I have to say we had better – players in that Torsby team, but he was always a very nice person to work with. When I told him to do something, he did it. You could always rely on him. As a coach, you have to say to a player: “You do that, and don’t worry about anything else.” If I taught him anything, it was that. The team worked in zones. We divided the pitch into zones, and in your zone, you were the boss. You might be needed to help out elsewhere, but first and foremost you had to be in control of your own area. It’s the same today, and I like to think I gave Svennis a little bit of grounding there.’ Eriksson smiled at the notion. ‘Mats was a nice man, but he knew nothing about football,’ he told me. ‘When he was in charge, we did a lot of running. That’s all I remember.’
Academically, the young Eriksson was a diligent, above-average rather than brilliant scholar. The school records are kept on file at the municipal offices in Torsby where, obliging to a startling degree for a Brit accustomed to bureaucratic bloody-mindedness, they searched the vaults and came up with Svennis’s exam papers. In his last year at Frykenskolan, aged 16, he gained very respectable grades in all subjects, doing best in maths, where he was marked AB. In Swedish language, an essay entitled ‘A Summer Place’ brought him a BA, and he gained the same grade in English, where a paper notable for its meticulous, painstaking writing included the translation of such portentous phrases as ‘He looked at me with pain-filled eyes,’ and ‘They’re going to X-ray him soon.’ The marker’s corrective red ink was in evidence only once, where Eriksson had written: ‘I finely [sic] knew my husband would bee [sic] alive.’ It will do his reputation with England fans no harm at all that his worst subject was German, where he got a straight B, one delicious howler seeing his word ‘Chou’ [sic,] corrected to ‘Auf Wiedersehen’.
‘My English wasn’t up to much, but I was good at writing when I was at school,’ Eriksson says. ‘I wrote a lot about Ernest Hemingway and his life. He was my favourite author. I also read a lot about the Greek philosophers. For a time, I wanted to be a writer – a sports reporter – and I thought about going to a sports journalism college.’
At Torsby FC – the ground is called ‘Bjornevi’, or ‘Bear Meadow’ – there is Eriksson memorabilia everywhere. There are bigger, better stadia to be found in non-league football in England, but the importance of this one to the local community extends way beyond its raison d’etre, and on my various visits there were Mothers’ Union meetings, IT for Beginners classes, and sundry similar extracurricular activities making use of the clubhouse facilities. On entering, the first thing you notice, immediately to the left, is an impressive trophy cabinet with more than 50 exhibits, central to which is a framed portrait of Eriksson in England garb. Closer examination reveals an autographed picture of the England squad, next to the Junior Football Shield 1999 and the Svennis Cup for Boys and Girls (10–13 age group). There are pennants from every club Eriksson has managed, a framed picture of Sampdoria, 1992/93 vintage (Des Walker to the fore) and, tucked away above a waste bin bearing the legend ‘Knickers’, Torsby team groups from 1966 and 1967, featuring a youthful Svennis, complete with luxuriant blond thatch.
When I called, nobody at the club spoke English, but the two old stalwarts present could not have been more helpful. By sign language, a man who appeared to be the caretaker indicated that I should follow him, and took me on a five-minute drive to meet one of Eriksson’s former teammates and best friends, Morgan Oldenmark (formerly known as Karlsson) who, together with his brother, runs the family printing business. Morgan (he changed to his wife’s surname because Karlsson is so common in Sweden), played in the same Torsby team as Eriksson before the latter left in 1971. Oldenmark, né Karlsson, was a striker, Eriksson played right-back. ‘Sven did nothing special, he just did his job,’ his friend recalled. ‘He was a good player for a coach to have. He did what he was told. He never lost his composure, or his temper, never shouted. He was a fine person. He was quiet, but he did have a sense of humour. He liked to laugh, and when we all went out together he’d enjoy himself and behave just like everyone else. He wasn’t always, how do you English say it? A goody-goody.
