”
His fractious relationship with the press came to a head in January 2006, only months before the World Cup in Germany, when the News of the World’s infamous “fake sheikh”, Mazher Mahmood, trapped Eriksson in an undercover sting. The England manager was lured into suggesting he would leave his job for a lucrative contract at Aston Villa and that he would persuade Beckham to join him. He was also recorded making disparaging remarks about England stars, saying Ferdinand was “lazy” and Rooney had “a temper”.
For all of Eriksson’s wisdom, he also possessed a naivety which was cruelly exploited. The FA announced days later that he would be leaving his post after the upcoming World Cup. The organisation insisted the decision had nothing to do with the News of the World story.
Mahmood was later sent to prison and the News of the World was shut down in scandal. But it was little consolation for Eriksson, who reflected in 2016: “That man was a disaster for my professional life. England was the biggest job of my life, and he took it away from me. I would probably have been sacked anyway if England didn’t win the World Cup in 2006, but in fact, I was sacked because of the Fake Sheikh; 90 per cent of what he said about me was lies.
“The newspaper apologised six months later, but it was too late by then. I’d lost the biggest job of my life, and my reputation was in tatters.”
Eriksson continued his eclectic management career for more than a decade, taking charge of Manchester City and Leicester, as well as Mexico, Ivory Coast, the Philippines and several clubs in China from 2013 to 2017, during the country’s ill-fated splurge on football.
He returned to Sweden during the pandemic, to live and work in the western Varmland region where he grew up, and where he remained well respected as a down-to-earth character and a doyen of football. It took terminal cancer to finally bring an end to his long love affair with the game.
“I was fully healthy and then I collapsed and fainted and ended up at the hospital,” Eriksson said in January. “And it turned out that I had cancer. The day before I had been out running five kilometres. It just came from nothing. And that makes you shocked.
“I’m not in any major pain. But I’ve been diagnosed with a disease that you can slow down but you cannot operate. So it is what it is.”
In March, Eriksson was given the chance to manage Liverpool, the club he supported as a boy, in a charity match at Anfield. He described the occasion as “beautiful” and “like a dream”. His Liverpool Legends team won the game and one of his players, Gerrard, later revealed Eriksson “still has the magic” with a decisive tactical change at half time.
Eriksson continued to be held in esteem by former players long after he had finished working with them. Beckham recently visited his Bjorkefors farm and brought along six bottles of wine dating from years that held special meaning, including 1948, when Eriksson was born, and 1982, the year of his Uefa Cup win with Goteborg.
“The previous day he had sent a chef who fixed the food, and then he came and was here for a day,” Eriksson said. “He ate herring and potatoes and elk meat. We sat chatting, a lot about football. He didn’t have to come here. I felt proud that he came.”
During the height of his celebrity fame, Eriksson’s sex life became the butt of many jokes, and his football acumen was sometimes derided, the result of an accomplished career distilled down to one near-impossible role in charge of England. But as time passed, he retained a popularity in Sweden, Britain and beyond as someone flawed but gentle and jovial, with a sense of humour and an eternally upbeat spirit in the face of negativity, in football and in life.
“I think we are all scared of the day when we die, but life is about death as well,” Eriksson said in the recent documentary. “You have to learn to accept it for what it is. Hopefully, at the end, people will say, ‘Yeah, he was a good man’. But everyone will not say that.
“I hope you will remember me as a positive guy trying to do everything he could do. Don’t be sorry, smile. Thank you for everything, coaches, players, the crowds, it’s been fantastic. Take care of yourself and take care of your life. And live it.”
