England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson has is to sue the News of the World for breach of confidence.

He was recorded by an undercover reporter who posed as a rich sheik saying he would stand down as England manager after the World Cup and he made uncomplimentary remarks about players.

Eriksson’s agent Athole Still and his lawyer Richard Des Voeux joined Eriksson in the legal move.

His lawyers say the stories were “a gross invasion of privacy”.

The trio had visited Dubai at the invitation of “an apparently legitimate company to discuss the possibility of a future sports development consultancy”.

“It is now clear that this was all a highly sophisticated deception by the newspaper,” his lawyers said on Friday.

“The resulting articles were a gross invasion of privacy, and the discussions, which our clients were expressly asked to keep confidential, were reported out of context in a distorted and sensationalised manner so as to provide a spurious pretext for the headlines which appeared.”

It continued: “Our clients’ position is that stories of this sort, and the distortion of what was said during confidential discussions in order to create the bogus appearance of some legitimate public interest, must be remedied.”

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