on power from the Klaralven, or Clear river, there is no industry to speak of now. There is a high-tech, state-of-the-art sawmill, owned by the Finns, and a small electronics plant, but the main employer is the hospital. With a population of 5,000, the village is the municipality for the northern part of the mostly wooded picturesque province of Varmland, which measures some 200 km in length. The region prospers on two tourist seasons, catering for all the usual winter sports and summer activities like canoeing and rafting. Lake Vanern, the largest in Scandinavia, is a magnet for anglers, while for wildlife enthusiasts there are elk and wolves in abundance. The wolf is Varmland’s official emblem.
It is against this bucolic background that young Sven, or ‘Svennis’ as he was quickly to become known, was raised. He grew up in a small, working-class home – so small that a lounge-diner-kitchenette was the main living room. A neighbour recalled: ‘They weren’t poor, but they had hard times. There were not many luxuries.’ It was a close family, in every sense, and the England coach still talks to his parents on the telephone every day.
Ski jumping, with a club called SK Bore, was his passion more than football when he was very young. He told me: ‘I learned from the age of five, and became quite good at it. With the club, I travelled all over Varmland, and into Norway, for competitions. It is a sport you have to start when you are very young, and have no fear. You’d never dare to have a go when you were older. The trouble was, when I was little they didn’t have skis for kids, we had to use adult ones. To get mine to the top of the slope, ready to push off, I had to carry them up one at a time. They were very heavy for a little boy, much too heavy to take two.’ In common with all the other children making their first jump, the diminutive Svennis started at 15 ft, before eventually working his way up to 65. ‘I loved it,’ he says, ‘but by the age of 15 I had to choose between ski jumping and football, and football won.’
The extremes in Swedish society made him a young socialist of the old school. ‘When I was young, I was far out on the left politically. I thought everything was unfair then. I was never politically active, but I was radical in my opinion.’ A friend from his teenage days said: ‘One of his dreams, when he was 19 or 20, was to move to South America, buy a plantation there and be nice to the workers, paying them well. He wanted to be a philanthropist.’
Charity had its limits, however. Sven’s brother Lars, eight years his junior, recalls how Sven always had to beat him at everything, irrespective of the age difference. ‘He was very competitive, even when I was little.’
Eriksson is a typical product of his environment, according to Mats Olsson, of the Torsby Tourist Bureau, who has worked with him in promoting the area. Olsson told me: ‘If you meet his parents, you will see where he got his calmness and laid-back character from. He’s a typical guy from around here. We have a saying that goes: “Let ordnar sig alltid, och om det inte gor det, sa kvittar det.” Roughly translated, it means: “Everything will fix itself, and if it doesn’t it won’t be so bad.”’ Eriksson knows the adage well, but while he accepts the translation, he prefers his own interpretation. ‘I like to think it means: “Don’t worry about things you have no control over,” which is a good way to live your life.’ He accepts that the pace of life is very different in Varmland, which is backwoods in more ways than one. ‘Their attitude is: “Never do today what can be put off until tomorrow.” It must be nice to be able to live that way, stress-free.’
Discussing old times with Eriksson’s parents is no longer easy. My predecessor at The Sunday Times, Brian Glanville, tells a story about two groups of journalists, tabloid and broadsheet, journeying together through the desert. Stumbling upon an oasis, the broadsheet boys fall to their knees to drink, only to spot the tabloid hacks relieving themselves upstream. The waters around Torsby have been well and truly poisoned by the redtops, whose foot-in-the-door intrusions in search of dirt at the time of Eriksson’s appointment have left the locals wary, and sometimes downright hostile, to English visitors. His friends are very, very protective, and in the case of Sven and Ulla Eriksson, reporters from their son’s adopted country are no longer welcome. ‘They have had a bad rap from your people, who came pestering them, knocking on their door uninvited and misquoting them to make their stories more dramatic,’ Olsson explained. ‘The English reporters made them almost reclusive.’
Sven-Goran told me: ‘If you go to see them now, they will welcome you, and give you coffee, but they won’t tell you much I’m afraid. They learned to be like that the hard way. It started as soon as the FA offered me the job. In the next few days they [the tabloid press] interviewed my mother, my brother in Portugal, my son in America, my ex-wife, who I hadn’t seen for six years, my ex-mother-in-law and my old maths teacher in Torsby. I want to be friendly, but I must try to defend my privacy and my family, especially when lies are written.’
Understandable this may be, but it is also a great pity, not least because the Erikssons have an interesting story to tell. In an interview conducted through a third party, Ulla said: ‘His [Sven-Goran’s] foundations are still very much in the Torsby values we have here. We care deeply about home, family, community, hard work and respect. I think he has carried those values with him all his life, and he takes them with him in his work. He tries to instil these values in his football teams. When he was young, it was always sport, sport and more sport. In the summer months we only ever saw him at mealtimes. He would go out in the morning and only return to the house to eat. Then he would be out again, always to the athletics track or football pitch. It was the same during the winter. Then it would be skiing, skating and hockey. He was best at ski jumping. He was never afraid of how dangerous it might be. Sometimes he would fall, but he was never seriously injured.
‘Sport always came first in his life, but he was good at school as well. He loved to read books anything from children’s adventure stories to Hemingway. I had to join a book club just to keep up with his hunger for reading. His school grades were good, but he always did best at sport. With most children, if you throw a ball to them, they will try to catch it and throw it back to you. Sven didn’t. He always wanted to kick it. If there was no ball, he would make do with anything, usually stones in the street. I remember dressing him up in his best clothes and a new pair of shoes for a day out, and while he was waiting he went outside and had a kick around. His shoes were almost ruined. When I told him off, he said: “You won’t be saying that when I’m a football star.”’
Sven senior says of his pride and joy: ‘Even when he was young, he had the sort of mind which wanted to analyse everything he did. He kept a notebook to record all his performances and chart his progress at every sport. He was a well-behaved boy. He kept himself too busy to get into any trouble. But we never pushed him into anything. We just wanted him to grow up a good person and to fulfil himself.’
Sven remembers watching English football on television every Saturday. ‘From when I was about 14, I sat down with my father every Saturday afternoon and didn’t move. It was the highlight of the week. When I was younger, I supported Liverpool.’ And now? ‘Today I support England, no club team.’
A visit to the young Svennis’s secondary school, Frykenskolan, found his old maths teacher, Mats Jonsson, happy to reminisce about his most celebrated former pupil, who lived just across the road, 50 metres from the schoolhouse. Jonsson, 65 but still teaching part-time, also coached Torsby when Eriksson started playing, and told me: ‘I had him in my maths class from 13 to 16. He was a clever boy. Very quiet and calm. He did everything I hoped he would do. He was always a pleasant pupil. I had a class of just over 30, and he was always in the upper half at maths.
‘He played football every day, it was always his passion. I was the coach at Torsby FC at the time, and when he was 16 he came to play there. He was in the first team at 17, but while he was always regarded as a good footballer at school, at club level he was never more than second rate. He wasn’t top class, never a remarkable player. But in football, as at school, he worked very hard and made the best of himself. At that time, we played with two markers and three players just in front of them, and he played on the right of those three. Today, you would probably call it right wing-back. It was a role for which he had to be very fit. It was a hard job I know, I’ve tried it myself – always up and back, up and back. Sven was always a hard worker, so it suited him. When he went on to play for better teams, it was as an out-and-out defender.