‘WHEN THE NEWS OF THE WORLD CLOSED IT FELT LIKE A BIRTHDAY’

10 Aug 2024 - Saturday Magazine

Portrait: Tom Jenkins

Sven-Göran Eriksson was the England men’s team’s first foreign manager – a quiet Swede who was blamed for their failure and had his private life splashed across the tabloids. He talks to Simon Hattenstone about facing a terminal illness, losing millions - and why he doesn’t envy Gareth Southgate’s successor.

‘THE NEW ENGLAND MANAGER HAS TO WIN. 

EVERYTHING ELSE IS A FAILURE. 

I FEEL SORRY FOR WHOEVER COMES IN. 

IT WILL BE A BRAVE MAN WHO TAKES ON THAT JOB’

SVEN-GÖRAN ERIKSSON IS SAYING HIS FAREWELLS to the world. The former England men’s football manager has pancreatic cancer, and is approaching the end of his life. In January, he announced he had at most a year to live. He is keen to talk. But he wants to do it in Sven style – calm, measured, drama-free. He tells me he wants to set the record straight. “I had a lot to do with the press in a lot of countries, but especially in England. So why not tell my truth? What I think is the truth.”

Eriksson was England’s first foreign manager. He seemed to belong more to the contemplative world of an Ingmar Bergman film than the cut and thrust of football – professorial, urbane, with a distinctive high forehead, spectacles and a kindly face. He wore immaculately pressed suits on the touchline and rarely showed emotion. While other managers threw tantrums, kicked water bottles or applauded referees ironically, Eriksson sat in silence and watched. He could just as easily have been meditating as managing a football team.

But Eriksson surprised us, too. He was a Casanova on the quiet. Actually, not even on the quiet. He arrived in England with his partner Nancy Dell’Olio, a glamorous, larger-than-life socialite and lawyer. Then there were affairs with TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson and FA secretary Faria Alam, which were lapped up by the tabloid press. At times, his life as England manager felt like a cartoon strip – Carry on Sven!

The tabloids did their best to destroy Eriksson, as they had so many England managers beforehand. But now there was something more sinister going on. This was the shameless – and eventually shamed – noughties, when the redtops were at their ugliest and most rapacious. They believed they could get away with anything, thanks to new technology. Eriksson was one of the most prominent public figures to have their phones serially hacked, and like many victims it left him scarred.

Today he lives in Sunne, in Värmland, Sweden, where he was born. Eriksson’s house looks out over the magnificent Fryken lake. Värmland is rural and remote, and few people leave like he did as a young man. We were supposed to meet here, but he feels too weak, so we Zoom instead.

His face is bloated from the treatment he is receiving, but he looks stronger than I expected. How is he feeling? “Erm, today I’m OK,” he says uncertainly. Today is Thursday, and he’s had chemotherapy the last three days. It’s extending his life, but it knocks the stuffing out of him. Eriksson is determined to make the most of his final days. He has written a book, A Beautiful Game, which is due out in November, while a film about his life is launched by Amazon Prime in a couple of weeks. The documentary, simply called Sven, provides an intimate and unvarnished insight into a complex life.

Eriksson has been misunderstood in many ways – not least financially. When he arrived as England manager on a £4m-a-year contract, he was labelled greedy. His critics said he was fixated with money. The truth is that his obsession was, and remains, football. “Yesterday I saw five games from the Olympic Games,” he says.

Five? “Yeah, I saw all of them on television.” That really is obsessive, I say. He laughs. He’s got a lovely laugh. More of a giggle really. “Yes, obsession. Yes, it’s a drug. In the Euros I saw every game.”

He talks about the current England men’s team, how they failed again at the final hurdle, and what that will mean for the successor to Gareth Southgate, who resigned in July. “Think of the pressure the new manager will have on his shoulders. Southgate – two finals, one semifinal, and that’s not good enough for the English. So the next one has to win. Everything else is a failure. I feel sorry for whoever comes in. If he doesn’t win a big tournament, he will be criticised – and the players, of course. It will be a brave man who takes on that job.”

Despite England getting to the final of the Euros, Southgate was lambasted. Gary Lineker called the 1-1 draw with Denmark “a shit performance” and suggested he was “tactically inept”. After a disappointing 0-0 draw against Slovenia, Southgate went over to the fans to applaud them. Some threw cups of beer at him, booed at him and shouted “Fuck off Southgate” and “Southgate out”. Eriksson says it’s a terrible way to treat a man who has achieved so much in his eight years as manager. “He did great things with England. You cannot take that from him. The results are there.” Eriksson believes the current England squad may well be the best ever, which is saying something given that his players were known as the “golden generation”. But, he says, there is still something holding them back. “It is the same for England all the time. I’m very, very sorry to say it. I had a good team, this year in Europe you had an extremely good squad, the best players in the whole tournament, but in the end something is missing. I don’t know what it is.”

