Don Revie
Revie succeeded Alf Ramsey as England manager in 1974 but, having failed to qualify for the 1976 European Championship and with his relationship strained with the Football Association chairman Sir Harold Thompson, he started sounding out prospective employers. He missed a friendly with Brazil in Rio apparently to scout Italy but, in truth, to travel to Dubai to negotiate a four-year contract to manage the United Arab Emirates worth £340,000 annually. He then sold news of his departure to the Daily Mail before the FA had received his formal resignation letter.
The FA duly suspended Revie from football for 10 years, a ban which was overturned in court after a ruling that the governing body had overreached its powers. Yet it transpired that the Daily Mirror had actually been conducting a lengthy enquiry into suggestions Revie had been fixing matches, details of which were later handed to the FA in a 315-page dossier. Revie sued the Mirror for libel, but did not pursue his legal action.
Terry Venables
Venables was appointed England coach in January 1994 but, while he retained various business ventures outside his day job, it was various legal proceedings – not least with the then owner of Tottenham Hotspur, Alan Sugar – which served as a regular distraction and were why the FA stressed that the new man was the coach, not the manager. Four months after taking up the reins of the national team he lost a high-court battle with Sugar to have his company, Edennote plc, wound up. In August of that year, police dropped an inquiry into allegations Venables had paid the former Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough a £58,750 “bung” to arrange the transfer of Teddy Sheringham to Spurs and, in November 1995, he called in Scotland Yard to investigate a “concerted and organised campaign to discredit him”. The case was subsequently dropped without any charges having been brought as the police were unable to find any evidence of wrongdoing.
In January 1996, Venables announced he would be standing down as England coach after Euro 96 because of court cases due to be heard later in the year which he felt would interfere with the national side’s efforts to qualify for the 1998 World Cup. As it transpired, he became director of football at second-tier Portsmouth in July 1996 having conducted a review of his legal commitments and discovered they would not be as heavy as initially anticipated.
In 1998 he was disqualified as a company director for seven years.
Sven-Goran Eriksson
The Swede’s preparations for his first World Cup finals in charge of England included the launch of a three‑CD box-set of his favourite classical music tracks. The collection, released on the label Naxos, came out in the April before the 2002 tournament and included 17 pieces by British composers, from Elgar to Purcell, Walton to Delius. Triumphalist favourites such as Jerusalem and The Dam Busters March were included. The second CD featured European classical pieces, and the third works by Scandinavian composers.
Eriksson did not stop there. He had tie-ups with Cirio del Monte pasta sauces, a television advert for Sainsbury’s alongside Jamie Oliver, and two Sony PlayStation games: Sven-Goran Eriksson’s World Cup Challenge, and Sven-Goran Eriksson’s World Cup manager. One reviewer of the games suggested “the greatest challenge is actually deciding which is worst”, describing them as “a dismal experience”.
There were, of course, other distractions. He was photographed meeting the then Chelsea chief executive, Peter Kenyon, in 2004 apparently discussing potentially succeeding Claudio Ranieri at Stamford Bridge, only then to sign a two-year extension with the national setup. Then, in the buildup to the 2006 World Cup, there was his meeting with the News of the World’s Fake Sheikh – over £900 worth of vintage champagne and lobster at a seven-star Dubai hotel and on a luxury yacht in the Gulf city’s marina – when he suggested he was prepared to become the £5m-a-year manager of Aston Villa, and where he appeared to offer to “tap up” the national captain David Beckham to move to Villa Park under his stewardship.
Fabio Capello
The Italian’s reputation as a national manager was at its highest point, just 24 hours away from naming his provisional 30-man squad for the 2010 World Cup finals, when, apparently to the FA’s surprise, he helped launch the Capello Index at the London Stock Exchange. The manager’s contract, as with other FA employees, included a clause requiring him to obtain prior approval for external business ventures, but this was ignored when he agreed to contribute to the Italian businessman Chicco Merighi’s online venture. At the launch, at which Capello spoke, he was described as cofounder of the player-rating site which had been two years in creation, though he later claimed he received no payment for his involvement. The site rated players according to a complex formula that was developed using Capello’s expertise and, while it apparently did not rely upon his personal assessments, the likelihood remained that the formula would be applied to members of his own England squad. His name and likeness were eventually removed from the site, after much lobbying by a flustered FA, but the venture continued to rate players.
Roy Hodgson
Hodgson’s son, Christopher, has worked as a designer with the Swiss watchmaker Hublot, with Hodgson Sr listed as “a member of the Hublot family” well before the brand produced a limited-edition King Power 66 Hodgson timepiece to commemorate the year England won the World Cup. That was launched before the 2014 finals at which the national team were winless and failed to scramble out of the group. Hodgson, however, had asked permission from the FA before accepting the 2014 watch, and another produced before this summer’s Euro 2016 campaign, and was permitted to accept as there was no financial inducement involved.
