It was traditionally said that the vocation that provided the best “apprenticeship” for death was philosophy. At a time when philosophers have greater concerns than their own mortality, perhaps that role has been assumed by the football manager. After Sven-Göran Eriksson announced that he was suffering from terminal cancer – he died in August, aged 76 – he was praised for his calm. He had an unfair advantage. For decades, he had been accustomed to a professional scenario in which control was illusory, in which the love of fans can “come and go” and you “can be fired at any time”. It is perhaps inevitable that Eriksson’s own preferred analogy was the football match. He said he hoped for “extra time” and his posthumously published book on “life and football” is entitled A Beautiful Game.
Eriksson was always serene, content with the idea that “things just happened”. At times he resembled the far-seeing yet otherworldly Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. He could be touchingly, at times hair-raisingly, susceptible to the charms and promises of strangers. While working as England manager, on a £4m annual contract, he accepted an invitation to Dubai, where he slagged off Rio Ferdinand and indicated openness to other offers – a sting arranged by the News of the World’s “fake sheikh”. “What had I done besides letting my naiveté get the better of me?” he asked in his excellent autobiography My Story (2013). “Nothing.” It was evidently a weakness he valued. In 2009, at the behest of the Notts County owners, he agreed to travel to North Korea and help land a minerals deal. He consulted the former chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, Ann Taylor, who urged him not to go. But Eriksson decided that he “wanted to look at the trip in positive terms”. As he put it, glass typically half full, “not a lot of people get to visit North Korea”.
A Beautiful Game, although begun before Eriksson’s diagnosis, has a valedictory, even testamentary spirit, and contains poems and a post-mortem epilogue by the writer Bengt Berg, a childhood friend. But it’s largely a retread of My Story, an engaging highlights package: his upbringing in rural Sweden and his short career as a left back; his time managing IFK Göteborg – where he won the Uefa Cup with amateur players – Benfica and four clubs in Italy; then his biggest and trickiest job, five years (2001-06) as England’s first foreign manager. Unfamiliar with tabloid journalism, he was surprised to find his love life endlessly picked over. But he took it all in his stride, responding with a wry smile or a shake of the head, and only occasionally a lawsuit. His later career was replete with daftness and drama, taking in not just the East Midlands – Leicester as well as Notts County – but Manchester, Shanghai, the Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico and Côte d’Ivoire. He must be one of the few people who spent time with both John Paul II and Peter Crouch.
Eriksson’s time with England receives by far the longest chapter. He admits to some communication difficulties – with the Liverpudlian players, for example, who, he rather surreally claims, spoke a mixture of Irish, Welsh and “the Lancashire dialect”. But there was also a coals-to-Newcastle element to the appointment. For virtually the first time he didn’t need to explain his taste for the 4-4-2 formation, which he had acquired in the 1970s from two young men from Croydon working in Sweden, Bob Houghton and Roy Hodgson.
What distinguished 4-4-2 was that it uses three rigid banks – defence, midfield, attack – and functions without a sweeper, playing behind the defence, or a number ten, operating between the midfield and the strikers. Eriksson gave short shrift to the idea that his more collective approach was a counterpart to Scandinavian social-democratic values, but it certainly reflected his belief in humility, collaboration and honest hard work.
It may also have been his undoing. Eriksson claimed that he adapted his philosophy to suit the available personnel – a pragmatic approach perhaps most strongly associated with Carlo Ancelotti, the current Real Madrid manager, who had played for Eriksson at Roma, and another 4-4-2 specialist, Arrigo Sacchi at Milan, but recognised the need to be malleable. In the early 2000s, Eriksson and Ancelotti, by then coaching Milan, faced a similar predicament: how to accommodate four great, essentially attacking, midfielders. Ancelotti’s response was to adopt the “Christmas tree” formation – 4-3-2-1, with two banks of midfielders. He also used a diamond midfield, a revision of the 4-4-2 in which the wide midfielders play narrower, and one central midfielder plays deeper, the other higher up.
