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In October of 2000, England manager Kevin Keegan resigned in the gents lose at the old Wembley after losing 1 nil to Germany. The FA's response was to hire their first overseas manager, a seemingly calm, detached Swede who'd had great success in Italy and Portugal over the previous 15 years. But Sven Eriksen was much more than that. He was a charming, urbane man who kept football in perspective and who loved the game, life and women. Eriksen led England to three quarter finals in a row, but despite boasting the golden generation, he couldn't take them any further. But he did open the door to foreign England managers. Just 30 years ago, you'd never have dreamt of seeing Thomas Tuchel on the touchline for England. But now we've had three overseas coaches in 24 years. So why did the FA decide to open up to foreign managers? And what of Svenjorn Eriksen, that pioneer who broke down that barrier? Did his off field lifestyle ultimately hamper England? Or was it simply a combination of bad luck, broken metatarsals and the penalty shootout hoodoo which denied him? This is how it all played out. Well, Paul, you and I live through this, we work through this. And you've written the England biography called England Football. We better start on that filthy day at Wembley where we were both there when England lost miserably under Kevin Keegan to Germany in a World cup qualifier. And before we knew it, I was live on air, you were scribbling away. Suddenly we realized that stuff was happening in the gents lose, wasn't it? Really was happening in the gents lose.

Yeah, it was a day dripping in pathos really. David Seaman had been beaten from 30 yards by a Diddy Hammann free kick. The great German goalkeeper Sepp Meyer said that even he could have stopped it at 57 years old. There was a lot of knife twisting by the Germans. It was a dismal performance, a very, very wet day. And Wembley, the great cathedral of the English game, was coming down. So it was bad enough already before Keegan stepped toilet cubicle in the bowels of Wembley and said he was he was quitting. The FA asked him whether he was sure he wanted to do that and he said immortally, no, no, no, I'm off, I'm not for this. And when it was pointed out to him that England had another game five days later against Finland, Keegan reportedly said, you're sort it out. A reference to Howard Wilkinson's availability as a potential caretaker. So suddenly Wembley is Coming down. That's the end of one era and the FA are starting to wonder whether it should be the end of this tradition of, of Englishness, English coaches teaching the English way. They'd had a couple of years with Keegan where he'd adopted an approach that could be described as a throwback approach, really betting schools in the, in the camp and race nights. A very direct and straightforward style of play, a lot of up and atom, a lot of pride and passion, all very English. And there were a modernizers at the FA at that point, led by Adam Crozier and David Dean. Crozier was a Scottish Sachi and Sachi executive who somehow found himself running the, the Football Association. David Dean, as we know, had brought Arsene Wenger to, to Arsenal. So these guys were looking at this situation and thinking, we need a change here.

So you've got, as you say, you've got David Dean, who'd had great success with Wenger, he'd won the double in 98. So he can immediately say to the FA, oh, go overseas. You've seen it's work with my club. And you've got Adam Crozier, who you describe as a disruptor because he wasn't immersed in football administration. He'd been at Saatchi and Saatchi. And why do you think it is that they alighted upon Svenjer and Eriksen, whose record in Portugal and Italy was actually outstanding. And I think it might surprise people just how good his record had been. Well, he'd won the UEFA cup with Gothenburg, which was astonishing because they were basically part time, weren't they? And that had attracted him to Benfica and then to Roma, Fiorentina, Sampdori and Lazio, where he won the title only the second time they, they'd won it. Obviously they looked at that and thought, wow, if this man from Sweden can do all this, he could do something for us.

Yeah. In 22 years of coaching, he'd won Serie A, Sweden's league title, three championships in Portugal, two Italian Cups, a UEFA cup and a European Cup Winners Cup. This man was not a fraud. And when they drew up a list of potential replacements for Keegan, the FA had Marcelo Lippi, Eriksen, Johan Cruyff, Amy Jacques Gerard, Julia, Arsene Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson. He was always on the list and he always said no within 10 minutes of them asking him. So it's a high class list and it's a cosmopolitan list. When they went to the players to say who they wanted, the players were almost unanimous in favor of Terry Venables. They wanted to bring Terry Venables back. The FA didn't want to do that for various reasons.

