Sven-Goran Eriksson: Shinawatra stopped speaking to me at Man City

Sven-Goran Eriksson has won several major honours as a manager across three countries and also managed three separate national sides – so when we had the chance to speak to him we obviously decided to talk about Manchester City…

Eriksson is best remembered in England for his five-and-a-half-year spell in charge of the national team, but the Swede also went on to manage two sides who would later win the Premier League: Manchester City and Leicester City.

Eriksson was the Thai consortium’s first appointment at Leicester in 2010, when he led them from the bottom of the Championship to a 10th-place finish, but the 69-year-old jokes he “joined Manchester City one year too early” after just missing out on the start of the Sheikh Mansour era.

Instead, he spent a season working for another Thai owner, Thaksin Shinawatra, who cited “modest ambitions [that] don’t end with domination of the world game” but who himself spent less than 15 months at the club before selling it on at great profit.

As is traditional with City (or at least used to be), the Shinawatra era was one of hope and excitement followed by embarrassment and humiliation.

After sacking Eriksson against the wishes of players and most supporters, the former Prime Minister of Thailand had his £800million assets frozen in Thailand amid allegations of corruption, with the club forced to take out a £30million bank loan and allegedly trying to sell players behind the back of the new manager, Mark Hughes.

All in all, classic City.

Initially, however, things looked promising after Shinawatra’s vision for the club had convinced Eriksson to take his first job since leaving his position as England manager a year previously.

“I didn’t have any contact with Thaksin before he took