Sven Goran Eriksson, the day after he walked away from
his job as director of football at Notts County. Photograph: Tom
Jenkins
Sven-Goran Eriksson revealed for the first time has the full
story behind his chaotic seven months at Notts County and the bizarre sequence
of events that began with hopes of a multi-million-pound revival
for the Football League's oldest club only to end with it on the
brink of financial collapse.
Twenty-four hours after cutting his ties with the League Two club that has been his
employer for the past seven months Eriksson opened his heart to the
Guardian. In a candid interview the former England manager has laid
bare:
• How he was promised the players and facilities to guarantee
Premier League football
• How he entered negotiations to help run North Korea's national team
• The circumstances behind the England defender Sol Campbell's
abrupt departure from Meadow Lane
• When he had his first doubts about Munto Finance, the club's
offshore-registered parent company
• His anger at the vanishing act that left the club with vast
debts and the threat of winding up
The strangest experience of Eriksson's football career began
last June when he received the first contact from Russell King and
Nathan Willett, two former Jersey-based financiers who claimed to
be representing a wealthy consortium of investors from the Middle
East and Europe, via a third party. They met at the Dorchester
Hotel, where King was a regular resident, and gave a "very clever,
very convincing" pitch to Eriksson about moving to Notts
County.
"I met these two guys and they were very enthusiastic about what
they said," Eriksson said. "They had already bought the club and
they wanted to take it to the Premier League. There were a lot of
promises about players, about the training ground, the academy;
they said they would fix the stadium, that they would buy feeder
clubs."
After initial reservations about joining a struggling club in
English football's fourth tier Eriksson was persuaded by the
prospect of taking the world's oldest league club to the top of
the football pyramid and promptly signed up. "I liked the idea of
the project, the challenge to do it. It was like a dream to me. And
if all their promises had been true, we would have done it."
Soon King's and Willett's promises were backed up by the
arrivals of Kasper Schmeichel and Sol Campbell, fresh from
contracts with the Premier League clubs Manchester City and
Portsmouth, deals that were also negotiated by King and
Willett.
"I had no doubts about it in the beginning," he explained.
Eriksson's faith in his employers was not shaken even when Campbell
quit the club after a single game. Nevertheless, the circumstances
of Campbell's departure were consistent with the surreal nature of
events at Meadow Lane.
"He played that game away [at Morecambe] and asked the manager
if he could go to stay for two days in Newcastle," said Eriksson.
"He got permission and left on Saturday evening. Then he called
[the chairman] Peter Trembling. Peter called me the next morning
and said Sol wants to leave. I called Sol and said could we meet
when he came back. We had an agreement to meet after training on
Tuesday.
"He started training and in the middle of training he went. I
don't know if he told the manager he had some small problems. I
thought that after training we would have a meeting but when I came
back he was gone. He knew the conditions at the club, I'd shown him
the ground and the training ground. Of course there were promises
from Willett and King that we would fix it, that they would make
the stadium and dressing rooms better and everything. But nothing
happened and Sol was concerned about that. We have never spoken
since but I guess he felt cheated by them too."
Eriksson says he was still being sold the grand vision of the
club, not least by Nathan Willett's father, Peter, who had joined
the Notts County board. Eriksson said he believed Peter Willett was
the actual owner. "He came a couple of times and said he would fix
the stadium and would make the training ground better and then he
suddenly disappeared. He never came back."
But still Eriksson was living a life more suited to the director
of football of a Champions League club than one in the lowest
division of the Football League. Indeed, some elements of the
project were truly unique.
"I went on 19 October to North Korea, together with Russell King
and Nathan Willett," he said. "When I went home from there I
started to have doubts because of what I saw in that country and
what happened after that."
They were accompanied by a member of the Hyat family, which the
club had stated has "extensive business interests" across the
Middle East and Asia; Eriksson says this man was projected as the
"big guy" behind the investment in County. However the Guardian
later tracked down Anwar Shafi, the acknowledged head of the Hyat
family, who disavowed his relative's claims.
