Profile Sven-Goran Eriksson - the icy, cerebral England coach whose libido has landed him in hot waterHe has split with his girlfriend Nancy Dell'Olio and his affair with a PA has angered the Football Association, but the suave Swede is keeping his cool, writes Shane Hegarty
Sven-Goran Eriksson has had enough. He is sick of the accusations, the speculation, the tawdry gossip. He is upset that the English Football Association announced that he had a fling with one of their PAs without consulting him first. On Thursday, it was finally time to break his silence, to speak out, to strike back hard.
"I wish to state unequivocally that I have at no time either categorically confirmed or denied any relationship with Ms Faria Alam," he said.
Stand back. He's going to blow.
It was very Eriksson. He didn't say he had had an affair, but then again he didn't say he hadn't. He was insisting that he wasn't commenting on his private life, but he was really. It said much, but clarified little. It was the latest lesson in the zen of Sven.
Once again the English public is forced to figure him out for themselves, to let speculation fill the gaps. Increasingly, the Swede who arrived with a reputation for self-control is letting his libido get him into trouble. Once upon a time Eriksson was hailed as the cerebral, icy football tactician who would rescue English football. Now he is ridiculed as a loose-loined lothario with a weak grip on both his personal life and his football team.
It further chips away at his frigid exterior. When Eriksson took the job as national manager he was easily caricatured. In a world of muddy tracksuits and bared teeth, this Scandinavian polyglot in Armani was an iceman, a thinker. He wears rimless glasses. He knows a lot about wine. He released a CD of classical music before the 2002 World Cup. He learned the languages of each of the countries he worked in. He does yoga. That he has read Tibetan poetry is dragged out by the press as confirmation of his intellectualism, mentioned as if he reads it in its original form while in the crab position.
The Mirror editor Piers Morgan described him as "Hoddle with brains, Keegan without emotion. This was a hybrid robotic figure that would lead us to glory". To the percentage of English who still believe that football is only on loan to the rest of the world, the appointment of a foreigner did not go down so well. Jeff Powell in the Daily Mail wrote: "We sell our birthright down the fjord to a nation of seven million skiers and hammer throwers who spend half their year living in total darkness."
ERIKSSON DIDN'T THROW the hammer, but he was a half-decent ski-jumper in his childhood. He was born - the son of a truck driver and a nurse - in the small logging town of Torsby in 1948. On the walls of the local football club, there is a faded black and white picture of Eriksson holding his only playing honour - a tin of coffee won in 1966. An undistinguished playing career was cut short by injury when he was just 27, but he became a successful coach in Sweden before moving on to Portuguese side Benfica and then on to Italy. While there, the press took to describing him as a "successful loser". When coaching Roma, he organised a victory party before the 1986 championship finale, only for the team to throw it all away by losing to the bottom-placed team. In 1999, his Lazio team lost the league at the death.
Still, in 2000 he brought that team its first championship in 26 years and attracted the attention of England. When he left Lazio, it was not popular.
Fans gathered at the club gates, yelling, "Just go to your Englishmen. Go to hell and take your girlfriend with you." That girlfriend was Nancy Dell'Olio. She is often described as a "society lawyer", although her expertise was actually in the heady arena of securities exchange control. When they first met, Eriksson was married with two children. She was also married - to one of Lazio's biggest investors.
The story goes that the wronged husband loved the club so much that, in 1999, he allowed Eriksson take his wife rather than disturb the running of the club.
She once described herself as Eriksson's "geisha", although she insists that the remark was misunderstood. Yet, there has always been something of oil and water about their pairing. He is the sober northerner; she is the flamboyant southerner. When they visited 10 Downing Street, she wore a red catsuit slashed to the navel, as if she had decided to pick up a dress along the way but the only shop open was in Soho.
She has said that he ignores the ridicule from the press. "It's in his culture not to get upset. He does, of course, but he doesn't show it." Of their arguments, she said: "Sven and I have incredible wars of silences. It's incredible. Scary." A war of silence with Eriksson, one would have thought, would be like holding a staring contest with a wall.
However, a Swedish journalist who interviewed him at the end of 1999 described a man at odds with the caricature. He drove at 160kph without a seatbelt, smoked Cuban cigars and gulped Scotch. During a dinner, the journalist wrote of how Dell'Olio "hinted that she was trying to encourage her Viking to loosen his grip on that famous self-control and to set his passions free". Bad advice.
In 2002, just before the World Cup, it was revealed that Eriksson had been having an affair with TV presenter Ulrika Jonsson. The press loved it. Piers Morgan best explains the story's allure. "The two most famous Swedes on the planet, at it!" There was a brief skirmish on the press battlefields between Dell'Olio and Jonsson before the Italian kept her man.
Meanwhile, there was a growing suggestion that Eriksson's commitment issues stretch beyond his personal life. He had almost come to England in 1997 to take charge at Blackburn Rovers, but reneged on the agreement and went to Lazio instead. And, more recently, he has been caught playing footsie with other teams. As England prepared for Euro 2004, Eriksson had separate meetings with Chelsea's owner, Roman Abramovich, and its chief executive Peter Kenyon. Meanwhile, there are those within the game who maintain that Eriksson was lined up to take over from Alex Ferguson before the Manchester United manager changed his mind about retiring. In response, the FA moved in and secured his services until 2008.
HIS RECORD AS England manager, though, has been unconvincing. He had a brief honeymoon period when England qualified for the 2002 World Cup thanks to a last-minute goal against a mediocre team, but since England threw it away in the quarter-final against a Brazilian team down to 10 men, a pattern has emerged. In important games England scorch into a lead. They then go into the dressing room for the half-time team talk and re-emerge as if someone's slipped a sedative into their tea. They retreat. They panic. They concede a goal. Eriksson slaps his knees and throws back his head in frustration. They go home.
These days, he goes home alone. Dell'Olio and he have split. The FA feels that he misled them over the affair with Alam. He always insists that his private life has nothing to do with how he does his job, but that has never dissuaded the British press from pursuing the time-honoured sport of manager-baiting, and his doubters may have found the excuse they need to oust him. Only the millions that it will cost the FA to terminate their relationship might prevent a messy divorce.
Perhaps Eriksson can find consolation in some of the homespun psychology included in his book On Football. Let's see: "Work up your plus mind, eliminate your minus mind." Not bad. "Think outwards, not inwards." Er, maybe. "We are the sum of what we have thought during our life." Now it's just getting silly - something that seems really smart but on further examination isn't so clever at all.