When England’s footballers trounced Germany 5-1 in the Olympic stadium in Munich on a warm evening in September 2001, a team that included Michael Owen, David Beckham and Steven Gerrard seemed to have recaptured the magic that had taken their predecessors to victory in the 1966 World Cup final at Wembley. Watching from the technical area, and perhaps as surprised as anyone by his team’s sudden discovery of an ebullient, free-scoring authority, was their new manager, a middle-aged Swede whose high forehead, rimless spectacles and reserved demeanour lent him the air of a man carrying the game’s higher calculus in his head.
Sven-Göran Eriksson, who has died aged 76, had been appointed England’s first foreign manager nine months earlier. He succeeded Kevin Keegan, who had resigned in an emotional meltdown a few minutes after losing to Germany at Wembley, making the new man’s success in Munich, in a World Cup qualifying match, seem all the more portentous. The recruitment by the Football Association of a coach who had cemented his reputation with success in Portugal, Italy and Sweden was intended to bring European tactical sophistication to bear on a flatlining England, and the plan seemed to be working.
The following summer Eriksson took his team to the 2002 World Cup finals, held in Japan and South Korea. A narrow defeat in the quarter-finals to star-studded Brazil, the eventual champions, hinged on a seemingly freakish long-range free-kick by the young superstar Ronaldinho. But when the team went out at the same stage in the 2004 European championships in Portugal, beaten in a penalty shoot-out by the home country, progress was beginning to stall, despite the emergence of Wayne Rooney, a prodigy given his England debut by Eriksson at 17.
Two years later the team arrived in Baden-Baden, their base for the 2006 World Cup, as the support act to the Wags phenomenon. The media gorged on the presence at a five-star hotel of the players’ female partners, led by Victoria Beckham and Coleen Rooney, who were followed on their shopping trips by a battalion of paparazzi while the players trained at their camp a few miles away. Once more the team could make it only to the last eight, going out again on penalties to Portugal in Gelsenkirchen after Rooney had been sent off.
In the aftermath of that last defeat the Swede, the highest paid manager in world football, bade farewell to the FA with a speech urging English football to look after Rooney’s talent. Even those who had been impressed by Eriksson’s early days in England, searching for the secret of his success and coming up with little more than his alleged love of Tibetan poetry, had begun to side with the critics who viewed him from the start as a weak, avaricious man unable to bring the necessary degree of motivation, discipline or tactical freshness to his squad.
His failure to win a tournament in three attempts was not the only factor in a deteriorating relationship with England and its football public. The cooling was hastened by accusations of treachery following his clandestine meeting in 2003 with Roman Abramovich, the new owner of Chelsea, and by the brouhaha following his entrapment by Mazher Mahmood, the News of the World’s “fake sheikh”, who surreptitiously tape-recorded his willingness to discuss accepting an offer – bogus, of course – of the manager’s job at Aston Villa only six months before he was due to lead England to the 2006 World Cup.
Other tabloid headlines were more lurid. He had arrived in England with the publicity-friendly Italian socialite Nancy Dell’Olio, who lived with him in London in a grand house in Regent’s Park. Within a year, however, his affair with the TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson, hitherto the UK’s favourite Swede, had been exposed, followed by the disclosure of assignations with a Football Association employee Faria Alam. Long divorced from Ann-Christine Pettersson, whom he had married in 1977, Eriksson discovered that his freedom to live as he wished was circumscribed by the special scrutiny to which the manager of England’s football team is subjected.
Born in the small town of Sunne in Värmland, a province of western Sweden noted for its lakes and streams, he was brought up in the nearby and even smaller town of Torsby by his parents: Sven, a bus conductor, and Ulla, who worked in a textile shop. At 16 he made his debut at right-back for Torsby IF before moving to study electronics in Säffle, where he played for SK Sifhalla. Aged 25, and now working as a PE instructor in Örebro, he joined Karlskoga, in the Swedish second division. There he was coached by Tord Grip, who later become one of his assistants with England.
Grip passed on the lessons he had absorbed from two managers, Bob Houghton and Roy Hodgson, who had successfully brought English tactics to Swedish football – particularly the 4-4-2 formation, with four defenders, four midfielders and two forwards. When the 29-year-old Eriksson was given his first coaching job, with Degerfors, he took that influence with him. After winning a divisional title, he was hired by IFK Göteborg, whom he took to league and cup victories before beating Hamburg in the two-legged final of the Uefa Cup in 1982, the first such success for a Swedish club.
