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Sven-Göran Eriksson, the coach of the English “Golden Generation” in the early 2000s, has died at the age of 76.
Eriksson was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last year after suffering a stroke while jogging near his home in Sweden. In January, he told a Swedish radio station he had “a year to live at best.”
Eriksson said his final goodbye to the public in a Amazon Prime Video Documentary about his life, released on August 23, in which he said: “I hope you will remember me as a positive person.”
His death was confirmed by his family on Monday.
Due to his illness, Eriksson was forced to resign from his position as sporting director at Swedish club Karlstad. It was the last job in a long, varied and extremely successful career as a coach in Europe and around the world.
Eriksson had a modest playing career in Sweden, describing himself as “a very average defender… who rarely made mistakes.” To supplement his income, he taught physical education at schools.
In 1973, at the age of 27, he ended his career and became a coach under Tord Grip, who would later become his mentor and later his assistant in the English national team and was then coach of the Swedish team Degerfors.
Eriksson took over as manager of Grip in 1977 and his early success in gaining promotion to the Swedish second division led him to one of the most important jobs in the country: manager of IFK Göteborg. There he won the UEFA Cup in 1982, part of a famous treble with the Swedish league and cup that boosted his reputation in football.
Jobs in the Portuguese and Italian leagues followed in the 1980s and 1990s. Eriksson earned a reputation for his calm demeanor and astute tactical sense, and his structured, defense-focused style suited the Italian Serie A well.
He won three league titles in two terms with Benfica and the Italian Cup with Roma, Sampdoria and Lazio. With Lazio he won the Cup Winners' Cup and finally, at his 13th attempt, the Serie A title in 2000. It was only Lazio's second ever league title and underlined Eriksson's reputation as one of the best coaches in world football.
At the time, the English Football Association was looking for a new manager following the resignation of Kevin Keegan, who had struggled with England's qualification for the 2002 World Cup. Eriksson received a lucrative offer from the English Football Association, which prompted him to resign from Lazio and become England's first foreign manager.
His six-year spell as England manager was to define his career. It was a rollercoaster journey that began with the 5-1 victory over Germany in Munich, perhaps England's biggest game since the 1966 World Cup. Eriksson led the team to the 2002 World Cup with David Beckham's famous free kick against Greece.
But in the three major tournaments that followed, England's star-studded team – including Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Paul Scholes, Rio Ferdinand, John Terry, Michael Owen and an extraordinarily talented Wayne Rooney – failed to make it past the quarter-finals.
Eriksson was criticised in the English media for his tactical inflexibility. He stuck with a rigid and unambitious 4-4-2 that failed to play to England's strengths. Scholes was often relegated to the left wing and the Gerrard-Lampard axis never worked properly. It has often been said that England should have tried a different formation such as 3-5-2 to capitalise on the abundance of talent in the central positions.
Eriksson seemed to have fallen behind tactically at a time when other European nations such as Spain and Germany were developing a more sophisticated, possession-based game that would win them World Cups in the years to come.
But he also had a lot of bad luck: Beckham and Rooney were injured at crucial moments before tournaments, Ronaldinho scored a bizarre goal over David Seaman's head in 2002, there were two defeats in penalty shootouts against the Portuguese and Rooney was shown the red card in Gelsenkirchen.
“It would have been possible [to win the World Cup] If [Rooney] “In 2006 he was not sent off,” Eriksson said later. “That was a low point for him and me. In 2006 we all thought we had a good chance of getting to the final and maybe winning 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, but when you get a red card in the quarter-finals of a World Cup, it's tough.”
Many players admitted their own mistakes and revealed that there were factions within the camp, fuelled by their bitter inter-club rivalries. In a BT Sport feature in 2017, Lampard, Gerrard and Ferdinand spoke openly about how they rarely had contact with anyone from another club while playing for England, so fierce were their feuds in the Premier League.
However, Eriksson rejected this idea and said: The Independent in 2018: “I never noticed that. When you see two players coming out of the dressing room or from lunch, it's usually two Liverpool players or two Chelsea players because they know each other. But I don't think that [they couldn’t play together].”
His main annoyance was with the British media. Eriksson's arrival in England coincided with the height of the British tabloid press, before its popularity and influence were diluted by the advent of internet journalism. His colourful and controversial private life, which included affairs with Swedish TV personality Ulrika Jonsson and FA secretary Faria Alam, made headlines. The media revelled in the idea that this sophisticated, Scandinavian football intellectual in his fifties had a dirty side.
Eriksson later said he had no regrets, admitted that his marriage to Nancy Dell'Olio had already broken down and that he had fallen in love with Alam. When asked about the one piece of advice he wished he had been given when he first arrived in the UK, Eriksson said: The Independent: “It would be easy to say, 'Don't look at women.' [But] one could say that there is something wrong in this country that so much is said about private life.”
His contentious relationship with the press reached its peak in January 2006, just a few months before the World Cup in Germany, when the News from around the world The notorious 'fake sheik' Mazher Mahmood lured Eriksson into a covert trap. The England manager was tricked into suggesting he would give up his job for a lucrative contract at Aston Villa and persuade Beckham to join him. He was also filmed making derogatory remarks about England stars, saying Ferdinand was 'lazy' and Rooney had 'a hot temper'.
For all of Eriksson's obvious wisdom, he also had a naivety that was cruelly exploited. The English Football Association (FA) announced days later that he would leave his post after the upcoming World Cup. The association stressed that the decision had nothing to do with the News from around the world Story.
Mahmood was later put in prison and News from around the world was shut down in the wake of a scandal. But that was little consolation for Eriksson, who said in 2016: “This man was a disaster for my professional life. England was the biggest job of my life and he took it away from me. I probably would have been fired anyway if England hadn't won the World Cup in 2006, but in fact I was fired because of the fake sheikh; 90 percent of what he said about me were lies.”
“The newspaper apologized six months later, but by then it was too late. I had lost the biggest job of my life and my reputation was in tatters.”
Eriksson continued his varied coaching career for over a decade, taking charge of Manchester City and Leicester from 2013 to 2017, as well as Mexico, Ivory Coast, the Philippines and several clubs in China during the country's ill-fated football boom period.
During the pandemic, he returned to Sweden to live and work in the western region of Värmland, where he grew up and continued to be highly respected as a down-to-earth man and doyen of football. Only a bout of terminal cancer put an end to his long-standing love affair with the game.
“I was perfectly healthy, but then I collapsed, fainted and ended up in the hospital,” Eriksson said in January. “And it turned out I had cancer. The day before, I had run five kilometers. It just came out of nowhere. And that's shocking.”
“I'm not in a lot of pain. But I've been diagnosed with a disease that can be slowed down but not operated on. It is what it is.”
At the height of his fame, Eriksson's sex life became the butt of many jokes and his footballing prowess was sometimes mocked – the result of a successful career reduced to a near-impossible role as England manager. Yet over time he retained his popularity in Sweden, Britain and elsewhere as someone who, while flawed, was gentle and cheerful, with a sense of humour and an ever-optimistic attitude in the face of negativity, in football and in life.
“You can trick your brain,” he said of dealing with terminal cancer. “See the positive in things, don't wallow in misery, because of course that is the greatest misery. But make something good out of it.”
