He’s not good enough. He’s not cut out for this level. He can’t handle the club. He’s out of his depth. It is never hard to propose simple explanations for why things have gone wrong for managers. But football is rarely simple. Everything is contingent; very little is true in itself. There is no simple explanation for Graham Potter’s struggles at Chelsea.
And these are struggles, even before you consider expenditure in excess of half a billion pounds over the past year. Chelsea started the weekend as close to the relegation zone as the Champions League qualification places. They are averaging a goal a game. They haven’t beaten a top-half side this season. They haven’t won a domestic cup tie and trail Borussia Dortmund after one leg in the Champions League last 16. And yet before Sunday’s game against Tottenham, Potter’s job is apparently not under threat.
Potter, we are told, isn’t angry enough. It’s a criticism that began with Danny Murphy on Match of the Day (although he was referring specifically to Potter’s reaction to Tomas Soucek blocking a goal-bound shot with his hand) and has spread despite Gary Lineker immediately pointing out how perpetually angry Murphy appears. Should all managers be as angry as Murphy? Was Nathan Jones too angry? Could mild-mannered managers perhaps bring in Murphy as an anger consultant? What is Murphy really angry about?
Ah, but Chelsea are an angry club – so angry Potter has received death threats from enraged fans. Anger is the Chelsea way. All Chelsea managers are angry. Apart, that is, from Carlo Ancelotti, who won them the Double. And Roberto Di Matteo, who won them the Champions League. And Guus Hiddink and Rafa Benítez, who salvaged sinking campaigns.
Which has led to the absurd spectacle of Potter being asked if he is angry enough to manage this famously angry club. You don’t, he replied, climb from the ninth tier of English football to the Champions League without being angry. Which unfortunately made him sound a little like the former Labour party leader Ed Miliband. Hell yes, he’s angry enough to manage Chelsea.
Tempting as it is to wonder if English football is anger – are we not all aggro-Saxons? – some managers are calm, some prone to eruption; angry can fail and angry can succeed. Anger isn’t the issue. The matter of level is rather more complex.
Already it feels as though a bar exists, that Premier League clubs don’t quite trust the Championship as a true test of a manager, that elite Premier League clubs are suspicious of mid-table and below. And to an extent that is reasonable enough: it is a very different job to battle through the Championship on a shoestring than to deal with global celebrities on contracts worth millions. But then if you don’t learn in the Championship, where should an aspiring young British coach refine his craft?
It probably is true that managers have a level at which they are most comfortable, but finding it is very difficult. Potter has worked with the Ghana women’s team, with student sides, with English non-league teams, with Swedish semi-pros and with Swansea and Brighton. He has succeeded at every level, in a remarkable range of circumstances, demonstrating emotional intelligence in dealing with a great variety of players.
Perhaps Potter does have a natural ceiling (although even that term seems loaded, as though it were somehow easier to operate on a tighter budget with less gifted players) but there is no reason to assume Brighton was it.
What has happened at Brighton since Potter left only emphasises the role of luck. Brighton, of course, deserve enormous credit for identifying and appointing Roberto De Zerbi as quickly as they did, for having plans in place should Potter leave. Defeat to Fulham last week was only De Zerbi’s sixth in 20 games. Under the Italian they have become a far more exciting, aggressive side. There is a sense they have kicked on.
It is probably too early to be sure but it may rather be that, like the England cricket team when Michael Vaughan succeeded Nasser Hussain as captain, there was need first of a leader to make them hard to beat and then a more expansive leader to build on that platform. It may be that Brighton, who at the time he left would never voluntarily have replaced Potter, have been fortunate to have achieved the transition from foundation to progression at just the right time.
Conversely, Potter may have taken over at Chelsea at just the wrong time, replacing a popular coach to oversee the implementation of a recruitment blueprint most generously described as courageous. Yet for all the money Chelsea have spent in the past two windows, they will not get a centre-forward until Christopher Nkunku arrives in the summer. So a coach whose main flaw is that his teams can struggle to score goals leads a hugely expensive squad whose greatest flaw is that they lack a goalscoring striker.
It perhaps shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that Chelsea under Potter don’t score enough goals. The question, then, is whether Potter has simply been unlucky to manage at two clubs that have lacked goalscoring forwards or whether there is something inherent in his way of playing that makes goals hard to come by.
Goals aside, Chelsea haven’t been playing especially badly: in seven of the nine league games since the World Cup, they have had the better expected goals, xG. An expected points model would have had them taking 20 points from that run, rather than the 10 they have. That would have them a point behind Spurs with a game in hand.
The club continue to brief that they have patience, that they believe in Potter and are looking to the long term. It’s natural that a revolution in personnel, enacted this quickly, should cause disruption. In that sense the scale of the money spent simultaneously brings pressure and offers a measure of insulation, at least in the short term.
The problem now, whatever Potter’s ability as a manager, is that these difficult months risk damaging his credibility. Many fans have already lost faith, some to a shameful degree. For now, the players still seem on board, Potter’s reasonableness, his lack of anger, seen as a strong plus. If they were to turn, though, it’s hard to believe the board would not soon follow.