‘When a few of us went to Austria, skiing, we shared a room and he enjoyed himself all right. He was quite a good ski jumper, and when we were alpine skiing he’d never make any of the turns I made to slow down. He was fearless, never afraid of the speed of the downhill. Another time, when he was playing for Sifhalla, Torsby went on a trip to Gran Canaria – no more than a holiday, really and Sven came with us.’ To emphasize Eriksson’s sociability, Morgan produced snaps of the players on sun loungers by the swimming pool, the England manager-to-be clearly having a laddish good time. ‘Sven has always been a bit reserved, but when he knows the company he does like a laugh.’
The man himself tells a slightly different story. ‘Being in the limelight has never appealed to me. At Christmas [2001] I was invited to a concert, and a dinner for 70 afterwards. I arrived at the concert after it had started, and then said “no” to the dinner. I don’t like the celebrity thing. If I go to a party, I prefer to sneak in and stand in the corner. I don’t want to appear to be better than anyone else because I don’t consider myself special. My parents were ordinary working-class people, and that has definitely influenced me.’
Torsby Football Club have had their days in the sun, too, and were in the top division in Sweden as recently as 1997. In Eriksson’s time, however, they were never better than Division Three. His first ‘trophy’, in the year England were winning the World Cup, was a tin of coffee presented to each of the Torsby players promoted to that level. Oldenmark spoke nostalgically of the era when 3,000 would turn out for the local derby against Rannberg. ‘Nowadays, it’s 150.’
When the teacher, Mats Jonsson, stopped coaching the club, the local baker, Sven-Ake Olsson, known as ‘Asen’, took over, using flour on a baking tray, in place of the conventional blackboard, to school Eriksson and company in tactics. His old protegé remembers him well – and not just for football. ‘I used to work in Asen’s bakery to make some money,’ Eriksson says. ‘He was good at his job – and he knew his football, too.’
Now in his mid-seventies, Olsson remembers his doughboy-cum-right-back for his activities off the field, rather than anything he did on it. ‘Sven never drank much, unlike the others, but he had plenty of female attention.’ Eriksson’s first serious relationship was with Nina Thornholm, a beauty pageant contestant he met on his 18th birthday. After dancing the foxtrot at the local hop, he escorted her home. ‘Nothing more.’ They dated for nearly a year (‘he was always well-mannered, very proper’, Nina, who is now in her fifties, insisted), eventually moving into a flat together. Earning next to nothing from what was virtually amateur football, Eriksson supported them by working in the social security office, dealing with sickness benefits, where his colleagues included Mats Jonsson’s wife. It was not the life he wanted, however, and the relationship foundered on his sporting ambitions.
At 19 he did his National Service, spending 12 months in the Swedish Army. It was not a regime he enjoyed. ‘It was compulsory, so I had to do it, but it was not my sort of life,’ he told me. ‘You knew when you woke up in the morning what you’d be doing every minute of the day until you went to bed at night, and that’s extremely boring. I’m not one who likes having everything regimented and programmed for him like that.’
It was with great relief that on demob he resumed his studies at Gymnasium Amal, a college 160 km from Torsby, and then at Orebro, where he took a university course in sports science. It was at teacher-training college, at Amal, that he met Ann-Christin Pettersson [‘Anki’ to her friends], the daughter of the principal. They started dating in 1970 and married on 9 July 1977. Intellectually well-matched, and both keen to better themselves, they seemed ideally suited. Their first child, Johan, was born on 27 May 1979.
Ann-Christin says: ‘His determination to achieve what he wanted in life was the first thing that appealed to me, so you could say football brought us together. He never gives in. He knows what he wants and goes for it. I should know. I was his wife for 23 years.’
While studying at Orebro, Eriksson joined Karlskoga, where Tord Grip was player-coach. It was a bigger club, with a modern stadium, but it would be wrong to draw the conclusion that Eriksson’s playing career was taking off. Sten Johansson, a midfielder, played in the same Karlskoga team and told me: ‘In