Well, they didn't want everything that. The reason they relieved him in the first place to come back, all the issues about his business interests.

Yeah. And I think they were set on this course of breaking the mold and saying, okay, England haven't had a foreign manager yet, but we're going to get one. Because we're kind of on our knees here and we need an infusion of something else, something more continental, something more mainstream. And actually, we shouldn't underestimate the role of temperament, because Keegan had been a very, you know, emotional kind of leader and a handful at times for the fa, who he didn't particularly enjoy working for. So Erickson had this kind of glacial calm. I started calling him Zengor and Ericsson in the, in the paper because he was so placid and in control and he was a kind of sage. You know, I'd said he, he looked like a Swedish government minister. Very sophisticated man, very well educated. He was into fine wine and Tibetan poetry and he read philosophy and he could speak four languages and he, and he could carry himself. So I think part of the appeal for the FAA was to get a guy who wasn't going to give them any problems and would calm things down and, and, and, and bring England into the European of sophisticated football.

You can understand it, can't you? Because England had had five English managers of the national team in the 90s. Bobby Robson, Graham Taylor, Terry Van Wilson, Glenn Hoddle, Kevin Keegan. That's a hoo hoo of players and managers at the time. So you can understand it a little bit that they looked at this calm, detached Eurocrat, if you want to call him that, who'd had great success in Spain and Italy. And because he'd had success in Italy, which was a very strong league, particularly in the early 90s, they must have thought, ah, here's a tactically savvy man. What sor. Football coach were they getting? What. What did his cv, apart from saying that it won in Italy and Portugal? What did it say about the way that he went about coaching footballers?

Well, that is interesting because Ericsson had been steeped in the English way himself. Actually, in 4, 4, 2, the English coaches that went out to Sweden and taught 442, he'd come over to England.

Being one of them, wasn't Roy Hodgson.

Was one of them. He'd come to English grounds, he went to see Bobby Robson and he went to Liverpool to look at the style of play. And he was very much a, a devotee of, of direct football from the beginning. But his work in Europe, in Portugal and Italy, had forced him to adapt. You know, you don't go to Portugal and, and hit the ball long up to a big striker and feed off knockdowns or hit channel balls. So Ericsson had, had, had widened his palette in European football. And I think the FA must have thought that when he came to England he'd bring European football to England. In fact, he did the opposite. After experimenting very briefly or considering the possibility that England might get the, and play possession football, he decided that the native strengths of the players he was dealing with were channel balls and direct play and getting the ball forward and bypassing midfield. So he reverted to an English style of play, which is really what we were trying to get away from.

What do you remember of the first press conference when he was announced?

Ah, well, it was like a. It was as if the FA had captured a kind of exotic creature, you know, from the upper reaches of European football. And there was a guy outside dressed in a John Bull outfit holding up a sign which said, the FA hang your head in shame. You know, by some it was seen as a kind of violation of the English birthright. This was a, an abject surrender to abroad because the English ought to have been able to summon from their own ranks a coach capable of leading the national team. I have some sympathy with that idea, actually. I think ideally the country should be led by somebody from the country that he's representing. That's just what international football is. But at the same time, there was a sort of, there was a tinge in relation to Ericsson.

There was a xenophobia about it, wasn't there?

Well, yeah, there was just this idea, the old English arrogance, that we don't need to learn anything. There's nobody can teach us anything. We don't need help from abroad, we don't need international rescue. We invented the game, we already know how it works and we, and we should be able to solve these problems ourselves. So it was quite unpleasant. And again, Erickson, with his kind of phlegmatic, glacial demeanor, just sailed straight through that quite nicely if you think about it.

Everyone's doing this. We're now early stages of 2001. England hadn't won anything since 1966. Hint, still haven't. So actually the fact that, you know, England can summon it up from their own ranks is something else. I like what you said about exotic creature. It reminds me of Those lectures they used to give at the Royal Geographic Society, didn't they, in the late 1890s, when they brought back a parakeet from wherever and put it in a cage and went, look at this amazing bird with its fine plumage. We found one, and now we're gonna have one here. Yeah, he was almost like that, wasn't he, in a ca. Up on the stage going, yeah, this exotic creature we've. We've brought you.

