England’s Forgotten Football Great

Yorkshireman George Raynor led Sweden to the final of the 1958 World Cup. Margaret Brecknell remembers a managerial pioneer whose achievements are little recognised in his homeland

- Margaret Brecknell

Only three Englishmen have taken a national team to the final of a major international football competition. One is the legendary Sir Alf Ramsey, manager of England’s 1966 World Cup winning team, another is Gareth Southgate who took England to the final of Euro 2020 but most readers will struggle to come up with the name of the third.

It was Yorkshireman George Raynor who took host nation Sweden all the way to the final of the 1958 World Cup. Raynor had enjoyed previous success as Sweden’s manager and also managed at the top level of Italian club football. So why is he still so little recognised in his homeland?

The son of a miner, George Raynor was born in January 1907 in Wombwell, near Barnsley. He enjoyed a steady, if unspectacular, career as a professional footballer, playing for several lower-league clubs before World War Two intervened.

Raynor joined the army as a physical training instructor and later in the war was posted to Iraq. While serving in Baghdad, he was asked to assist in coaching an Iraqi representative side. The job went well and raised his profile significantly.

Raynor returned to England at the end of the war, evidently ready to take the football world by storm. However, nothing much had changed. He took on the distinctly unglamorous role of assistant manager at one of his former clubs, Aldershot, and seemed to be going nowhere fast. All that changed when, in 1946, the then Football Association secretary Stanley Rous was approached by his Swedish counterpart, asking for managerial recommendations for Sweden’s national side. Rous had heard good reports of George Raynor’s coaching prowess in Iraq and put his name forward as a suitable candidate.