‘We want to entertain but we’re in the results business. I’m not naive’
New Brighton manager Graham Potter wants his team to attack more and silence the pessimists ‘Football players are human beings first and my job is to help them get better’
People say they want a meritocracy and chances for English coaches, but when Graham Potter steps into the Premier League some sceptics question his right to be there and make him 8-1 third-favourite to be the next top-flight manager sacked.
Potter arrives from the real world of the 92-club pyramid and successful spells at Ostersunds in
Sweden and Swansea City, from where Brighton & Hove Albion hired him to replace Chris Hughton, but clearly has some convincing to do with bookmakers.
It could hardly be otherwise for a coach making his top-tier debut with a club who narrowly avoided relegation in May, yet there is nothing in Potter’s work to suggest calamity awaits a side who were in trouble anyway when the 2018-19 season ended.
The reflexive pessimism reflects the Premier League’s obsession with “big-name” hires. Brighton’s gamble of course was to abandon Hughton’s organisational skills in favour of a more “adventurous” approach with a manager who had been on the radar of Dan Ashworth, the Football Association’s former director of elite development and now the Brighton technical director.
Modesty and self-assurance are two of Potter’s obvious attributes. He also knows he has joined a club who came a long way quickly. He says he found “a really good club, good people here, a really positive foundation. Two years of staying in the Premier League and the promotion – a good job that Chris did. The players have been open-minded and receptive to a new voice and a different voice. A hard-working bunch of players, I would say.”
Potter played for 11 clubs the length and breadth of England, worked in football development at Hull and Leeds universities and earned a masters degree in leadership and emotional intelligence, then raised Ostersunds from the fourth-tier of Swedish football to knock Galatasaray out of the Europa League and beat Arsenal in London last year.
A one-year stay at Swansea with his regular team of Billy Reid (assistant) and Kyle Macauley earned favourable reviews for the team’s slick style of play and placed him in the frame for Hughton’s job.
Try as you might to scare him with the prospect of Manchester City and Liverpool walking through his door, Potter is secure in himself and sure of his body of work without denying that he is in a new world now.
He says: “I suppose it’s 14 years of experience [since he stopped playing], 14 years of making mistakes, 14 years of failing and going again, failing and going again – just like normal.
“My career has been perfect for me, personally. I wouldn’t say it was perfect for everybody. I needed to learn to be a coach initially. I think if I’d gone into professional football when I stopped playing when I was 30-years-old I’d have failed because I’d have made too many mistakes because I had no real idea at that time.”
But a squad who survived by two points and scored 35 times in 38 games needed revamping and Potter will be under pressure to draw more from expensive recent signings such as Jurgen Locadia, Alireza Jahanbakhsh and Jose Izquierdo, assuming they all stay.
Anthony Knockaert, one of the heroes of Brighton’s promotion push in 2017, has moved to Fulham and there is concern that Leicester will pursue Lewis Dunk to replace Harry Maguire (hence reports of a £20million bid for the Bristol City centre-back Adam Webster). Glenn Murray, the No1 striker, will be 36 in September.
Five under-23s have been loaned out, and the club’s owner, Tony Bloom, wants more from the academy.
Abolishing comfort zones and improving players is one of Potter’s strengths. He says: “They’re human beings before they’re footballers and it’s important to understand – how can I help them?
“What do they need? How can they feel part of this? How can they feel they’re improving in their career, because my job is to help them get better, play better football, earn a better contract, whatever it is. That was my rationale when I started out, not to win football games.”
Brighton’s hardcore of Mathew Ryan, Dunk, Shane Duffy, Dale Stephens and Murray would not relish a third season of struggle so Potter needs to take the pressure off them either through recruitment or attacking more.
“It’s that balance between attack and defence we’ve got to get right,” he says. “Something has been very right here for us to still be a Premier League club. That’s not so easy to do. My job is to take that foundation and try to improve and build.
“You’ve got those guys who’ve played a big role at the club and it’s our job to help them and improve them. That’s the job of the coach.
“They’ve been great, with their attitudes. You can see their quality, you can see why they’ve played such a big role at the club.”
He is proud of his reputation for positivity: “We’ve got to this point by trying to build our attacks, control our attacks. We’ve wanted to go into games with a belief that we can win.
“It’s important that we can play with that freedom. I don’t think I’d have got to this point if it was all on the back of one thing.
“To knock Galatasaray out in a two-legged game you have to be able to defend. That’s the reality.
“All I can promise is I’ll do my very best. I’ll try as hard as I can. We want our teams to be able to entertain the supporters – they’re such an important part of the industry, sometimes forgotten a bit. At the Amex they’ll be very important for us. So we’ll try and entertain. At the same time I know we’re in the results business. I’m not naive.”
One of his biggest aims conveys a certain nobility: “Try to be the person I’ve been all my career.”