And his silences radiated a kind of assumed profundity. You know, the less he said, the more brilliant we thought he was. It was a kind of. It was a genius of his, really, because there'd been lots of garrulous England managers and emotional England managers. And there. There you've got this guy with his. His spectacles and his. And his smart suit and his Tibetan poetry and his Tibetan poetry and his ability just to sort of look out across the picture and make calm decisions. Actually, that wasn't him at all. Certainly not off the pitch. But at the time, it's kind of what England needed. And the crucial fact about it, of course, is, you know, we talk about lucky generals. Ericsson arrived on the scene at the point where one of the best generation of English players we've ever seen was coming through the golden generation. So he's hardly short of material to work with.

We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk more about Svenjer and Ericsson, the personality. So the FA think they're getting what Paul describes in his book as a sort of unflappable Eurocrat. But Svenjr Naosen gets a very early indicator of what it's like when he's having dinner in a Knightsbridge restaurant with Paul Barber, who then worked for the fa, now works for Brighton. And there are photographers outside, and he goes, paul, what are they all doing out there? And he goes, well, they're taking photographs of you. And he goes, well, I'm eating. I mean, that was. I think that was a Damascene moment for him where, okay, this is what it's like. But there was a Damascene moment for the FA as well, when they realized they were getting all the things you've described as a football manager, but also they were getting a man with a taste for life.

Yeah, he was a kind of master of the game of life. He was possibly the last generation of football managers who did the job for the wealth and the fun and the access it brought him. You know, he was a player in every sense. And ironically, he Once sort of lectured the young players about staying off the front pages. He said, we only want to be on the back pages. Well, he spent a good part of his England career on the front pages. And we can mention them because they were relevant to the job and incredibly relevant.

Yeah, it's what did for him.

Yeah. And, you know, we are talking about the national team here, which is public property, so this is a public role, the England manager. So, you know, we have to mention his, his romances with Ulrike Johnson, TV star Faria Alam, who was an FA staff member who was also supposedly entangled with the FA chief executive. That's a very complicated one. Sven lived with a high society lawyer called Nancy Del Olio, who was great fun to be with, really eccentric, full of joie de vivre. And she loved the London life, you know, she loved.

She was an American Italian lawyer.

She was. And she, she was a. She was a born celeb. She was a star. She kind of twinkled. And all the time this idea of Erickson as this exotic figure, this almost footballing royalty, was being built up by the FA because they liked the idea of having a star manager. So David Davis, for example, the executive director, said some English crit critics forgot what a star Erickson was globally. Being abroad with Sven was like accompanying royalty. So parts of the FA are a bit drunk on this idea that they've got this guy who showbiz, you know, he's, he's box office. But of course, bit by bit, they started to realize that with that came again what I think one of the FA executive called upon for attractive ladies. Ordinarily that would be a private matter, but of course, the way it happened and the regularity with which it happened presented the FA with enormous kind of firefighting challenge, because every Saturday night somebody would be on duty at FA headquarters waiting for the Sunday red top first editions to drop in case Sven was in them so they could firefight. And of course, there was another type of opportunism that was even more complicated. For example, well, this is the bit.

That nails him in the air.

This is the thing. Yeah.

I think almost you could get away with what happened with his private life with women. But this is the bit where in the end, I think more people, people really have sympathy with the FA.

Yeah, because in July 2003, for example, he snapped entering Roman Abramovich's house with the agent Pini zahavi. This is 48 hours after Abramovich had bought Chelsea worked audio Raniere. He was a manager two Days later, there were stories linking Chelsea with Steven Gerrard. Gerrard's an England player. Gerrard's a Liverpool player. Very unfortunate. Erickson said. I was listening to Chelsea. If you have ambition, you listen to other jobs. So that's one fire that the FAA has to put out. He was. He did attract a lot of interest from other clubs in, in Europe and each time the fa, because at that point they thought they were desperate to keep him. They kept looking after him. They gave him pay rises.

