Sven-Goran Eriksson is a kindly and gracious soul who has surrendered to the amorality of the business he is in and exploited it at every opportunity, shifting in ever decreasing circles from England to Manchester City in the English Premiership to Mexico to Notts County in the English lower leagues and maybe even to North Korea, on loan, as his rootlessness starts to look like a spiritual condition.
You may have noticed in Eriksson’s recent career moves a blend of extreme pragmatism and a kind of fatalism, or resignation, as if the only thing left is to gravitate ever faster toward people with power and money. Speaking of Notts County, he said recently: “Where exactly [the money] is coming from, who could care less as long it’s legal?”
When he first wandered across England’s landscape he was known as Zen-Goran Eriksson. His mission was to bring order to chaos. It was as if the chief executive of Saab had been hired to sort out Rover. Behind that technocratic aura and those spectacles deep wisdom flowed, we assumed. Sven made England a quarter-final team and then set out on another existential journey.
His life now looks like a series of short-term leases on nice apartments, with the engine always running for the getaway.
Somewhere in him, for sure (as he would say, in a press conference), is a love of the game. His early academic wanderings featured a fascination with English soccer and a deep yearning to be around players. Bobby Robson’s Ipswich Town were one of his major stops. But at Robson’s memorial service at Durham Cathedral, in the north of England, last month it was noticeable how detached he seemed from the great and the good who sat round him on those ancient pews.
Plenty of famous leaders have traveled from idealism to cynicism. It was after he left Sweden that Eriksson’s power-addiction took hold, among the moguls of Italy’s Serie A league. He was always an expert at attaching himself to soccer’s most influential families. Then he found a dysfunctional one who were willing to pay extravagantly. His time with England produced many a caper, from compilation classical music CDs to a Sunday tabloid newspaper’s fake sheikhs to the flirtation with Chelsea and an office menage a trois with Faria Alam, followed by 12 months of rumination while his lucrative England FA contract ran down.
As soon as that year was up Eriksson hitched his wagon to Manchester City and Thaksin Shinawatra, that well-known friend of human rights, before the inevitable meltdown drove the nomad down Mexico way. What interests me most about this voyage away from the heart of things is how Eriksson squares it with the memory of his younger, more idealistic self.
It would take Philip Roth to study properly the internal tension when a man starts out with romantic aspirations and ends up thinking life is a menagerie in which the only rational aim is to grab all one can. Did the England job propel Eriksson over this line? By the end, his jaundice was obvious. Maybe the equanimity he brought to the fake sheikh fiasco and the exposure of his dalliances concealed the onset of perdition. The worse it got, the calmer he seemed to be, as if he were disengaging from the world.
In that state it was doubtless easy to work for Thaksin, easy to take a punt on Mexico, easy to believe the vague assurances of Notts County’s ghostly owners and easy to hear an approach from North Korea, the land that time forgot, and the antithesis of Swedish liberalism. Then again, if all foreign football coaches refused to work for authoritarian regimes, World Cup qualifying would be over a lot quicker. There would be no Saudi Arabia, for a start.
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