Graham Potter makes Todd Boehly Chelsea transfer jibe with Harry Kane and Declan Rice point
Former Chelsea head coach Graham Potter has said that a 'perfect storm' led to his sacking from the club after just seven months.
The former Brighton man took charge of just 31 games in all competitions at Chelsea between September 2022 and April 2023. The 49-year-old has been out of work since leaving Stamford Bridge, despite being linked with moves to several different clubs.
In the 31 games, under Potter, Chelsea won 12, drew eight and lost 11. A 2-0 loss against Aston Villa at the start of April proved to be the final straw, with new owner Todd Boehly making the decision to show Potter the door.
The manager is still searching for the right opportunity to get back into football. He has now opened up on his time at Stamford Bridge and what went wrong he has appeared to put some of the blame on Chelsea's owners.
“I take responsibility for the results,” he said in an interview with the Daily Telegraph . “I’ve never said I’ve ever been perfect and you live and you learn, and you are grateful for the opportunity and grateful for the experience you had there. 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.”
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“It was almost like the perfect storm,” he added. “It was 14 matches in six weeks prior to the World Cup. It was like you were in the washing machine, that’s what we said within the staff, because the games kept coming and we had no preparation time or anything.
“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.”
Potter also pointed to the January transfer window, where the Blues spent over £300 million on nine new arrivals. The former Brighton & Hove Albion boss suggested that the window only made his job harder.
He added: “Then the ownership decided to invest a lot of money in the squad, £300 million in the January transfer window. Now, if you are spending £300 million on players that are coming from outside the Premier League, from countries that are having a mid-season break, then the reality is you can’t just imagine they are going to hit the ground running and everything’s going to be fine.
“But, obviously, if you spend £300 million, the pressure on the team goes up and the pressure on the coach goes up. And people go: ‘Come on then, you’ve spent all this money.’ I think if I’d have spent it on Harry Kane and Declan Rice, then fair enough, but at the time that was the decision. We tried to support it as best we could, but it left us with a challenge of a lot of players after January and then they can’t go anywhere.”