You could argue he played them like. Like a great big fish.

Them. Well. He played them well. But the one that did for him was the. The fake shake. So Erickson is invited to Dubai onto a yacht with Middle Eastern tycoon.

This is just before the 06 World Cup.

This is just before the 06 World Cup. So this is Masma Mahmoud, a man who was the fake shake. An undercover reporter who was later disgraced himself. Erickson was filmed saying he would be prepared to take over Aston Villa as part of a takeover and said David Beckham would return to England if he asked him to and suggested he would walk away if England won the World cup two years before the end of his contract. He's dead in the water at that point. Tried to pass off the conversations as fantasizing and gossip, but the FAA had had enough.

Brian Barwick, the FA chief exec, said, understand me, I cannot have my Sunday mornings. You've already mentioned it.

Yeah.

Disturbed every week by something else you might have been doing.

Yes. And he said, Sven's contract will be terminated at the end of the World Cup. That is the thing that finishes him. The fake shake expose.

And I love the fact that he always had things in perspective. You've already mentioned Didi Hamanu scored that goal at Wembley and his interaction with Sven. I tell all my friends this is my favorite football story, bar none. And I'm Didi, I know, reasonably can tell me if I've got the exact wording wrong, but he's manager of Manchester City. The preseason tour. You know the story, don't you?

I want to hear it again.

Well, preseason tour, I think in Thailand, isn't it? Yeah, in Bangkok. And they've. They've done a morning's training and they're sitting by the pool afterwards and Sven's drinking a bottle of champagne and Eddy's going, sven, we're on pre season tour. What are you doing drinking champagne? I mean, what's all this about? And he just looks at him and goes, life there, Kaiser, life. And I mean, I love Sven for that. If nothing else, I'd also like to call a horse that I think is such a good name that. Why not? Yeah, it's there. I've got life in perspective.

I think that's it. I think he was kind of serious about his work. He cared about his work, certainly, and he was heartbroken to lose the England job, but at the same time he had that lust for life. He had that ability not to take it too seriously and to see it as an opportunity, as a way to live. Well, I mean, I think it was. Martin Kellner in the. In the Guardian wrote famously, sven Johan Eriksen regards the England job as an excellent way to meet women. And there was some truth in that.

Right, we'll take a break there. When we come back, it'll be Sven, the England manager on the field, and how it all unraveled for the golden gener. So Sven takes over and then he does something which really hasn't been done before or since. He goes to Germany and absolutely hammers them. You're in the ground. I was in the ground. I remember thinking, blimey, we're beating Germany 51 away. I mean, it was astonishing. But in a way it set the bar too high. Do you remember a few days later there was a miserable draw with Macedonia, I think, or somebody, but. But you realized then, didn't you, that you had Lampard, Gerrard, Scholes, Beckon, Owen, Ferdinand Rooney was about to appear. Wow, what a set of players this was. But it never quite came together. Do you put it down? As I said in the introduction, was it bad luck? Was it broken metatarsals? Was it tactical naivety? Was it being useless at penalties? What. What was it that stopped that generation from winning something?

When he arrived, I think he looked at the players he had and he looked at Premier League football and thought, I can play a normal European mainstream way with these players. But I think he quickly gave up. There was a crucial sit down in South Korea before the 2002 World cup and Eriksen said, if you can pass six, seven or eight opponents with one pass, it is always the best pass. We shouldn't try to compete with Brazil in trying to keep the ball because we can't do it better than that, them or some other South American countries. So it was a kind of. England ended up playing a primitive style of football with a high class coach in many ways and a very good.

Group of players and a court squashed into a pint pot because you had Paul Scholes, who's a magnificent footballer, Playing on the left hand side of a diamond and so fed up that after Euro 2004 in Portugal, he quit.

He packed it in. Yeah.