"They cheated," Eriksson said. "I was invited there to talk
football and I met the president of the Football Association there,
coaches of the national team, I saw games and the training and I
had a lot of meetings.
"They wanted help with a lot of things. They wanted footballs
and boots and coaches and for us to take care of teams in North
Korea. They wanted the team to come to Europe and they wanted help
with the scouting and help with friendly games, analysing
opponents, etc.
"Of course this would have cost money and they [King, Peter
Willett and their associates] said everything was OK. When we came
home the days went on and I contacted Nathan Willett and I said I
needed a contact number for the people in Korea to start to do it.
So I prepared places in Europe for them to take their teams for six
months and we contacted sponsors to help out about everything.
"But I never could contact anyone in Korea and nothing happened.
And I felt sorry for them because I'd promised on behalf of these
guys and I never could contact them so I wondered what was going
on."
While the party was in Pyongyang, Willett and King and their
colleagues went to meet officials at the ceremonial Mansudae
Assembly hall. "I was there for football and they went to visit
people at the palace," he said. "I saw them handing out share
certificates in Swiss Commodity Holding [the company whose
corporate logo was incorporated into Notts County's club crest] to
people. These were not for millions but billions. I tried to joke:
why don't you put some of that into Notts County? And they said,
'Take it easy, Sven, you'll have your players and you'll go to the
Premier League.'"
But when it emerged that the club was running up huge debts as
bills went unpaid, with the taxman even issuing a winding-up order
in November, Eriksson's perspective began to change. "Then the club
had problems with money, bills not being paid. So, of course, I
started to be doubtful and they never paid me what they promised,"
said Eriksson. "In my initial contract I was promised 10% of the
club but I never received anything."
Eriksson has been hit in the pocket by this experience. Though
he refused to go into details of his financial arrangements club
sources say that inagreeing to leave Meadow Lane after the takeover
by a consortium led by the former Lincoln City chairman, Ray Trew,
on Thursday, he has waived a £2.4m pay-off, accepting instead two
months' wage arrears. Trew, now County's chairman, has described
the Swede as an "absolute gentleman".
"I signed the agreement to leave because there was never a
question I should stay here," said Eriksson. "I told the players
and staff today and the people in the office: that's it."
Eriksson accepts that his decision to place his faith in King
and the Willetts might have damaged his reputation. "I don't know
if it's affected me like that," he said. "All I can say is I've
gone in with open eyes and I liked it and it went wrong. Maybe I
should have had suspicions but I didn't have that in the
beginning."
At the height of the roller coaster Eriksson did not want to
hear others' suspicions about Munto. When I confronted him on the
issue at the Leaders in Football conference early last October,
Eriksson appeared irritated, referring me to Trembling without
hearing me out. But County's crash has been so alarming, the gap
between what Willett and King said and reality so wide, that now
Eriksson feels compelled to break football's omerta and tell one of
the most extraordinary stories that has befallen the game in
decades.
"Sometimes things go wrong in football," said Eriksson. "You
can lose games, own-goals, you can buy the wrong players. But you
do it in the right spirit and you do it honestly. That is not how
it went wrong at Notts County. If you are not trying to cheat
people, it is very easy to come out and say that it went wrong.
People will not like it but they will understand. But when they
disappear like that: it's morally very, very bad. This is why I am
talking about it.
"I did feel personal responsibility. I know some of the players
wouldn't be there if I was not, of course I feel that. I feel very
sorry for the players and the fans. I tried as hard as I could to
find people who could help us, I've been to Norway, to Sweden, to
Spain, to London many, many times to find investment.
"But what's disappointing about these people is that they just
disappeared without saying anything. Without any message to the
players, to the fans, to the staff. Just gone."
Now Eriksson will look to rebuild his career, putting the
experience of the past eight months behind him. A man with league
titles in Sweden, Portugal and Italy and two World Cup
quarter-finals on his resumé will not want for work and he has
been inundated with calls from agents, although he has received no
formal offers.
So when all is said and done and he looks back on the past eight
months, what has he learnt from the experience? "Maybe I trust
people too much."