PHOTO: Bildbyrån
Sven-Göran Eriksson is one of Swedish football’s greatest.
Today we pay tribute to the coaching icon “Svennis” on his 76th birthday.
And Torbjörn Nilsson says what everyone needs to hear about him.
He is one of our top football coaches of all time. Sven-Göran Eriksson made great success in both Degerfors and IFK Göteborg before leaving Swedish football forever and conquering Europe.
Svenni’s career
After winning the Uefa Cup with Blåvitt, “Svennis” took the step to Portugal and the big club Benfica. It was the start of an absolutely fantastic coaching career that led to success in major clubs such as Roma, Fiorentina, Sampdoria, Lazio, Manchester City, Leicester and the national teams England, Mexico and the Ivory Coast.
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But recently, the Swedish people have been able to follow his fight against cancer. At the beginning of 2024, Eriksson revealed that he only has one year left to live and since then the tributes have poured in from all over the football world.
Nilsson pays tribute
Today, the coaching icon turns 76 and he deserves to be celebrated again for his matchless career. Now the legend opens Torbjörn Nilssonappointed as Svenni’s great favorite player, about Sven-Göran Eriksson’s greatness and with the most beautiful words.
– I am very happy to have experienced him as a leader. He has meant an incredible amount, both as a player and a leader, he says in Olof Lundhs podcast.
– You ran for him, everything we did was for him and that proves that you are a good leader. He’s very diplomatic, he’s very flexible and he gets everyone on board somehow. Then I can’t say what it is that makes him bring everyone along, but I think it’s the co-influence and that everyone feels they are needed.
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Nilsson is full of admiration for Svenni’s qualities as a coach, which has made him the most successful in Swedish football history.
– It is one thing that it might work in Sweden, but there is no other Swedish coach who has had such success as he had. Were you surprised or was it a given? – Not a given, but I was quite convinced that he would be successful. Then I thought when he had a setback in Roma, he came to a team with lots of stars who didn’t want to play the way he thought, then maybe you saw a concern that he would move home soon. But he ended up in Benfica again and had to straighten out his career again, he tells the podcast.
READ MORE: The entire football world’s beautiful tributes to the late “Kurre” Hamrin go straight to the heart: “One of our greatest”
Torbjörn Nilsson thinks it’s a shame that Sven-Göran Eriksson never became the national team captain for Sweden. As he is convinced that Svennis could have handled the superstar Zlatan better than anything Lars Lagerbäck and Erik Hamren did.
– I think that status is very important and Svennis had a star status, it was perhaps even bigger than Zlatan’s, so I think so, he says in the interview with Lundh.
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