The Englishman leading Swedish revolution
Graham Potter has taken a tiny Scandinavian club to the brink of Europe, writes Julian Bennetts
There is a football revolution taking place in the north of Sweden – one fired by ballet, rock concerts and arguably the most successful English manager currently working abroad. Tonight, Graham Potter and his Ostersunds team take their unique brand to Istanbul, where they will face Galatasaray in front of 52,000 people at the Turk Telekom Arena in their Europa League qualifying round tie.
They do so with a 2-0 lead from last week’s first leg, and if they complete the job it would be one of the great European upsets and also cement Potter’s hero status in his adopted homeland.
“When I arrived and I told people I was working for the football club, they would say: ‘What are you doing – they’re rubbish! This is an ice hockey town!’,” laughs Potter when he recalls arriving in Sweden six years ago.
“We’ve had to do all this from the bottom up. The first six months were tough. It was a step into the unknown.”
Since those difficult early days, Potter has taken Ostersunds from the fourth tier of Swedish football and into Europe thanks in large part to an excellent team spirit and placing the football club at the centre of their community.
His methods have been highly unusual, with the squad putting on regular performances for the locals in Ostersund, a town of 45,000 people a six-hour drive north of Stockholm. The team celebrated promotion to Sweden’s top flight with their own production of Swan Lake, while Potter was the lead act in the concert the team put on in a cavernous arena at the end of last year. What few can argue with is that his style is working.
“We want to be different and that was part of the attraction,” says Potter. “We thought of cultural activities as a way of taking players out of their comfort zone and building team spirit, helping them be braver, and a bit more comfortable in the uncomfortable situations. When you involve the community they get interested.
“We put on Swan Lake after we were promoted and it was packed. At first the boys were going: ‘What are we doing dancing in front of each other?’ But we pulled it off – to an extent.
“The most recent one – we were like rock stars. I had to open the show singing the Jamtland [the local area] anthem and in front of 1,600 people that was quite nerveracking.
“The point of it is that the lads who were saying no chance to going on stage at the beginning of the night were strutting around like Mick Jagger at the end of it! It brings everyone together.
“This year we will do something on the local Sami [Lapland] culture but I can’t tell you what yet. It’s all about getting good characters and people that want to be part of our project. This has been an interesting part of that process.”
When Potter took the job in 2011, even the locals questioned why this former football journeyman had left a stable job in the higher education system to try and resurrect a club that had just been relegated to the fourth tier and were playing in front of 600 people.
“The club was on its knees,” he recalls. “There was a real negativity towards the club, even towards foreign players and coaches.”
What Potter had was an ambitious chairman in Daniel Kindberg and a confidence in his ability after 13 years as a professional in English football.
The highlight of his playing career was featuring in Southampton’s 6-3 win over Manchester United in 1996, but he quit the game at 30 to take a master’s degree and work as football development manager at the University of Hull and then Leeds Metropolitan University. He knew next to nothing about Swedish football when he arrived in Ostersund and embarked on a series of road trips to learn the football culture, before realising the difficulties he faced.
“In the first couple of years it was impossible to get anyone from the south of Sweden to come to Ostersund,” he says. “We had to look at the local area and foreign players who were the right people and characters. We needed to create an identity where people were proud of playing for the club, and to build support from the local businesses and supporters again.”
They did that through clever recruitment, particularly of players Potter knew from his days in England, and a formidable team spirit with the community projects at the heart. Promotions in each of Potter’s first two years were followed by a third in 2015, while last season saw an eighth-place finish and a 4-1 victory over IFK Norrkoping in the Swedish Cup final.
That secured their place in Europe, and last week’s stunning victory over a Galatasaray side including the likes of Bafetimbi Gomis and Fernando Muslera was the type of result that will alert many more to Potter’s progress. “It isn’t right to say that where we are now is a billion miles away from where we were in 2011 – it’s much further than that,” he says.
“Everyone is in a dream world. It’s incredible to have arrived at this point.”