Eriksson’s England era became a celebrity circus – but he wanted to enjoy life and was never bitter
Sven-Göran Eriksson doubted so much whether England could ever have a foreign manager that an initial approach was considered a joke.
Intrigued eventually by the ground-breaking opportunity, rather than being deterred by the indignation, the Swede would launch the Three Lions into five of the most frenzied years in their history.
Everything belied his suave demeanour – from allowing a celebrity culture to consume the team to being an unlikely headline-making lothario himself and, even, showing passion while delivering results for his adopted country.
It was a blessing and burden to inherit a Golden Generation of talent of David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and co – captivating the country with dazzling one-off displays but unable to deliver when it mattered most under the weight of expectation and pressure.
It is the failure to overcome the constant quarter-final barrier and lift a trophy that shaped Eriksson’s England legacy where football too often seemed secondary.
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But the Eriksson era did provide a mirror to the nation at the start of the new millennium.
How the public’s ravenous appetite to gaze into the private lives of the stars – and the legalities of intrusive tabloid reporting – was stretched to extremes, and only unearthed years later.
How patriotism could seem parochial or xenophobic – just as the Premier League was the platform for England opening up to the world.
For a coach arriving after league and cup wins with Lazio, it proved perplexing that his suitability focused on his nationality over coaching credentials.
“We’ve sold our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their lives in darkness.”
The Daily Mail headline set the tone for his introductory news conference.
Sven-Goran Eriksson in 2019. Pic: Reuters
He did try to sing God Save The Queen, feeling emotional as he realised the national standing he quickly assumed from 2001.
And doubters – some at least – were won over spectacularly on the turf of England’s greatest rival.
A 5-1 humiliation of Germany in Munich was followed a month later by another iconic moment of Eriksson’s reign – Beckham’s free kick that sealed a spot at the 2002 World Cup.
But the highs came in qualifying, falling short – always at the quarter-finals stage – in his three tournaments.
Too often it seemed more about fame than football around this England generation.
The high – or low – point of that came at his second and final World Cup in 2006.
Sven-Goran Eriksson at the 2006 World Cup with England. Pic: PA
As if managing Beckham, Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard wasn’t challenging enough, this was the era of the WAGs.
The celebrity circus around the Baden-Baden team base in Germany saw the players’ wives and girlfriends indulging in the media attention.
The insatiable appetite for a trophy matched the front page fodder the team – and their manager – provided.
Eriksson wanted to enjoy life but his privacy was exploited by the dark arts of tabloids.
Intimate details of affairs that the papers had a role in playing matchmaker to.
“I met Ulrika Jonsson on 8 December 2001, at some party hosted by the Daily Express, or maybe it was the Daily Star,” he recalled.
“The FA wanted me to travel around to various newspapers to be courteous and meet the editors. I visited the News Of The World too.”
It was the paper – closed in scandal by Rupert Murdoch in 2011 – he would blame for ending his England reign.
The notorious ‘fake sheikh’ had been used to trap him in a fictitious approach by Aston Villa ahead of the 2006 World Cup.
“I was extremely disappointed because I was sacked because of that,” Eriksson said. “I never accepted or understood that the News Of The World is so important… because I told the people at the FA – you believe in them or me.”
Who he could believe and trust was called into question by what he only later discovered was phone hacking.
Voicemail interceptions were linked to being behind the Daily Mirror’s revelation of his relationship with TV presenter Jonsson – another Swede who made it big in Britain.
“I think the football media was rather good. Sometimes they tried to kill me,” he said. “The other part of the media, that was a little bit of a surprise for me, because I wasn’t used to that.”
But he was never bitter – returning to English football to manage Manchester City just before the influx of Abu Dhabi wealth, dropping into the fourth division during a bizarre, brief spell as Notts County’s director of football and taking on a second-tier job at Leicester.
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The breadth of managerial roles after England – at three Chinese clubs, and the Mexico, Ivory Coast and Philippines national teams – showed Eriksson was happiest in the dugout.
“As a player I was not good at all,” he recalled. “I was not good enough to play first division in Sweden well, so the best decision I ever took in my professional career was when Tord Grip came to me and said, ‘It’s better you stop playing and be my assistant coach.’
“And that was when I was 27. So I had much better luck as a coach than a player for sure.”
The affection following Eriksson revealing his cancer diagnosis in January 2024 even allowed an emotional farewell to English football at Anfield by fulfilling a wish to manage Liverpool, as revealed on Sky News.
And assessments of his England reign seem more dispassionate as the trophy drought has gone on.
His immediate successor – Steve McClaren – didn’t qualify for Euro 2008 – and it took 12 years for an England men’s manager to win a knockout game.
But in his dying days, Eriksson was still thinking back to the 2006 World Cup.
“We should have done better,” he said. “So the criticism I and the team took after that tournament I think was fair.”
But what he could still never accept was why some questioned his right to ever have the job.
And while breaking new ground by becoming England’s first foreign manager, the nationality debate endures whenever an FA appointment is needed.
“There were people who did not like I was not English,” he lamented in retirement.
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
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In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
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Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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