Why can’t England win a tournament? “One of the reasons is the expectation the press put on the players.” The longer the England men’s team goes without winning a tournament, he says, the more of a millstone it becomes: “1966 is a long time ago. England is a football nation and you have the best league in the world. You definitely have the players. So I think it’s more mental than technical or tactical.”

ERIKSSON, AGED 76, GREW UP WATCHING FOOTBALL with his father. Sven senior was a bus driver and his mother, Ulla, worked in a textile store. Sven senior didn’t play the game, but he took little Sven to just about every local match from the age of five. By 13, Eriksson was working as the baker’s assistant in his summer holidays. The pastry chef, Åsen, coached the local fourth division team, Torsby IF. As they baked, the two of them would talk football, and Åsen would draw tactics in the flour on the baking sheets. In 1964, at 16, Eriksson made his debut for Torsby. He says he was a “distinctly average” right-back. But he was already becoming a profound thinker about the game.

When he started out, football was very much one-on-one – the left-back marked the right-winger, the right-back marked the left-winger, and the two centrebacks marked the forwards. One day the young Eriksson was being roasted by a winger, so he suggested that one of the centre-backs move wider to cover him. It was transformational in the most Sven of ways – incremental, pragmatic, unobtrusive.

At 18, he was a regular in the Torsby team. By day, he worked at the local state insurance office, in the evening he trained. One night, he and his friends got drunk on glögg and discussed what they would do with their lives. Eriksson told them he was going to be famous. He really believed it – his mother had told him he was “special”, and who was he to question her. It was an outrageous thing to say in Värmland, where no one was better than the next person and the concept of fame barely existed. In 1971, he switched clubs to SK Sifhälla after moving to the town of Säffle to study economics. A year later, he was playing for KB Karlskoga in the second division, and teaching PE by day. That’s as good as it got for him as a player. By 27, he’d given up the game to coach.

In 1977, at the age of 29, he married Ann-Christine Pettersson, with whom he had two children. But football still took priority. The wedding had to be postponed for a match. He admits that his children didn’t see enough of him when they were young.

After retiring as a player, he became Tord Grip’s assistant at Degerfors. Within a year, Eriksson had taken over from Grip, who had left to become assistant manager of Sweden. Astonishingly, he went straight from the third division club to managing Gothenburg, Sweden’s second most successful club. Eriksson was still only 30, and few supporters had heard of him.

It was here that he achieved the seemingly impossible, winning the Uefa Cup with a semi-professional club. His teams didn’t play expansive or sexy football, but somehow he had turned his plucky part-timers into champions on the international stage. He soon became one of the world’s elite managers.

What made him a good manager? “Well, I don’t know if I was a good manager, but if I was good at anything it was to create a good atmosphere in the club, not only the team. I think that was my strength, more than technique.” You gained their respect? He beams at the word. “Yes respect is a great word. If you show respect to the people around you, they will show respect to the people around them.”

We talk about his greatest achievements. He lists them quickly and modestly. “Gothenburg in the 1980s played in an amateur league and we went on to win what is now the Europa League. So that was a great moment for Swedish football. Then Benfica, a big jump. Lazio, a big jump. But then came the biggest job I had, which was England, of course. We didn’t win anything, but that was the highlight.”

He yo-yoed between Portugal and Italy, winning numerous trophies – three league titles at Benfica and, remarkably, Serie A with Lazio in 2000 – only the second time the Rome club has won the league title in its 124year history. Wherever he went, he increased his value.

And then England came calling. In early 1999, Glenn Hoddle had been sacked after he suggested that disabled people were being punished for sins in a previous life. He was replaced by Kevin Keegan, who lasted less than two years before he resigned in October 2000 saying he “wasn’t up to the job”. To be fair, none of the 17 managers and caretakers who succeeded Alf Ramsey, England men’s 1966 World Cup-winning boss, have been up to it. The Mirror screamed at Bobby Robson “In the name of Allah, go” after his England team drew with Saudi Arabia in 1988. Graham Taylor was depicted as a turnip in the Sun after England lost to Sweden and exited the 1992 European Championships after finishing bottom of the group stage (headline: Swedes 2 Turnips 1). Steve McClaren, who briefly and disastrously succeeded Eriksson, was labelled “A wally with a brolly” in the Daily Mail, after watching his England team lose 3-2 to Croatia in 2008 while standing under an umbrella in the rain.