Accusation that he would not make a decision. Lampard. We still use Lampard, Gerald, today as an analogy for a football manager or frankly for a life lesson when people won't make a decision between two very good players. He just wouldn't do that. And you look at Lampard, Gerrard, Scholes and Beckham and then people like Owen, Hargreaves and Carrick and go. A more decisive manager would have gone. Right. Even if you don't like it, you're Paul playing Mark, you're on the bench, you'll play your football because you'll come off the bench. But the best team is not necessarily the best 11 players, it's the best team. And the way that they gel. I think you can't get away from the validity of that accusation that he would not make those decisions.

No. And hundreds of thousands of words were and still are written about that conundrum. How do you get all these good players into. Into one team in particular? It was Lampard, Gerrard, Scholes and Beckham into a single midfield. Now, if you're being paid sort of £4 million a year to be England manager, you. You have to solve that problem.

Yes. So I think 202. I don't think realistically they're ever going to beat Cafu. Ronaldo. Ronaldinho. Ronaldo. Especially in that heat and especially with Beckham coming back from a metatarsal. Was he enthralled to Beckham? That's a. Is that a fair question?

Yes. Yeah. I think he was enthralled to Beckham partly off the pitch, I think, because of the access to the celebrity life that Beckham gave him. He was drawn by the light of Beckham's celebrity and it probably affected his judgment.

204 In Portugal, I think everybody would agree, is the one that got away and probably is the one where there is a degree of sympathy for Ericsson, that this was bad luck. Rooney bursting onto the scene and then breaking his foot in the semi final. Feels like the one where actually Ericsson could just say that was sheer bad luck.

Yeah. I was watching the footage of that, of Rooney specifically, because I was doing something on Rooney at that tournament quite recently and there was a touch of Zidane about him at that tournament. He really was as good as we think he was. The memory is not playing tricks. Had Rooney survived all the way through the tournament without breaking his metatarsal, who knows, but every single England player from that generation that, that squad, I should say, says that that's the tournament that got away. I mean, I'm just. I know you've mentioned a lot of the names, but let me. Let me just list the outfield players who played against Croatia in a 42 win in Lisbon. Gary Neville, Sol Campbell, John Terry, Ashley Cole, David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Paul Scholes, Wayne Rooney and Michael Owen.

How did they not win?

You would. Well, given that Greece won that tournament, you would expect them to go and win that European champion then.

Saul Campbell has a goal very unluckily disallowed against Portugal as well. So I think that's where the bad luck is. And by 206, it had just started to unravel. Eriksen, because of his flirtation with the fake shake, knew he wasn't going to be manager any longer. His number two, Steve McLaren, was going to take over and was still within the camp. That can't have helped. You've talked about Baden Baden before. It was absolute chaos off the pitch. Rooney had broken his foot against Chelsea and Alain Beckham in 202, racing to get back. I remember being in a bar in Cologne and a Premier League manager saying to me, england are going to win this World Cup. It was a big statement. We haven't won anything since 1966. And look at the team. Well, no, I think he probably said, look at the players. Goes back to the old debate. Those are the players. What about the team?

Yeah, absolutely. What about the style of play?

In retrospect, Feels like it was past the point of no return by then, almost, doesn't it?

Yeah. And I would say on the pitch, England couldn't win a World cup playing the way they were playing. And on the Rooney thing, there was a fabulous revelation by Rooney in the Sunday Times. So we know he turned up late after a lot of treatment on his broken metatarsal and said, the big man is back in town as he walked into the camp. Good luck to him for that. That was brilliant. Do you know, the next day he jogged out for training. I'm back, I'm ready, you know, I'm fit. And he got tempted. There was a ball around about the halfway line. He got tempted to hit it as hard as he could. He was trying to strike the crossbar and he felt his groin tear. This is the day after he arrived in camp, after being a late, you know, a late arrival. And he said, I. I knew straight away, I was never close to 100 in Germany, and I shouldn't really have been there, so. And he didn't last long in the game against Portugal, of course. He stood on the unmentionables of Ricardo Carvalho and was sent off.

And of course, because Fenior and Eriksen have, for whatever reason, madly gone with picking Theo Walcott. It was 16, stroke 17. So Rooney's injured and sent off. Peter Crouch. There's nowhere to turn to, is there, because Jermaine Defoe is at home, as I would be fuming. And you'd seen Theo Walcott with his parents going around Baden Baden. You're thinking, that's England's only fit striker now.

