Nobody wanted him. An ambitious young English coach who was bursting with new ideas grew more and more frustrated as his efforts to land a job in his homeland fell flat. Application after application came to nothing, his reputation as a lower-league player meaning he rarely received a reply. But then came hope. A new opportunity opened up in Sweden. It was a relative football outpost, but it was the foothold the coach had been craving. George Raynor was finally going to be a football manager.
Raynor’s big break in 1946 has a few parallels to the path that Graham Potter has taken in management. Potter is unlikely to win an Olympic gold medal or lead Sweden to the World Cup final but that was not the aim for Raynor either. Swedish football was very different when Raynor took the job in the 1940s. The domestic league maintained a staunch amateur philosophy that extended to the national side.
The 39-year-old would have to work under the Swedish FA’s selection committee. He had a say on team selection, but the ultimate decision fell to Putte Kock, a former Sweden winger who won bronze with the national team at the 1924 Olympics (as well as playing for their ice hockey team). This setup was not unusual at the time. England manager Walter Winterbottom worked within a similar structure, which continued until Alf Ramsey took over in 1963.
That did not reduce Raynor’s impact though. Despite his only previous coaching experience being as a physical training instructor posted in Iraq during the second world war, and a stint with Aldershot reserves, he was a student of the game who took influences from study rather than managers he worked under. The FA secretary Stanley Rous recognised his aptitude for coaching and recommended Raynor for the Sweden job.
Working with Putte, Raynor tried out his self-learned coaching principles. He quickly organised Sweden’s players to be more competitive against larger nations, pushing England all the way in a 4-2 friendly defeat at Wembley in November 1947. He went one better the following year, returning to his homeland again to lead the Swedes to gold at the 1948 Olympics.
The success was built on a team playing with a solid midfield base that allowed the triple threat of future Serie A players Gunnar Gren, Gunnar Nordahl and Nils Liedholm – dubbed Gre-No-Li – to fire them to victory. Winning the Olympic gold medal was a huge statement of Sweden’s potential, but it had a downside. The country’s strict amateur ethos meant any stars moving abroad to become professional on the back of their new status were immediately made unavailable for national team selection.
Despite being hamstrung by the rule, Raynor continued to pull up trees. After qualifying for the 1950 World Cup in Brazil, the Englishman led his patched-up side out of a three-team group with Italy and Paraguay to a final group stage that would decide the winner. They finished third overall after a 7-1 shellacking at the hands of the hosts, a narrow 3-2 defeat to eventual winners Uruguay and a 3-1 victory over Spain.
They finished third at the Olympics two years later, only being knocked out in the semi-final by Ferenc Puskas’s seminal Hungary team. Raynor learned a lot from witnessing the Magical Magyars up close. He analysed his opponents closely and devised a way to handle their movement and skill, coming up with a plan that earned his team a 2-2 draw in Budapest the following year.
That contest took place 10 days before Hungary’s famous 6-3 win against England, with Raynor reportedly meeting Winterbottom in a Vienna cafe beforehand to pass on his learnings about how to tame the Magyars. Unfortunately for England, Winterbottom failed to replicate the approach and they fell to a humbling defeat.
Raynor’s desire to learn from a Hungary side considered to be the greatest international team of the era, and obsessively work on a way to get on terms with them, shows what made him so successful. He sought to understand the trends of the day and update his team to compete with the best.
His insistence on sharing those tactics with his English counterparts also indicates how important it was to be recognised back home. As he later wrote in his book, Football Ambassador at Large, “any coach has an ambition to be a success in his own country” and he clearly wanted to show his worth.
If he hadn’t proved himself enough, the 1958 World Cup would surely do it. After a three-year hiatus from the Sweden job to take up short-term stints with Juventus, Lazio and Coventry, Raynor returned to the job in 1957 as Sweden prepared to host the tournament.
Sweden relaxed their rule of only picking amateur players, helping Raynor mould a side that went all the way to the final – beating holders West Germany, the Soviet Union and Hungary along the way. In the final, the hosts met a Brazil side that included Garrincha and a 17-year-old Pelé. Sweden took the lead in the fourth minute courtesy of Lindholm, but Vavá equalised and then gave Brazil the lead before half-time. Brazil showed their class in the second half, with goals from Pelé and Mário Zagallo giving them a 5-2 win.
The tournament was still seen as a success for Sweden. Raynor, the first English manager to reach a World Cup final, hoped his extensive international CV would help him to secure a job back home. But the only interest he could muster was from non-league Skegness Town, where he remained until 1960 after the club could not afford to keep him on.
Another short spell back in Sweden followed, but he slipped into retirement after a year in charge of Fourth Division Doncaster in the late 1960s. He was revered in Sweden, earning royal recognition from their King and being named in the Swedish Football Hall of Fame in 2006, but his footprint was not felt elsewhere.
Raynor had a level of sustained international success that no other Englishman, other than Alf Ramsey, can hold a torch to and he came as close as any non-native manager has to winning the World Cup. But in a time when international awareness was low and British coaching was ignored more progressive European methods, Raynor’s record counted for very little. Just as when he left England, nobody wanted Raynor. He was a forgotten man.