Managing England might have been a poisoned chalice, but Eriksson regarded it as the greatest challenge in world football. And he had no doubt he was the man for the job. He had never failed in management, and he was convinced he would win England its first major football trophy in more than 30 years. “It’s a big job. Huge job. Even bigger than I thought when I took it.” What made it such an attractive proposition? “The status. I think every coach in the world would have loved that job. And the fact that they hadn’t won anything for so long made it even more interesting.”

Interesting yes, but maybe not quite so enviable as Eriksson believed. Soon after his appointment, he met Tony Blair at Downing Street. If Eriksson had any doubts about the task he faced, the then prime minister quickly set him straight. “Tony Blair said, ‘Welcome to England. Shall we take a bet?’ ‘What d’you mean by that?’ I said. ‘Who’s going to keep the job longest, you or me?’ he said. ‘Because Sven, they are both impossible jobs and we will be sacked sooner or later, both of us.’ He won the bet. I was sacked earlier than him.” (Blair resigned in 2007, a year after Sven’s exit.)

Eriksson’s England was a squad full of stars. David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Paul Scholes – and that was just the midfield. He had a similar problem to Southgate: too many great players and not knowing how to knit them together.

But the players loved working with him. In the film, Beckham, his captain, says: “I loved him from day one. He protected the players and treated them with respect.” Which player was Eriksson closest to? “I hope I was close to everyone, but of course you speak to the captain more than the other players, so that was the closest relationship for sure.”

Has he remained close to Beckham? 

“Yes. He sends me messages asking how I am.” Who was the most talented player? “There were a lot. But Rooney came when he was 17 and made his debut for the international team.” He inhales sharply at the memory. “He was a huge talent. Yep.”

Eriksson really did seem like the man who could break the jinx, particularly after an incredible 5-1 away win in Germany in a qualifying match for the 2002 World Cup. Not surprisingly, that’s his favourite game as manager. “Most England fans remember that. If I’m in London, I still get taxi drivers saying, ‘Sven, Germany 1 England 5!’”

Eriksson’s England qualified for all three tournaments they entered – two World Cups and one European championship – and he took them to the quarter-finals in each one. By the time he left, he had improved England’s world ranking from 17th in 2001 to fifth in 2006. It wasn’t that he had failed; just that he hadn’t succeeded.

The press proved more problematic than the football. He had plenty of experience of the media – in Italy, three daily sports newspapers scrutinised everything he did football-wise, for good and bad. But they left his private life untouched. It was regarded as an irrelevance. Here it couldn’t have been more different. “In Italy, they kill you if you don’t win football games. If you play bad football, they will attack you. And that’s fairer. They judge me for the work I’m doing. But never in Italy in 13 years have I had stories in the papers about my private life.” Was he shocked? “Yes, shocking is the right word.” It wasn’t just the publication of tittle-tattle that horrified him, it was the amount of space they gave it. “Jesus it’s not like an article. It’s first page to the last three pages, it was everywhere.”

The tabloids sniffed around his private life from day one. “When I became the England manager they started to look for bad things. They phoned my ex-wife, for example, offering a lot of money to speak about me. She said, ‘I will speak about my ex-husband, but it will only be positive things.’ ‘We don’t want to hear that,’ they said. ‘It must be bad.’ It’s horrible. She phoned me and said, ‘What’s going on? They want to hear bad things about you.’”

His relationship with Nancy Dell’Olio was complex, but he didn’t feel that was any business of the press. Dell’Olio was married to the Italian property lawyer Giancarlo Mazza, 27 years her senior, when she and Eriksson began an affair. In his memoir, My Story, he writes: “Giancarlo said Nancy was expensive and impossible, but still the best thing that had happened to him. I think he was telling me not to take her away from him. I probably should have listened to him.” At one point, he bought another apartment so they could live separately. By that time, he says, their relationship was long over.

The tabloids gorged on his relationship with the Italian-American Dell’Olio. She was loud, funny and publicity-hungry – the opposite of Eriksson. When Eriksson was rumbled over his affairs, they had a field day. He was devastated because he, rather than his team, had become the news. “We had a qualification game a week after I’d been in the news, and I thought, ‘What shall I tell the players? Because it’s not good.’ So I told them, ‘I’m extremely sorry you read about me on the first page and not only the last page,’ and one of the players, I don’t remember who it was, said, ‘Boss, welcome to England!’ They took it like ‘Who cares??’”

