How Eriksson shaped a generation of Europe’s best managers

Sven-Goran Eriksson gave up some very appealing parts of his life when he accepted the job of England manager: the higher bar on what was deemed relevant public information about his private life; the view of Rome’s Piazza del Popolo when he opened the curtains of his apartment in the morning.
Signing up to become England’s first foreign head coach also meant he left the fast-track of elite club management just as he was absolutely mastering it.
When he was headhunted by England, at 52, he had just achieved something truly mould-breaking, guiding a club from outside the privileged clique of Italy’s north to the title in what was then the game’s strongest domestic competition. Yes, Eriksson’s Lazio, the Serie A champions in 2000, had sudden money, but the more time passes the more that peak moment of Eriksson the expert strategist, the dressing-room sage, the unflappable absorber of pressure, stands out as meteoric.
With his death on Monday at the age of 76, there’s a temptation to wonder what he might have become had he not been drawn to what he considered an irresistible opportunity with England. He had spent 13 years working at the sort of Italian clubs habitually kept at arm’s length from the biggest prize by AC Milan and Juventus’s duopoly. His Lazio crashed the party.
He became only the second coach in a decade to stop Marcello Lippi or Fabio Capello, the Klopp and Guardiola of that epoch, from finishing top of Serie A. The field then opened up. Very soon Eriksson was watching, from London, two of his direct disciples, Carlo Ancelotti, who played under Eriksson at Roma, and Roberto Mancini, of Eriksson’s Sampdoria and Lazio, win the Italian title as coaches.
Had Eriksson stayed in club football, who knows? He might have compiled a management career as medalled as Ancelotti’s. He was as intrepid as a young coach as Ancelotti would become in middle age. He had made as precocious an impact as José Mourinho would 20 years later. The journey from remote and provincial Sweden, on the back of no great distinction as a player, to managing Gothenburg to the 1982 Uefa Cup, is a modern parable, a prototype for Mourinho at Porto.
In those upstart years he made a striking impression on the managerial greats. The late Johan Cruyff told this reporter how a young Eriksson had Cruyff’s full attention — not easily done — when Eriksson talked him through what football could learn tactically from ice hockey. This reporter, privileged to have interviewed Eriksson at length during his time in Italy, was always struck by his curiosity. And, like most, by his courtesy and those disarming moments of self-deprecation.
As he developed as a novice coach Eriksson would take learnings from everywhere. He’d turn up at English club training grounds in his Nordic overcoat to study methods and be wowed at how Leeds United’s toughest footballers were out practising in the sleet and gales in short sleeves. He admired the spirit. Many years later he turned up for his job interview at Sampdoria and encountered a different sort of player machismo, seeing the club’s star inside forward, Mancini, sitting on the managerial selection panel.
There, we have two snapshots from the Eriksson story that put into context the perception, during his England period, that he indulged some of his senior players. He always knew his own value but he made sure his alpha players felt theirs too. “He never lost his temper, was respectful, warm and approachable in helping players,” Ancelotti observed. “I always admire his ability to be unfazed by almost anything,” said Diego Simeone, a key warrior at Eriksson’s Lazio.
So he was never the scary martinet. Working his way up the elite of European club football had taught him the diplomacy needed in the tricky buffer zone between dressing room and boardroom. His CV, a catalogue of prestigious but combustible employers, is a tribute to that. He thrived at Benfica, where Eriksson restored the club to champion status in Portugal, retained the league title and was later invited back to lead the club to a European Cup final in 1990, an event Benfica have not attended since.
At Roma he won one of only six major trophies the club have achieved in the past 40 years. Sampdoria’s most recent significant silverware is the Eriksson-era Coppa Italia of 30 summers ago. Lazio, champions and European trophy winners under Eriksson, have not scaled comparable peaks since.
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After England he took on an array of jobs that, to put it kindly, kept track of the game’s global zeitgeist. He coached in China when Chinese football had wondrous budgets. He managed an African national team, Ivory Coast, at the first World Cup hosted in Africa. He guided the Philippines at their first Asian Cup. He was manager of Mexico, a gig for which, in terms of pressure and exasperating big-tournament glass ceilings, there are few better preparations than taking charge of England.
Most of those jobs were brief, and if there is a lasting Eriksson stamp in those territories, it may take a while to decipher them. But across Europe, from his pioneering work in his native Sweden, to Portugal and Italy, the legacy is plain. Those who played for his teams queued up, on hearing of his death, to praise and thank him. Many are now in the profession he mastered.
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One afternoon, sitting with Eriksson in his large, deluxe but eerily windowless office at Lazio’s Formello training ground, I remember noting the impressive stack of pre-match briefing papers on his desk — “It makes us look like we’re working hard,” he said, smiling — while counting the number of superstars, some Lazio players at the time, some loyalists from Eriksson’s past, who knocked on his door for a word.
Mancini popped in. He was by then being steered towards coaching, a role where he would make Inter Milan Serie A champions, Manchester City Premier League winners and Italy European champions. Simone Inzaghi, a young striker pushing to be as important for Eriksson’s Lazio as Mancini had been, was there. So was Simeone. A winger named Sérgio Conceição had just won Serie A alongside them.
That last trio have, in the past three years, won Serie A, La Liga and Portugal’s Primeira Liga as managers. Inzaghi and Simeone have taken Inter and Atletico Madrid to Champions League finals. For Inzaghi, their shared successes have a common father. “His influence is clear,” the Inter head coach said. “He was a source of inspiration for me, an example in life for all of us.”