Softly spoken seducer whose eye-popping private life once eclipsed the antics of royals and celebrities - and on whose watch the phenomenon of the WAG was born..

Softly spoken seducer whose eye-popping private life once eclipsed the antics of royals and celebrities - and on whose watch the phenomenon of the WAG was born.. By Robert Hardman Published: 02:22, 27 August 2024 | Updated: 02:26, 27 August 2024 e-mail View comments During one Downing Street reception in the Tony Blair years, the then-prime minister offered the then-England football manager a wager.

‘Shall we take a bet?’ Mr Blair asked Sven-Goran Eriksson. ‘Who keeps the job longest? You or me? We have two impossible jobs.’ As it happened, Mr Blair won that one (by a year) but he wasn’t wrong about the job.

On the pitch, Eriksson came up with the same problem which has bedevilled every England manager since 1966: an irreconcilable imbalance between popular expectation and results. Shortly before his death at the age of 76 yesterday, following an eight-month battle with pancreatic cancer , he warned that the next occupant of that position – following the resignation of Gareth Southgate – would face the same eternal challenge. Study any league of past England managers and Eriksson is clearly in the upper echelons, though not at the top; a Spurs or a West Ham perhaps but not a Manchester City or Liverpool.

He lasted a respectable five years in the job, took his side to three respectable quarter-finals in major tournaments, and had one or two cracking results, notably a 5-1 win against Germany in Germany in 2001. Sven with ex wife Anki and son Johan What singles ou.