Sven-Göran Eriksson made trophy hunting and the good life a single activity | Sven-Goran Eriksson

IIt takes a huge effort for today’s leading football managers to prevent their personalities from being compromised by the money and power around them. Sven-Göran Eriksson refused to give in. He was the last to be guided by the pleasure principle as much as by tactical ideas.

Eriksson died as he lived: as his own man, with his zest for life intact, not as a department head forced by private equity or a nation state to play the serious tactical genius. Where today’s upwardly mobile coaches hope to convince locker rooms full of multimillionaires of their credibility, Eriksson impressed his players with a limited coaching manifesto but a broad appreciation of human nature.

The cool Eurocrat the FA thought it had hired had a flame in his glacier: the glow of a man who thought that chasing trophies and the good life were a single pursuit. Those who painted him as a purveyor of hollow profundities ignored both his 18-trophy CV and a truth about top coaches. More than teams, they manage people: their egos, desires and flaws.

Eriksson has had a successful career in multiple leagues and countries, from Swedish backwoods player to star player in European club football, to the meat grinder of the England manager and finally on the other side of the line, in ever-decreasing circles, until he nearly went bankrupt and ended with a reflection-filled ending.

Eriksson found himself back where he started, amid the Swedish lakes and forests of his youth. Along the way he was revered, mythologized, Fake Sheikh’d, scammed in Notts County and sent in search of a living to Mexico, the Ivory Coast, Thailand, China and the Philippines.

He mastered the art of being driven by money while appearing to care nothing. He encountered the champagne highs and inglorious lows of a life lived on the front and back pages with remarkable composure. He was simultaneously intensely serious about football as an intellectual exercise and inclined to ironic detachment from the tribalism and frenzy of the game.

At his peak, Eriksson was England manager, attracting the attention of Chelsea, Manchester United, Barcelona and Inter. Until the headlines broke the trance, the Football Association of the day fell behind to keep him in the England tracksuit. Eriksson was set to become the next Manchester United manager until Sir Alex Ferguson reversed his plans to retire. Ferguson asked United players returning to the training ground after England service: “What does Eriksson do, what’s his secret, what’s he got?”

His not-so-secret visit in 2003 to the London home of Roman Abramovich, who had just bought Chelsea, was the first major warning to the FA about Eriksson’s opportunism. The published photograph of him entering the Russian oligarch’s residence was undoubtedly chosen because of Eriksson’s furtive expression. “If you have ambition, you listen to other jobs,” he explained: an answer far too rational for his adopted home, where the England job was still seen as a state function, not to be sullied by personal “ambition”.

Managing England offered him a Regent’s Park life, a hugely inflated media profile and plenty of free time to get up to mischief. It also put him in charge of a rare breed of English talent: Rooney, Owen, Lampard, Gerrard, Beckham, Scholes, Terry and Ashley Cole, with their mountains of Premier League and FA Cup medals. As football’s celebrity culture spiralled into orbit, ‘the quiet man’ knocked his players off the news bulletins.

The Fake Sheikh raid, in which he expressed enthusiasm for coaching Aston Villa and said he could lure David Beckham back from Real Madrid, effectively severed his relationship with the FA, which embarked on a doomed quest to hire Brazilian world champion Luiz Felipe Scolari (Steve McClaren got the job instead).

Here we saw the two sides of Eriksson. One, the operator, seduced by status and power, always open to offers and at ease with plutocrats. The other – a student of life, with a sense of its absurdity, an ability to see what others in the room could not: that it is all a game, that we are all going to die anyway, and that fame is an aphrodisiac – handy, for a man in love.

The FA brought him in as England’s first foreign manager, to replace Kevin Keegan and to break the narrow-mindedness of the blazer culture. With Benfica and Lazio winning league titles – and IFK Göteborg and Lazio winning European trophies – he was no impostor. In Alan Shearer’s words, Keegan was a “freeman, a freebooter” who didn’t meet the technical and tactical demands of the modern game. And Keegan had resigned in a toilet block at the old Wembley before the wrecking ball arrived. English pride and passion had run their course.

The FA headhunters went to Rome to pluck Eriksson from Lazio, the same way Eriksson had plucked his then partner Nancy Dell’Olio (‘the first lady of English football’, as she calls herself in the Amazon Prime documentary Sven) out of her marriage.

English football thought it was taking a safe bet, on a calming influence, a rationalist who had won big in Sweden, Portugal and Italy. Eriksson’s personal and professional promiscuity was not in the debit column of reasons for not paying him the salary of a FTSE-listed CEO. He was a low-risk, low-maintenance, consistent overachiever.

Except that he was steeped in the methodology England wanted to leave behind: direct play, 4-4-2, trying to win tournaments in the summer heat without the ball. Eriksson’s earliest education was in the English way. Later, in Portugal and Italy, he adapted to the more technical standards of those leagues. In England, after a brief flirtation with passing and possession, he reverted to local customs. Eventually, a ‘channel ball’ for fast attackers to chase down appealed to him more than ball retention and intricate build-up play.

In his Sunday Times column, Wayne Rooney wrote of the Eriksson years: “Under him you always played 4-4-2 or 4-4-1-1 and when you do that you always give away a lot of possession. You look back and wonder why we never tried 4-3-3, especially with all the midfielders we had. But we had great characters in the dressing room: why didn’t I say something, or Lamps (Frank Lampard), or Becks (David Beckham)? Why didn’t we as a group ask for a change? So the tactical side, it’s not just Sven, it’s all of us as players.”

Unlike Fabio Capello, a martinet who despised English frivolity and was the antithesis of Eriksson, “Svennis”, as he was known at home, made no attempt to shift the blame for three quarter-final exits onto his players, the FA’s second foreign signing. Eriksson was a manager in control of his ego and his honour. He was bewildered by English lechery, but even his indignation at press interference in later life was politely expressed. Eriksson lacked the vocabulary of anger and revenge.

The reasons his England teams failed weren’t to be found in his phone being hacked, his affair with Ulrika Jonsson, or his affair with Faria Alam, an FA employee who was also romantically involved with the chief executive, Mark Palios; or in his allowing England’s 2006 World Cup camp in Baden-Baden to be turned into a sitcom. According to Alam in the Amazon documentary, Eriksson encouraged her to sell her story to “make some money” when she was struggling to find work after the FA – a neat summation of the famous (in this case Eriksson) exposing media excesses while trying to profit from them.

The real explanation for England’s repeated failure to hit the buffers in the ‘quadrant final’ phase was to be found on the pitch, where they reverted to a type and style of play that the Golden Generation had largely left behind at their clubs. Foreign influence in Premier League coaching was steadily closing down Route One. But Eriksson remained on that path. His two emotional high points during his five years as manager came not in tournaments but in qualifying matches: the 5-1 win in Munich – the pinnacle of rapid, long-range passing – and Beckham’s free-kick against Greece at Old Trafford in 2002 World Cup qualifying.

The final chapter of his English reign was his laissez-faire management of the Baden-Baden circus, a social satire more appealing than the actual World Cup campaign. From then on, Eriksson seemed to lose control of his own destiny. His sure-footed approach deserted him, in unstable environments at Manchester City, Notts County and Leicester City, before mercenary roles in the Far East largely removed him from the picture, until a £10m investment loss brought him back into the news.

But his recent standing ovation at Anfield and grace under the pressure of terminal illness confirmed his best qualities: humility, enthusiasm, kindness, dignity. His farewell messages brought the real Sven-Göran Eriksson back into focus and put the gold rush of which he was a part into proper perspective. For much of his time on earth, Eriksson was beating the system. He was winning the game of life.