Nobody wanted him. An ambitious young English coach bursting with life experience and new ideas, growing ever frustrated at his efforts to get a job in his homeland falling flat.
Application after application came to nothing, his reputation as a lower-league player meaning he rarely got as much as an acknowledgement. The calling he felt burning so strongly within him had nowhere to release.
But then came hope. A recommendation from an ally in England had opened up a new opportunity 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 to become Sweden manager may have been in 1946, but there are stark parallels to the path that first led his eventual successor Graham Potter to the Scandinavian nation to take over Östersund 65 years later.
Since Potter was named as Sweden boss in October – at first on a temporary basis before being made permanent in March – those comparisons with Raynor have become even greater.
Yet the chances of Potter emulating the success his English counterpart had in charge of the Blågult are slim, with Olympic gold and a World Cup final appearance not expected of him. Although they weren’t the aim for Raynor either.
The Swedish football landscape was very different when Raynor got the job in the 40s. The domestic league maintained a staunch amateur philosophy that extended to the national side, meaning the first task upon the 39-year-old’s arrival was to instil structure and formalised tactics to the talent that existed in the country.
Raynor wouldn’t oversee choosing the players he worked with, instead working with the Swedish FA’s selection committee, which chose the players called up and picked in the team. He’d have a say, but the ultimate decision fell to Putte Kock, a former winger who won bronze with the national team at the 1924 Olympics.
This setup wasn’t unusual for international football at the time, with England’s manager at the time, Walter Winterbottom, working within a similar structure that existed until Alf Ramsey took over in 1963.
That didn’t reduce the impact Raynor was able to have, 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’s reserve side, the Barnsley native was a student of the game, taking influences from study rather than a direct lineage from other coaches or managers he’d worked with.
Those virtues led to FA secretary Stanley Rous recommending Raynor for the Sweden job, recognising his countryman’s natural aptitude for coaching.
Working with Putte, Raynor was well placed to try 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 – a little over a year after taking the job.
But he’d go one better the following year, returning to Blighty 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.
Olympic gold was a huge statement of Sweden’s potential standing in the world game, but didn’t come without its downside. The Scandinavians’ 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 to decide the winner. A 7-1 shellacking at the hands of the hosts was followed up with a late defeat to eventual winners Uruguay and victory over Spain to come third overall.
Two years later, another third-placed finish saw Sweden win bronze at the 52 Olympics, only being knocked out in the semi-final by Ferenc Puskas’s seminal Hungary team.
Raynor had learned a lot from witnessing the Magical Magyars up close. He closely analysed his opponents and devised a way to handle their movement and skill, coming up with a plan that earned his charges a 2-2 draw in Budapest in a match in the following year.
That contest took place only 10 days before Hungary’s famous Match of the Century with England, with Raynor reportedly meeting Three Lions boss Winterbottom in a Vienna café before the match to pass on his learnings about how to tame the Magyars. Unfortunately for England, Winterbottom failed to replicate the approach as they fell to a humbling 6-3 defeat to end their unbeaten Wembley record.
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 highlighted what made him so successful. He sought to understand the trends of the day and update his team to compete with them.
His insistence on sharing those tactics with his English counterparts also indicates how important recognition back in his home country was. 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 in 1957 to take over a team preparing to host the tournament.
This time he’d be aided by the relaxing of the amateur rule to finally allow Sweden to select professionals within their ranks, helping to 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 boasting Garrincha and a 17-year-old Pele among their ranks, taking a fourth-minute lead courtesy of Lindholm. But it would only last for five minutes with Vava scoring the first of two first-half goals to draw things level before giving the Selecao a lead they wouldn’t relinquish.
A brace from Pele and a fifth from Zagallo, before Agne Simonsson scored a consolation, left Sweden on the end of a 5-2 defeat – although the campaign was still seen as a success.
For Raynor, he had become the first Englishman to reach a World Cup final. Once more, he looked to use his extensive international CV to score 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 couldn’t afford to keep him on.
Another short spell back in Sweden followed, but he slipped into retirement anonymously after a year in charge with Fourth Division Doncaster in the late 60s.
He was revered by the Blågult, earning royal recognition from the King of Sweden and being named in the Swedish Football Hall of Fame in 2006, but his footprint wasn’t felt elsewhere.
Raynor had a level of sustained international success that no other Englishman other than Alf Ramsey could hold a torch to and came as close as any non-native manager has come to winning the World Cup.
But in a time when cross-national awareness was low and British coaching was still dominated by working-class values than more progressive European methods, Raynor’s record counted for very little among his compatriots.
Just as when he left England, nobody wanted Raynor. He was a forgotten man, a fate that – despite the similarities – is unlikely to befall Potter should he come anywhere near to the success his countryman achieved as Sweden boss.