Benfica snapped him up and were rewarded with two Portuguese league titles in two years before he left Lisbon to join Roma, where after three years yielding a single Coppa Italia success he moved to Fiorentina for two trophy-less seasons. A return to Portugal brought another league title with Benfica and defeat by Milan in the final of the 1990 European Cup.
In 1992 he moved to Sampdoria, winning another Italian Cup before accepting an offer from the steel magnate Jack Walker to join Blackburn Rovers, only to go back on his word and announce that he was moving instead to Lazio in Rome. Over the next three years there were victories in the Italian Cup and Super Cup and the 1999 European Cup Winners’ Cup, crowned in 2000 by the capture of the Serie A title.
A few weeks into the following season, he resigned from Lazio to join England. His appointment, on an annual salary of £4.5m, was announced by Adam Crozier, the new chief executive of the FA. A moderniser, Crozier had been guided towards Eriksson by David Dein, a member of the FA council. As co-owner and vice-chairman of Arsenal, Dein had previously brought the French manager Arsène Wenger from Japan to revive the north London club.
Dein believed that a moribund England team was similarly in need of an infusion of fresh ideas from a different footballing culture. Dissenters within the game and the media believed that the England team should always be guided by an English manager – as did Wenger, who had turned down the job. It was not fully recognised that Eriksson’s successes in three countries had been based on the English 4-4-2 template, and his rigid adherence to the system in its homeland would eventually bring him more criticism.
Other incidents that enlivened his tenure included the Beckham free-kick against Greece that ensured last-gasp qualification for the 2002 World Cup finals, Rooney’s broken metatarsal in Lisbon a year later, the players’ threat to strike over Rio Ferdinand’s eight-month ban in 2004 for missing a doping test, and the endless debate over whether Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Paul Scholes could be fitted into a coherent midfield.
In his five-year tenure, Eriksson never managed England at Wembley. The old stadium was demolished after Keegan’s resignation, forcing the FA to arrange home games at venues around the country while it was rebuilt. A year after Eriksson’s departure, England returned to the new Wembley under his former No 2, Steve McClaren, and stumbled to a defeat against Croatia that cost them a place in the Euro 2008 finals. McClaren, Fabio Capello (on £6m a year), Hodgson and Sam Allardyce all failed to match the Swede’s record before Gareth Southgate led England to the final of a major championship in 2021, losing on penalties.
Eriksson joined Manchester City a year after resigning from the England job, winning the manager of the month award that August before being sacked at the end of the season by the club’s Thai owner, Thaksin Shinawatra. Thereafter came brief spells managing Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen in the Chinese Super League, Leicester City in the Championship, Al-Nasr in Dubai, and the national teams of Mexico, Ivory Coast and, in 2019, the Philippines, his final job in football.
The strangest assignment of his career came in 2009, when he spent six months with Notts County in the fourth tier of English football before discovering that the ambitious promises made by a Middle East consortium were not backed up by actual money. Said to have a contract worth £2m a year, Eriksson earned widespread admiration by quietly waiving his right to a pay-off in order to save the world’s oldest league club from further financial embarrassment.
At Meadow Lane he left behind, as he had elsewhere, the memory of a courteous and charming man whose principal flaw was not his adventurous love life or a keenness to listen to offers of new contracts – characteristics that hardly set him apart from the common run of humanity – but his failure, after early success, to live up to his billing as a football genius.
In January this year he announced that he had received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. In March he realised an early ambition to manage Liverpool when he was invited to lead a team of the club’s former stars in a 4-2 win over an Ajax team at Anfield. “Absolutely beautiful,” he said of the experience, at which he received a standing ovation.
He is survived by his partner, Yaniseth Bravo Mendoza, and her son, Alcides; by the son, Johan, and daughter, Lina, from his marriage to Ann-Christine, which ended in divorce in 1994; a granddaughter, Sky; and his father, Sven, and brother, Lars-Erik.
• Sven-Göran Eriksson, football manager, born 5 February 1948; died 26 August 2024
• This article was amended on 27 August 2024. When Sven-Göran Eriksson managed Leicester City, they were in the Championship, and not the Premier League.