But Eriksson cared. “They wrote so much about women. I had difficulties accepting any of it because between a man and a woman things can happen. I was not married. I think it was wrong. And they wrote about the money I earned. But it was exactly the same as I had earned in Lazio, to the pound.”

The timing of the “scoops” was so cynical, he says. They invariably coincided with major tournaments. While the media put immense pressure on the team to win, it also did its best to sabotage their chances by causing disruption.

In April 2002, five weeks before the World Cup, the Daily Mirror revealed that he and Ulrika Jonsson were seeing each other, under the headline “Sven and Ulrika’s secret affair”, with the subhead “Yes, we know it’s amazing – read this astonishing story”. Even the Guardian reported “Sven ‘playing away’ with Ulrika” on its news pages.

Fast forward two years to 2004, and the News of the World revealed that Eriksson was having a fling with Faria Alam who worked at the FA and had recently had a relationship with FA boss Mark Palios. This time the story emerged two weeks after the Euros finished, when Eriksson was under pressure for having lost another quarter-final. It was Alam who ultimately paid the price when she resigned from the FA, saying her position had become untenable. (In 2008, Dell’Olio told Piers Morgan that she slapped Eriksson when she discovered he was cheating on her with Alam.)

He didn’t know where the newspapers were getting their stories from and became suspicious of those closest to him. Were they telling tales on him for money? At the same time, his family became wary of being seen with him. His daughter, Lina, told him she didn’t want him to come to her graduation ceremony at the University of East Anglia because he would inevitably be followed by paparazzi.

It was affecting his daily life in a serious way. “When I was on holiday or in Stockholm, or going out for dinner with a woman, the English paparazzi were there waiting for me. I couldn’t find out who was talking. I thought, ‘Is it my girlfriend, my brother?’ You get suspicious. Somebody very, very close to me has to be talking about what I’m going to be doing next weekend. I started to count how many people know about this.”

In 2011, five years after leaving the England job, Eriksson says the Metropolitan police got in touch with him. “Scotland Yard called and said, ‘Your mobile has been hacked and they’ve been listening to all your calls.’ And I said, ‘Ah, now I understand everything. ‘Sven,’ they said, ‘that’s what everybody’s saying in your position.’”

The scandal that ultimately did for Eriksson was the result of entrapment. In January 2006, five months before the World Cup finals, he was the victim of a News of the World sting. The newspaper reported that while being treated to lobster and £900 worth of vintage champagne, he told a wealthy Arab businessman preparing a takeover of Aston Villa that he would quit England if they won the World Cup to become the Villa manager on a £5m-a-year salary, and that he could persuade David Beckham to leave Real Madrid and join them. The businessman turned out to be the News of the World’s infamous reporter Mazher Mahmood, also known as the “Fake Sheikh”. The story was the final straw for the FA, which announced a few days later that Eriksson would stand down after the World Cup, despite having a contract running till 2008. The FA had bowed to the pressure of a corrupt press. When FA chief executive Brian Barwick (who had replaced Mark Palios after the Faria Alam story broke) told Eriksson they were dismissing him, Eriksson said, “So it’s true that the News of the World runs England.”

In 2011, the phone hacking scandal led to the closure of the News of the World after 168 years of publication. Five years later, Mahmood was jailed for 15 months after being found guilty of perverting the course of justice over another entrapment story, this time involving pop star Tulisa Contostavlos.

How did Eriksson feel the day the News of the World closed? “It was like a birthday!” he says with relish. “I mean they didn’t show any morals at all.”

In his final press conference as England manager, just after being knocked out by Portugal (on penalties, of course), Eriksson made a memorable speech. England had played an hour with 10 men after Wayne Rooney had been sent off for petulantly stamping on Ricardo Carvalho. “You, much more than me, need Wayne Rooney in the next few years so, please, pay attention, don’t kill him, I beg you,” he said. “Take it easy with Rooney, for your own sake. You need him, so take care of him.” He blamed himself for the defeat and apologised for another World Cup failure. It was a heroic and humble speech; almost biblical in casting himself as the sacrificial lamb. I mention it to Eriksson, and he smiles. “Yes, I remember that. It was the last press conference, in Germany. Rooney was young and he was one of the future, for sure. That’s why I said, ‘Don’t kill him, kill me. You need him, but you don’t need me.’” And did they kill you? “Sort of – they did, yes.”

