psychologist for the first time. The engagement of Dr Willi Railo started a collaboration which endured for 25 years. The guided tour of his dark domain complete, the kit man passed me on to Degerfors’s latest manager who, with ice on the pitch, had taken his charges inside for midweek training in a hall that doubles as a basketball arena. Dave Mosson is the sort of gnarled Scot you stumble across coaching in remote outposts all over the world. Going into 2002, he was in his third stint at Degerfors, having initially replaced Eriksson in 1979. Originally from Glasgow, he was apprenticed to Nottingham Forest, under Johnny Carey. By way of residential qualification, he played for the England youth team, but realizing early that he might not be good enough to make a decent career out of playing the game, he attended Loughborough College as a PE student, and made the move to Sweden after his fiancée’s father, who was on the board at Karlstad FC, invited him over for a trial. ‘I did quite well, and I’ve been here ever since.’ He has coached five different clubs in the Swedish First Division.
Mosson first met Eriksson as a player. ‘I played for Karlstad and Sven for Karlskoga, the neighbouring town, so we came up against one another quite a few times. He was a very ordinary right-back. You would never have noticed him in a game. He never kicked his winger or overlapped much. He just did his job as best he could. I don’t think anybody in those days admired how he played football, but he was very passionate. The game has always been a passion for him.’
The expatriate Scot was later in charge of the coaching course which set Eriksson on the path to greater glory. Was the England coach-to-be a natural? ‘Yes, I’d say he was. Some are, some aren’t. He was not the dynamic sort. Some use a lot of vocals and gesticular [sic] action, and are generally dynamic in the way they work. He was never like that. He did things methodically, talking a lot. He was always a good communicator. When he talks now, of course, people are more inclined to listen.’
When Mosson took over from Eriksson at Degerfors they had just missed out on promotion from the First Division. ‘Under the Swedish system,’ he explained, ‘it wasn’t enough to win your division, you also had to get through a play-off system to get up. Under Sven, they were in the play-offs twice, and were promoted once. I took them up straight away.’ At this stage, it became apparent that Mosson was holding something back. There was an ambivalence behind the praise. When I mentioned this, there was a pregnant pause before he decided not to reveal all. ‘I won’t tell you what Sven was really like, because I don’t think it would do anybody any good. Let’s just say that he’s very good at maintaining a front.’ No amount of prompting and pressing would persuade him to elucidate. Steering a determined course away from the dangerous waters he had ventured into, he went on: ‘Sven has learned to keep his cool, to stay inside his shell. Swedes do that. They are very polite and reserved. They don’t like to be associated with any diversionary activity. He lived his life here no differently to anybody else. He was a family man fairly early, marrying a girl from Amal, which is between Karlstad and Gothenburg, and quickly having a couple of children [Johann and Lina]. When he came on to the coaching scene, there was never any scandal. He just got on with life.’
Mosson was the first of many to hint that Eriksson had always been something of a ladies’ man. As a coach, Eriksson had always been an anglophile. ‘Right from his early days, Sven was heavily influenced by the English style of play, zonal defence and 4–4–2,’ Mosson said. ‘When he did his final coaching course over here, he had to submit a written paper, which I read, and that’s what he did it on – his adaptation of the English game.’ Bobby Robson was something of a mentor in the late 1970s, Eriksson journeying to Portman Road to study the methods and pick the brains of the manager who was rivalling mighty Liverpool’s preeminence in England with unfashionable Ipswich. Eriksson recalls: ‘I went to Ipswich on a Friday and watched the team train. I asked Bobby Robson if I could put some questions to him after training, and we ended up sitting in his office for two or three hours, talking about football. Fantastic. He didn’t know me, and I was no one. He asked if I was coming to see the game the next day, and if I had a ticket. I said I was going to buy one. “Well,” he said, “do you want to sit on the bench with me?” Can you imagine? I was sitting next to him and the game was being shown live in Sweden. Beautiful. He is a very special man.’
Mosson’s predecessor as manager at Degerfors, Kenneth Norolling, has also known Eriksson for many years, and says: ‘Tord Grip and Svennis were the first coaches in Sweden to take ideas from England. That’s where they got the 4–4–2 system and the flat back four. They took ideas from Bob Houghton [the Englishman who took Malmo to the 1979 European Cup Final] and Roy Hodgson, at Halmstad. There was a lot of discussion in Sweden around that time about how we should play, who we should follow. Tord was the first Swede to copy the English system, followed by Sven.’
Hodgson told me: ‘From 1974 to 1980, of the six Swedish championships available, Bob won three and I won two. Then Bob and I left Sweden [to go to Bristol City together] and there was a period of Gothenburg domination until 1985, when Malmo took over. All credit to Tord and Sven who were the first to hitch on to our bandwagon. To be honest, there’s nothing really new in the game. All of us, somewhere along the line, have looked at somebody who has done something and been successful and thought: “Yeah, that’s me, that’s what I want to do as well.” For me and Bob it was Don Howe and Dave Sexton. With Sven, it was probably more Bob than me, because he was the first.
‘Fair play to them, Tord and Sven had to fight a lot of battles because Bob and I weren’t popular in Sweden in those days. Not only had we anglicized their game, but we had locked out the Swedish coaches when it came to winning things, and they didn’t like it. We engendered great loyalty among our players, and it became a bit of a war between the Halmstad–Malmo faction and the rest of Sweden, including the football federation and the media. Tord and Sven aligned themselves with us, the group that was under fire, which can’t have been easy. But then, when they did it our way and gained their own success, our methods became popular everywhere because it was no longer the English who were doing it. In 1979, though, there were only three clubs playing with a back four, zonally, and pressurizing: Bob’s, mine and Sven’s. All the others were still playing the German way, man for man.
‘The national coach was a guy called Lars Arnesen, and he was one of the bastions of anti-British feeling. “This is not the right way to play,” he said. “It stifles initiative and turns players into robots.” All the old claptrap. But the national team had a strong contingent of Sven’s Gothenburg players, and they went to Arnesen and told him: “We’ve had enough of this system of yours. The way Gothenburg play is the way we should, too.”
‘I got to know Sven and Tord in 1979 and 1980, and felt an affinity with them because they’d had the courage to go with us. Other Swedish coaches were distancing themselves from us, but Sven and Tord said: “No, this is good football, this is the way football should be played. It’s how we’re going to play.” Tord took over the national Under–21 team, with Sven as his assistant, and they played the English way while the seniors were still sticking to their guns. I know they came under all sorts of pressure, but they stood up to the criticism, and I think the experience probably did Sven good. Taking on a fight like that prepared him for what happened later at Benfica, and in Italy.’
Grip told me: ‘When Sven started to work for me at Degerfors, I was the one with the experience in coaching and management. I was ahead of him in that respect, so I suppose I helped him to learn how to organize a team. At that time, a lot of coaches in Sweden were learning new ways. It was a period when we were starting to update our methods. It was an exciting time – a time of constant improvement. We took a lot, including our playing style, from England. The physical requirements we had already. There is not much else to think about in Sweden during the winter! Our strength was always our strength. It was when the other countries caught up with our fitness levels that we had to improve our organization. In Sweden, we’ve never been great technically, so we had to organize our teams cleverly and work hard to compensate. We did that.’
After Grip had left, Eriksson took Degerfors to the Third Division championship in his first season in management. The play-off system, involving four regional winners, was known as the Kval. At the end of 1976, Degerfors lost all three games, and were not promoted. In 1977, they did marginally better when, having won the league again, they took only