Eriksson did experiment with a diamond – but while this suited England’s lack of a natural left-sided midfielder, it consigned Frank Lampard or Steven Gerrard to a defensive role. In the end the players didn’t like it and, for the 2004 Euros, Eriksson decided that the best way to accommodate star members of England’s Golden Generation was in a flat midfield. Paul Scholes took the hit, with David Beckham on the right, and Lampard and Gerrard in the centre.
For the latter half of Eriksson’s tenure, Lampard and Gerrard were probably the two most effective midfielders in the world. The debate over why they never gelled received almost as much coverage as Eriksson’s romantic life. Eriksson’s insistence that they “could play together” became a refrain. But however futilely counterfactual that risked sounding, José Mourinho, the greatest coach at the time, clearly saw potential in the partnership. In the summer of 2005, Mourinho tried to sign Gerrard to play alongside Lampard. But then Chelsea had an extraordinary player at the defensive base of his triangle midfield – Claude Makélélé.
Balancing a midfield was the topic of the day. When Real Madrid sold Makélélé in order to bring in David Beckham as their latest star, the team’s top player, Zinedine Zidane, said that they were adding another layer of gold paint to the Bentley while getting rid of the engine. And so it proved. You could certainly argue that Eriksson picked Beckham, who was deemed untouchable, instead of giving Gerrard and Lampard a Makélélé equivalent. But dropping him was not the only neglected possibility.
In Ancelotti’s system, the four attacking midfielders were facilitated by a hardworking battler. The position sacrificed was one of the two strikers, much to the consternation of Milan’s owner, Silvio Berlusconi. For Eriksson, a solution proved more elusive. In trying to make space for so much talent, he ended up betraying his belief in team coordination, the original appeal of 4-4-2. Scholes, Eriksson emphasised, was England’s “best player”, Beckham had “the world’s best right foot”, he “could not” leave either Lampard or Gerrard “on the bench”. But unlike at Madrid or Milan, the players had not come for huge transfer fees. He could have dropped whoever he wanted.
But Eriksson was also a victim of bad luck. He took charge of England for two World Cups and a European Championships. Before the first, Beckham broke a metatarsal; before the third, Wayne Rooney did. And the “broken toe bone curse” was not the only one. For different reasons, Rooney spent the end of two consecutive quarter-finals watching a televised broadcast of his teammates losing in a penalty shoot-out to Portugal, having left the field before the full-time whistle.
Eriksson worked with Rooney at a point when Rooney’s temper was still restricting his genius. He had sustained the metatarsal injury having worn longer studs with the aim of hurting an opposing player – John Terry, as it turned out – on the last day of the 2005-06 league season. Then 62 days later he got sent off for stamping on Terry’s Chelsea centre-back partner, Ricardo Carvalho of Portugal. And though the lack of chemistry between Gerrard and Lampard was maddening, it was ultimately less decisive than the remarkable fact that, after England battled on for an hour with only ten men in that World Cup quarter-final, both of those players managed to miss their penalties. (Eriksson often said he should have taken the mental side of shoot-outs more seriously.)
It’s also unclear that the Golden Generation were really golden at the same time. Michael Owen was more or less finished and Beckham had taken up his semi-retirement gig in Los Angeles before Rooney marked his 22nd birthday. The boring truth may be that whereas Eriksson had a lot of world-class talent to work with, it didn’t quite suit a diamond, a Christmas tree, or any other viable formation. That’s the curse of international management: you can’t recruit players.
For all his achievements, Eriksson’s legacy is personal as much as professional. In Gothenburg and Rome he is an object of worship, but among English fans and players, he is remembered with great fondness. The FA, confronted with another exceptional crop of players, has hired a foreign manager. Like Eriksson almost a quarter of a century ago, Thomas Tuchel is a divorced father of two in his early fifties, with a background as a hard-working but unremarkable defender, a strong record at club level and no previous international experience. Gareth Southgate is the predecessor whose record Tuchel is being asked to emulate, but Eriksson may prove no less useful an example – in his equanimity and kindly spirit, and for bequeathing a range of positive feelings that have survived the failure to live up to early sky-high expectations.
A Beautiful Game
Sven-Göran Eriksson with Bengt Berg
Michael Joseph, 304pp, £25
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[See also: Tirzah Garwood’s English satires]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024