Freddie Potts interview: 'New West Ham era is the perfect chance for us youngsters to impress'

While most of the team-mates he has just spent a terrific loan season at Wycombe alongside jet off on their summer holidays, Freddie Potts has been back at West Ham this week, training with the first-team squad during the final days of David Moyes’s reign.

“I’ve seen them all on social media, posting on planes and stuff, places I wanted to go,” Potts tells Standard Sport.

“But I’m not bothered. I’m back at West Ham, trying to prepare myself for pre-season, because I know it’s going to be a really important one for me.”

It is forecast to be a summer of change at West Ham, with Julen Lopetegui set to take over from Moyes when the Scot’s contract expires, and for a crop of highly-rated youngsters like Potts, George Earthy and Ollie Scarles, one of opportunity, too.

“It’s a fresh start,” Potts agrees. “No one knows too much about the young players, whoever the boss is going to be. It’s a new first impression that you have to make, so we’re all excited for it.”

None can be better placed than the central midfielder, who went to Wycombe last summer in search of regular playing time and found that and so much more.

In a genuine breakthrough campaign, the 20-year-old made 43 senior appearances, the majority of them starts, played in a Wembley final and finished with both the club’s fans’ and players’ player of the year awards. Little wonder that he says moving to Adams Park was “the best choice I could have made”.

“There’s pressure to win, that was the main thing I learned,” he says. “You do get it in the Under-21s, but there’s more emphasis on it when you’re playing and peoples’ jobs are on the line.”

A first move away from home provided familiar rites of passage — “I’ve had to live by myself for a bit, learn new things, make stuff rather than relying on mum and dad” — though perhaps with added significance, given Potts has grown up at his boyhood club, where said father, Steve, was once a player and is now U21s coach.

This week, the younger Potts has been turning his own hand to coaching, leading a junior age-group session as part of the club’s South Asian Communities programme at an event held in partnership with Saturday’s Premier League opponents, Luton Town. “I’m not as good as my dad!”, he laughs.

It says plenty though for the regard in which he is held at West Ham that he was named on the bench for last season’s Europa Conference League final against Fiorentina. As well as a winners’ medal, Potts left that night in Prague with experience that proved invaluable when it came to Wycombe’s own showpiece, against Peterborough in the EFL Trophy final, earlier this term.

"I loved it,” Potts says. “The whole build-up to it, I wasn’t even nervous.

“I’m a West Ham fan so I knew what Prague meant. Then playing for a club that I don’t support like Wycombe, I knew what it would mean to the fans going to Wembley and playing in a final.

“It’s something I always dreamt of as a kid so to have it happen so early in my career is something I’m buzzing with.”

A 2-1 defeat was a rare disappointment during a season of accelerated development that, nonetheless, brought several “big reality-checks”, his debut against Exeter chief among them.

“We conceded twice in the first five minutes,” he says. "That was my first start in league football and I thought: ‘Wow, this is a real different challenge that I’m going to have to get used to quickly’.”

“Portsmouth away was tough,” he adds. “For the first 60 minutes I did alright, decent enough against their midfielder. Then they brought on a lad called [Christian] Saydee who was a complete beast on the pitch. That was a step up in physicality I had to deal with, that’s stuck in my mind.”

So, what is the biggest difference between the player that left Rush Green and the one now trying to impress in training with the likes of Jarrod Bowen and Lucas Paqueta?

"I think probably my character,” he says. “I used to be pretty shy when I first came over as a 17 or 18-year-old. I feel like I’ve just become a completely different person off the pitch and that’s going to help with my game on the pitch as well.”

There is no doubt, however, as to where Potts wants to spend the coming campaign: “My main goal is to make my stamp in the first-team at West Ham. I want to be here for the next year.”