"The little boy in the big jacket': how Eriksson made his mark

Before his adventures abroad, the Swede took on Europe's elite with ateam of plumbers and electricians and won

- Marcus Christenson

It was the autumn of 1980 and IFK Gothenburg had just been eliminated by Twente in the first round of the Uefa Cup when the board asked their young manager what was required to make progress in Europe. "I need three new players," said a 32-year-old Sven-Göran Eriksson. "A goalkeeper, a left-back and a forward."

The club could not afford the signings but such was the belief in Eriksson that several board members remortgaged their houses to free up the money. It was a huge gamble.

The previous year, Eriksson - a complete nobody at the time - had been put in charge of one of Sweden's most famous clubs and it had led to a rare moment of self-doubt. Eriksson, who has died at the age of 76, claimed to have been nervous only once during his long career and that was before his first training session with Gothenburg. One of the players, the legendary Björn Nordqvist, had played 115 times for Sweden and was six years the manager's senior.

Eriksson, meanwhile, had two seasons in charge of the third division side Degerfors under his belt. In the beginning the IFK players could not even get his name right, calling him Sven-Erik Göransson. "We looked at him and thought: 'Is this little boy going to coach us?"" the former forward Torbjörn Nilsson told the podcast Änglarna last year. "He had this big jacket and looked so small and pale."

In the book Svennis: My History, Eriksson wrote: "In my previous club, Degerfors, I felt at home but here I was an outsider, a country boy in Sweden's second biggest city. I looked at the players, the stars, standing in front of me, on the pitch. But then it hit me - many of them were from the countryside too. There was nothing to be afraid about."

So the young coach set about implementing his ideas. They were fairly new to Sweden including a 4-4-2 formation with high press and zonal marking - but the local media hated it.