Well, we were in Baden Baden with the paparazzi, with all the families, with the wives and girlfriends, and with England players coming down from the hills to try and sort things out and calm everything down. The papers were having a field day with the families going out and celebrating. It was great fun, actually, and there were some lovely people. It was so nice to spend time with the families, but it was mayhem. Rio Ferdinand described it as a circus. So England's only real backup striker towards the end of the tournament, Theo Walcott, was only 17. He was taken in front of Jermaine Defoe, as you said. And I remember being out in Baden Baden one day and I heard the clip clop of a pony and trap, a tourist pony and trap, you know, of the sort you see in those twee German towns. And I thought, oh, there goes Theo Walcott with his family. His family were in the front, Theo's in the back, having a trip around Baden bad and on a pony and trap.

And I thought, hmm, that's our World cup savior.

Yeah, that's the last card in the pack. And it looked like Theo was there on a school trip and so dressed in lederhosen.

No, I'm sure he was.

I don't think he was. But Baden Baden was the end of the line for Eriksen, and it was suitably unhinged and debauched. But what he did do, of course, was break down the barrier to England having a foreign coach, and there have been two more since. So we go from Ericsson to Capello and now to Thomas Tuchel, who's been appointed to do the job that the FAA felt, the only job that Gareth Southcote hadn't quite pulled off, which was to win a trophy. So it's interesting to trace the lineage from Ericsson to Capello to Tuchel, all appointed for slightly different reasons, but for England to have had three foreign coaches in 24 years tells you that there's a problem with the production of coaches and managers.

But the fact that they had a. They had appointed three overseas coaches of the men's team meant that it was much easier for them to appoint correct the women's team from overseas. Serena Wiegman, who has done absolutely everything the FA want their men's overseas coaches to go and do.

Quite right. And Serena Wiegman is the best defense against the idea that it should always be an England manager because without Serena Vegeman I think England would have done really well. But. But we don't know that they'd have won those trophies. And she looks like the difference. She made the difference. So that certainly helped the argument that you just go for the best person. It doesn't matter where they come from.

Paul, I think it's just worth. With Sven reiterating, sadly passed away from cancer. And in the last year when he knew he was dying, he sort of went on a farewell tour of all the clubs where he'd managed and he came to England. He loved Liverpool, he managed a sort of celebs game at Anfield. And actually the outpouring of, of affection for him in the UK in England was really striking, wasn't it? It was like, yes, Fed, you might have underachieved a bit, but we completely got who you were and your love of life and actually we want to show that completely.

He had really a hero's send off. It was deeply moving. He was open and honest and really displayed his love of football in those final months and, and it was so good that the English game and the clubs and English fans showed such a fondness for him because he deserved that. I mean, when he left the England job, he didn't fall off a cliff. I mean he managed. He was managing Manchester City. A year later he also managed Leicester City, Knott's County. He was thoroughly conned at Knott's County. That was a bit of a duocal bit. But he went on this kind of walk on the wild side where he went to Mexico, Ivory Coast, China, Shenzhen in the Philippines. He kind of. He became very peripatetic. You know, he went anywhere. He was a hired gun in his. In his final years. But really pleasingly, the, the light drew him back to England and English football and that's really where you felt the love for him. So the story ended in that sense, you know, quite happily.

Paul, thank you. That was really fascinating. We hope you've enjoyed today's show and if you have, please make sure you rate, follow and subscribe so you never miss an episode. You know the drill. Subscribe and have a listen to our Nazi Olympics series, which we've just released. Did you know that they invented so many of the features of the modern Olympics? You can listen on Global Player or wherever you get your podcasts, and we love hearing from you, your suggestions and your feedback. Email us how it all played out@global.com or find us on socials on laidoutpod and we'll speak to you next time. How it All Played out is presented by me, Mark Pugach and Paul Hayward. It's a Global original production in association with Apex Content Ventures.

This is a Global Player Original Podcast.