Graham Potter has not been seen or heard from since being sacked by Chelsea – but presumably with some sort of agreement with the club having expired, he’s wheeled himself out for a tell-all interview with the Daily Telegraph – presumably in the lead up to putting himself back in the running for some jobs.
Matt Law’s interview covers the whole span of his time at the club, but of course we’re most interested in what went wrong.
Potter was never the right choice – but there’s no denying that the context within which he was working was a disaster. That was proved by the similar struggles of managers before and after him. Ultimately the results weren’t good enough, and given what had come relatively recently before under Thomas Tuchel, it was a hard act to follow:
“I take responsibility for the results,” Potter said.
“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.”
Potter explains what went wrong in chaotic 6 months
He went into some specific detail on what had contributed to the whole thing falling apart:
“It was almost like the perfect storm. It was 14 matches in six weeks prior to the World Cup… 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… the reality is you can’t just imagine they are going to hit the ground running and everything’s going to be fine.”
So what we saw from the outside was pretty much accurate then – buying a load of players who weren’t yet ready for first team action only hindered and didn’t help Potter.