ERIKSSON HAD NEVER BEEN SACKED until the England job. After that, he drifted from post to post like a footballing hobo – a year here, a year there, and then he’d be given the boot. Perhaps it said more about the callous nature of professional football than it did him. Along the way he learned even more about the grubby side of the game. There was a season at Manchester City, which had just been taken over by the former prime minister of Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra, whose human rights record was as dodgy as his finances. Eriksson was given about a week to build a new squad. City beat their great rivals Manchester United home and away for the first time in 38 years. The trouble was that Shinawatra only spoke to him when City were winning. Sure enough, he was fired at the end of the season. Over the next 11 years, he managed seven teams – Mexico, Ivory Coast, Philippines, Leicester City and three Chinese clubs – before calling it a day in 2019.

His most bizarre stint was at division two club Notts County, where he was appointed director of football in 2009 after it had been taken over by a Middle East consortium that had bought the club via a subsidiary called Munto Finance. Eriksson dealt with an English man, Russell King, who told him that billions would be invested in the club with the goal of transforming Notts County into a top Premier League club within five years. Eriksson was thrilled at the idea, and called it “the biggest challenge of my life”. He says he was stupid – and it’s hard to disagree. “I started to have my doubts when the milk bill wasn’t paid,” he says.

The way he tells it, the Notts County venture sounds like a cold war farce. He was asked to go out to North Korea to complete a mineral deal that was at the heart of the investment into the club. But there was no mineral deal, and there were no billions. “It was built on lies, and I still don’t understand today why they do things like that if they don’t have the money,” Eriksson says with a touching innocence.

Carry on Sven! was back in the news. “They fixed a meeting with North Korean officials, and I met the chairman and manager of the national team.” Eriksson says he didn’t have a clue what he was doing there. “They knew I was a member of the Fifa committee, and they said they wanted a good draw in the World Cup.” He laughs, still bewildered. “I said, ‘I can’t fix that. It’s impossible.’” Eriksson later discovered King was a convicted fraudster.

It was around this time that he found out his own finances were in freefall. Although Eriksson had always enjoyed a lavish salary, he never looked after his money, and hired financial adviser Samir Khan to manage his wealth. In 2012, he received a call from his bank, Coutts, to say he was on the verge of bankruptcy and that it would no longer handle his assets. Eriksson discovered Khan had lost him more than £10m in failed investments. In 2013, he took Khan to court, alleging the adviser had defrauded him. Eriksson ended his claim for damages when Khan was declared bankrupt. In court, Eriksson got an apology from Khan, but no financial redress.

He tells me today that he was at least partly to blame for being so gullible. “I was never interested in money – I never took care of it and trusted people to do that for me. I was stupid not to control where the money went. I realised that when I didn’t have any more cash!” He laughs, and says he’s just as clueless today. “I still don’t know what I have in the bank.”

He might not have learned about money, but I sense he’s learned plenty about non-material values. He seems at peace with himself; a man who’s never been so sure of what’s important to him. He now sees more of his two children, Johan and Lina, than he ever did. Journalists might talk about the famous women from his distant past, but he’s been with his Panamanian partner, Yaniseth Alcides, for 16 years. He tells me how happy he is with Yaniseth, a former nightclub dancer he met when coaching Mexico.

Does he appreciate family more than he used to? “Yes. I have Yaniseth, and my children are coming Saturday. So of course you appreciate everything. Also small things like friends saying in passing, ‘Are you free for a cup of coffee?’ ‘Yes of course, come in.’ And we sit talking about old memories on the football pitch.” He lights up at the thought of visits from old friends. “So I appreciate small things much more than I did.” Has being terminally ill made him feel different about life? “In one way for sure – to wake up and feel good, to be alive, I appreciate it much more than I did a year ago or 10 years ago.”

You look surprisingly well, I say. “Yes!” he says. “So far, I’m a healthy sick man.” Is he scared of dying? “Well, to say no to that, I would guess, it’s a lie. Sometimes it goes through your head, but I try not to think of it.” Yet at the same time he is clearly putting his house in order – telling his truth to the world, visiting clubs he managed and embracing the love from fans, completing his bucket list (in April he realised a lifelong dream to manage Liverpool at Anfield, taking charge for a charity legends game against Ajax).

After decades of globetrotting, Eriksson is back where he started – looking over the lake in Värmland, preparing for the end, and hoping he can stave off the inevitable for just a little longer. “The only thing we know is we’re all going to die sooner or later.” He pauses. “Hopefully later.”