Todd Boehly and co. want Graham Potter to be a long-term appointment, but a legacy relies on success and success at Chelsea means trophies.
Graham Potter is perhaps Chelsea’s most exciting managerial appointment this century. Every permanent boss signed in Roman Abramovich’s reign, other than club legends Frank Lampard and Roberto Di Matteo, had won a league title before arriving at Stamford Bridge; most of them had won far more than that.
Potter’s only engraved success is the Swedish Cup with Ostersunds, an achievement – in status terms – dwarfed by those to have preceded him at Chelsea.
Potter is, in that sense, a gamble. And as is the case with any manager making a jump as significant as Brighton to Chelsea, his ability to deal with bigger egos and better players is another cause for great intrigue and concern.
But Chelsea moving for Potter was also not a surprise. Football agrees: he’s a very good manager. And it’s nice to see Chelsea – whose obsession with silverware under Abramovich made them overly simplistic in selecting managerial replacements – consider the process as much as the end goal.
They don’t know if Potter can win major trophies, but they do know he can coach individuals and a team to make them a hell of a lot better and it will be fascinating to see how good he is with the ceiling as high as possible.
“He is a proven coach and an innovator in the Premier League who fits our vision for the club,” Todd Boehly said after Potter was announced as the new boss, with a report claiming he and fellow owner Behdad Eghbali are ‘understood to regard the upwardly-mobile coach Potter as a risk taker, innovator and master communicator, in the mould of a blue-chip company chief executive’.
The US owners are said to be bemused by the Premier League’s managerial merry-go-round – ironic given they spared no time in hoisting Thomas Tuchel aboard one of its horses – and are determined to break that cycle by installing Potter at the Stamford Bridge helm for the long-term.
The problem is, guys, we don’t believe you, and neither should Graham Potter.
Knee-jerk, disrespectful and nonsensical though the sacking of Tuchel was, that move alone doesn’t suggest the new owners will continue with Stamford Bridge’s saloon-door policy.
Rightly or wrongly, they believed the manager who was in charge when they bought the club wasn’t the right person to take it forward.
It wasn’t their decision to hire him, so there’s…
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