Graham Potter Was Never A Good Fit For Chelsea- And The Owners Are Responsible For It

Graham Potter

The two big mistakes that Chelsea made this year were sacking the incumbent coach Thomas Tuchel back in September, and appointing Graham Potter as the main manager for the PL team.

This doesn’t imply that the team from Stamford Bridge didn’t make any other mistakes during the season. The new owners of the club- a consortium that was led by the part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers Todd Boehly- went on a spending spree to sign Raheem Sterling from Manchester City- who were only too happy to see him go. They also signed Pierre Emerick Aubameyang from Barcelona at the suggestion of Tuchel- whom they ended up sacking midway into the season. 

Graham Potter Sacked By Chelsea After 7 Months

If sacking Tuchel was half of the disaster, the other half was signing Graham Potter, the erstwhile manager of Brighton and Hove Albion. This appointment reeked of incompetence at the highest levels in the club- with the owners thinking that Potter would be able to replicate the model that was adopted at LA Dodgers.

Boehly and the other investors have by now learned that managing an association football club was a different ballgame. Similar to Dave Roberts, who Boehly hired for the Dodgers in 2015, Potter was supposed to be a long-term appointment, but after winning just 12 of his 31 games as manager of Chelsea, Boehly’s plans have backfired heavily. 

It was pretty evident that Graham Potter wasn’t ready to jump from Brighton to Chelsea. While he had set himself as a star with his work at Ostersund in Sweden, Swansea, and finally Brighton, the credentials were massively overstated due to him being an English coach working in the Premier League- which is quite a rarity over the last decade.