Sven-Göran Eriksson is dead.
Now Juan Sebastian Veron wants an arena to be named after him.
– That would be the right thing, says the icon.
It was in January earlier this year that Sven-Göran Eriksson, Sweden’s greatest football coach of all time, told us that he had suffered from an incurable and fatal cancer. During the year, Svennis has traveled around Europe receiving accolades from former clubs he coached, and if it wasn’t already clear exactly how much he was valued by former players and coaches, it certainly was now.
The icon’s fine words
Sven-Göran Eriksson made IFK Gothenburg a top European club, and over the years he also reaped great success in Portugal and Italy. At club team level, apart from Blåvitt, he is perhaps most associated with Lazio. The Rome team had not won Serie A since 1974 when Svennis took over in 1997. But in four hugely successful years he led the team to league victory, victory in the Cup Winners’ Cup, as well as two titles in the Italian Cup.
Juan Sebastian Veron was one of Svenni’s key players at Lazio. The Argentine then went on to play at big clubs such as Manchester United, Chelsea and Inter, but still hasn’t forgotten what Svennis did for him and Lazio as a club. And now he thinks it is fitting that the Italian giants pay a proper tribute to the coach who took the team to their first league title in 26 years.
Want to do the most powerful thing
Lazio have long had plans to leave the Olympic Stadium in Rome, as there are plans to refurbish the Stadio Flaminio. Now Veron wants the arena to be named after Svennis, or Tommaso Maestrelli who was the coach who took Lazio to the team’s first ever league title.
– Lazio’s history is full of great characters, but I think Maestrelli and Eriksson have made many generations of Lazio fans happy. Therefore, I think it would be the right choice, he says to La Repubblica, according to SVT.
Sebastian Veron doesn’t have much for modern sponsor names, as is often the case in stadiums these days.
– Often the club chooses the name of the stadium after those who laid the first stone or the sponsor who finances the facility. But for me it would be romantic that Lazio’s home would perpetuate the names of two coaches who wrote the club’s history, he says.
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