The former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson died today. He had terminal cancer and said he expected to be dead before the year was out. In an age when such grim diagnoses are usually kept private until their morbid predictions have come to pass, it was characteristically candid of the 76-year-old Swede, even though doing so invited a fresh round of media scrutiny of a life that has already been scrutinised intensively over many years.
He treated players as grown-ups, even though they often weren’t.
Any England football manager gets attention – it comes with the territory. But when you start having public relationships with a flamboyant Italian lawyer, a prominent TV presenter and even your boss’s secretary, as Sven famously did, then inevitably the attention will increase to the point of frenzy. Sven was once almost as regular a subject on the front pages as he was on the back ones.
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