Former Chelsea boss Graham Potter has revealed that his players had to “sit on the floor” in the dressing room as he’s reflected on his exit from the club.
The 49-year-old has been out of work since he was sacked by Chelsea in April 2023 after he won just 12 of his 31 matches in charge of the Premier League giants.
Potter was the first manager Todd Boehly and Co. appointed following their takeover as he replaced Thomas Tuchel, but he was sacked after just seven months.
The Englishman was given his big break by Chelsea, but his spell at Stamford Bridge was a nightmare as he struggled to deal with a mass influx of players amid significant changes behind the scenes.
In a new interview with The Telegraph, Potter has reflected on his time at Chelsea as he admits he felt “bitter and angry” in the months after departing the club.
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Potter said: “The first six months were tough because I worked really, really hard to get that type of opportunity.
“I don’t think it was the only opportunity I was going to get because I left Brighton in a really, really good place. So it was about choosing the right opportunity. And I didn’t choose the wrong one, it just didn’t work out.
“I don’t have any regrets over doing it, but, at the same time, when anybody loses their job, there’s an element of frustration, anger and maybe bitterness at some point.”
While Potter has “taken responsibility” for Chelsea’s poor results, he has indicated that he was not entirely to blame for their struggles.
“I take responsibility for the results,” said Potter. “I’ve never said I’ve ever been perfect and you live and you learn, and you are grateful for the opportunity and grateful for the experience you had there.
“But there’s probably a context that has appeared. The easy solution is Chelsea aren’t winning, so it must be the coach who has never worked at this level before, he’s the problem. That might not be 100 per cent wrong, but it’s not 100 per cent right.”
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Potter has also explained why he thinks a “perfect storm” resulted in him being sacked, while players “just had to sit on the floor”.
“It was almost like the perfect storm,” Potter added. “It was 14 matches in six weeks prior to the World Cup. It was like you were in the washing machine, that’s what we said within the staff, because the games kept coming and we had no preparation time or anything.
“We lost Reece [James] and Wesley [Fofana] to injury. I think we had the most players at the World Cup and pretty quickly afterwards we lost Raheem [Sterling] and Christian Pulisic.
“Then the ownership decided to invest a lot of money in the squad, £300 million in the January transfer window. Now, if you are spending £300 million on players that are coming from outside the Premier League, from countries that are having a mid-season break, then the reality is you can’t just imagine they are going to hit the ground running and everything’s going to be fine.
“But, obviously, if you spend £300 million, the pressure on the team goes up and the pressure on the coach goes up. And people go: ‘Come on then, you’ve spent all this money.’ I think if I’d have spent it on Harry Kane and Declan Rice, then fair enough, but at the time that was the decision. We tried to support it as best we could, but it left us with a challenge of a lot of players after January and then they can’t go anywhere.”
He continued: “A few of them just had to sit on the floor.
“It’s not ideal, of course. Everybody recognised it was a really difficult situation because you can only pick 11 players and if you’ve got 20 players not playing, it doesn’t matter where you are. If you can find a coach out there who says: ‘Yeah, that’s the best condition for me,’ I’d be very surprised.”
