Potter admits finance issue at Swans was bigger than he thought

FORMER Swansea City boss Graham Potter has opened up on his time at the club, stating that he underestimated the financial problems he faced when he arrived in South Wales.

Potter swapped Sweden for Swansea in the summer of 2018 following the Liberty Stadium outfit’s relegation from the top flight.

The manager came with a reputation of passing football, a philosophy the club were eager to return to, having lost their way since the days of Roberto Martinez, Brendan Rodgers and Michael Laudrup.

Potter recognised this and did his research on the club before taking up the opportunity, but admitted the finance issue was bigger than he thought. He does, though, believe he spun that into a positive.

A total of 15 players left the Liberty that summer on loan or in permanent deals as Swansea chiefs attempted to balance the books and negate the effects of relegation. It left Potter with an increasingly difficult job to manage.

“Swansea, on a philosophical level, was a club that had an identity of how they wanted to play that they’d lost but also, they’d had success from it,” Potter told The Athletic.

“They wanted to get back to that. Huw Jenkins was influential in terms of his experiences as chairman. I liked the American owners, what they were saying.

“The only thing is, you do your research and you think you know how it’s going to be, but you never really know.

“The fact was they’d been relegated, so the level of the financial problem they had was bigger than we thought, which in some ways was bad but in some ways was good.”

The now-Brighton boss was able to use the club’s famed academy to blood the likes of Daniel James, Oli McBurnie, Connor Roberts and Joe Rodon, who had all shown promise even before he arrived.

All would go on to play key roles that season, with James and McBurnie earning themselves bigmoney moves to Manchester United and Sheffield United respectively.

Potter himself was well liked during his one-season stay in Landore, guiding Swansea to mid-table after briefly flirting with a play-off push. He went on to make a salient point about fans actually being tired of top-flight football, a view many supporters would subscribe to.

“It’s interesting,” Potter added. “You hear pundits talk about supporters wanting to be in the Premier League but actually, Swansea supporters had had enough of being in the Premier League.

“They’d had enough of turning up to the game, thinking the team wasn’t thinking about winning – just hoping they’d win, parking the bus. Everything they liked about the club had gone.

“So, the supporters were saying, ‘We just want to get back to playing football how we want to play; watch a bunch of players that are trying to win, trying to do stuff’.

“That was good for me from a coaching perspective.”

His influence on the team’s style of play was noticeable, with a club insider labelling him “a genius”.

“Sometimes we’d go into meetings with him and it was like you were back in school. I felt like I was learning something,” said one member of the squad.

“The formation; he would expect you to be able to change not just week-to-week – during games, also. If, after 15 minutes of a game, something wasn’t working or he thought there was something that would improve us, we would change it.

“A lot of players ended up playing in positions they’d never played in before, and in formations that we’d never played in before.

“I had one-to-one meetings with him about the opposition before games and I would just be sat there in awe at times, at his brain and the way that he’d look at attacking the opposition and the way that he’d look to overcome them, no matter who we were playing.

“We would go out and pass teams off the park. It was so enjoyable to play under him. Training was intense, but also fun. He’s undoubtedly the best coach I’ve played under, but he’s also one of the best people I’ve met in football in terms of he just wants you to be the best person you can be. He genuinely cares.”

Potter made the move to the south coast last summer to take the top job at Brighton, who were 15th in the top-flight standings before coronavirus halted the season.