Football: how long can Potter survive at Chelsea?
More than 500 million: that’s what Chelsea’s American owners have spent on new signings since the summer, said Tony Cascarino in The Sunday Times. They’ve bought “some of the best talent around”: Chelsea’s squad is now so deep, they often have players not even on the bench who’d “walk into the starting 11 of most teams in the country”. Yet Chelsea’s form has been worryingly poor. Having already suffered seven defeats this season, they’re currently tenth in the Premier League. Last Saturday, they reached a new nadir with an “abysmal” 1-0 home defeat to bottom-placed Southampton.
Chelsea’s fans are in no doubt who’s to blame, said
Jim White in The Daily Telegraph: manager Graham Potter. Not since the “caretaker residency” of Rafael Benítez a decade ago has a Blues coach “been so universally unpopular”.
And with reason. Potter is a manager at sea, unsure of “the identity of his best team”. Every week, he makes “wholesale” changes, often without discernible logic. No wonder Chelsea fans look wistfully back to the days of Roman Abramovich, when managers were sacked with impunity. Still, you can’t put all the blame at Potter’s door, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. Under Todd Boehly’s consortium, the club has tried something virtually unprecedented: bringing in “hundreds of millions of pounds of hyper-talented young players” in a short space of time. You can’t expect this “swirl of starry players” to “click into a functioning shape straight away”. The good news for Potter is Chelsea’s owners recognise this, said Matt Law in The Daily Telegraph. According to insiders, they believe he deserves to “start a season as Chelsea manager” – which suggests he’ll remain in place for at least a few months yet.