Graham Potter and the Incomplete Prophecy
The following is an article I wrote all the way back in April. If some things come off as outdated, that's why.
Some players were forced to sit on the ground during team meetings. Others were changing their clothes in the external corridor of the room. The training sessions witnessed an 11 versus 11 division on one field, alongside a 9 versus 9 on the adjacent pitch.
The above quote is not a sarcastic exaggeration of the overwhelming number of new Chelsea players who have piled up on top of the veterans to form an immensely large squad for a team in eleventh place in the English Premier League. These are facts mentioned in "The Athletic" report about the tragic end of Graham Potter's experiment for him and the team.
The man who some of his players have secretly mocked by calling him "Harry" or "Hogwarts," in reference to the famous "Harry Potter" novels, may not have been successful enough, and perhaps he was not the right man for the job.
Perhaps we are facing a promising new coach who was crushed by the machinery of top clubs, and perhaps he will rediscover himself in a suitable experiment for him. However, we are not here to try to understand why Potter failed only, but also why Frank Lampard will inevitably fail, and why the next coach - at the very least verbally possible - will struggle until they can escape that chaos and enter a reality that witnesses some stability.
Football is not 100% fair to coaches. Can we blame Ernesto Valverde at Barcelona without mentioning Josep Maria Bartomeu? Was Steve Bruce's slaughter at Newcastle justified while Mike Ashley gets away with it? Are all the former Manchester United managers since Ferguson solely guilty without any partnership from the Glazer family? Should Jurgen Klopp bear the full brunt of responsibility for Liverpool's current results? Perhaps not, considering that "Fenway" signed Arthur Melo for him.
Ironically, the main plot of the "Harry Potter" novel series - and this is not another analogy to Graham Potter - revolves around a job interview in a bar between the Hogwarts headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, and the candidate for the Divination teacher position, Sybill Trelawney. After an utterly unconvincing presentation from the candidate, Dumbledore is about to leave, more convinced than ever of his preconceived opinion: this subject should be abolished altogether.
Suddenly, the woman's face changes, and she begins to spout words of prophecy, while the bartender, Severus Snape, eavesdrops on them in the middle. He swiftly kicks him out and rushes to his master, informing him of what he overheard. Lord Voldemort, thinking he knows enough, ultimately only needs to identify a certain baby and then hunt him down.
The baby is born with the death of the seventh month (July 31) to parents who defy him three times, and I know him as Harry. It's an easy task; the conditions apply to two babies, one of pure blood and the other a half-blood. I will choose the half-blood like myself and then proceed to kill him. The result? Voldemort lost his body and remained as a wandering spirit, feeding on the weak animal bodies for 13 years until he managed to regain his form. In your opinion, what was the first thing he did after his return? He spent a year in secrecy, pursuing that other half of the prophecy.
Do you want to know who's behind the chaos at Chelsea?
Those Who Call It "Soccer"
Yes, that American duo, Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, the duo who bought the club thanks to the Russian war on Ukraine, which Britain saw as a perfect opportunity to get rid of Roman Abramovich.
Can we say they scrimped on the club in any way? Absolutely not. On the contrary, they wanted to quickly prove their worth. How many teams do you know that spent €550 million in a single season on new signings? You may find a few, but you certainly won't find a team that spent €330 million in January. There are entire leagues that don't reach that amount in the winter transfer window.
The problem? The summer deals were made in agreement with the then-current coach, Thomas Tuchel. The summer transfer market ended on August 31, 2022, while Tuchel was sacked on September 9 of the same year. Only 9 days. It's one of those dismissals that we may only hear about in Palermo, let alone elsewhere.
It has become customary for conflicts to arise between the coach and the management when the man requests a transfer and they do not deliver it to him. However, in our case, several reports have stated that one of the main reasons for the dispute was a transfer that the owner wanted and the coach refused: Cristiano Ronaldo, of course.
Behdad Eghbali was not pleased with this, breaking the tradition of expressing gratitude to the coach and leaving the reasons for the dismissal to the media, which spread both accurate and baseless information. He held a press conference to personally explain this decision:
When you take over any business activity, you need to make sure you agree with those who run the company. Tuchel is extremely talented and has achieved great success, but our vision was to find a coach who genuinely wants to collaborate with us. We were not sure if Thomas saw things the same way we did. No one is right or wrong; we simply did not have a shared vision for the future.
Tuchel left, and we all knew that Todd Boehly was right: It was not possible for the German coach to share that vision with them, whatever it may be. Nevertheless, by sheer coincidence, the owners decided that the most popular name on the internet is the person who supposedly shares their vision.
Therefore, they signed Graham Potter without any preparation period, without sufficient time, with more expensive and larger transfers in January, because we agreed in advance that the solution always lies in buying, according to the second half of the prophecy. And with a dressing room resembling a crowded public bus in New Delhi during rush hour... Oh my God, I truly don't know how it failed.
Building On A Shaky Foundation
Recently, I was rewatching Breaking Bad and there was this one scene that I believe embodies much of the things Chelsea fans want to tell Boehly, with some alteration of course:
We had a good thing, you stupid son of a bitch! We had everything we needed, and it all ran like clockwork. You could've shut your mouth, done your job and made as much money as you ever needed. It was perfect. But, no, you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego! You just had to be the man. If you'd done your job, known your place, we'd all be fine right now.
We have before us two obscenely wealthy businessmen, whose fortunes allowed them to pass judgment on a coach who won the UEFA Champions League just a year and a few months before his dismissal and the hiring of another coach, only to later be forced to dismiss him as well, after adding 13 new players to the team's roster in a single season. Like any investor who wants to see the fruits of his beloved project, they continued to closely monitor the team, not only by attending matches but also by attending training sessions regularly.
An article by "Athletic" presented this point as one of the peculiarities of the Potter era. Which owner sits on top of the players' heads during training? But honestly, these are their own funds, and they want to see them kicking the ball. What is your problem with this peculiar sport? Didn't Johan Cruyff say, "I've never seen a bag of money score a goal before"? Where is he now?
He is in his grave, but the bags have yet to score. Chelsea has scored 29 goals in 30 English Premier League matches, which is less than what they have conceded by two goals so far. Why? Because it's not that simple, yet it is that simple.
To achieve that core structure, the coach needs time that allows for intensive work with the key individuals who require individual attention, particularly those whom he knows he will heavily rely on, as well as those he prepares for future occasions and those facing specific problems. "Athletic" tells you that some players lay on the ground during team meetings, referring to those individual sessions that Potter was able to conduct. If the man dedicated only 10 minutes to each player on this list, it would require approximately 5 and a half hours.
Finally, Pooley and Eghbali found a solution: an extensive and highly meticulous search process to select the right coach for the new season. This is a genuine step in the right direction because, being non-specialists ourselves, we need a specialist to fix this chaos. But how do we find one? The interim solution is the answer.
In a completely disastrous season like Chelsea's, any interim would suffice. However, because the American duo stands out more than that, Frank Lampard, a club legend who worked with almost everyone the new owners didn't buy, was hired. This will inject spirit into the team and perhaps, by some miracle, lead them to achieve something in the last hope of this season: facing Real Madrid in the Champions League.
But Chelsea doesn't have this historical legacy from the start. Honestly, if the club gathered its crowned legends, they wouldn't fit in the dressing room that can't accommodate its current roster. To worsen the irony, the last coach to be fired after a major spending spree, and after a transfer ban that provided a valid excuse, was Frank Lampard himself. He acquired seven signings at the beginning of his second season for approximately 250 million euros, and the result was his dismissal in January.
Was Lampard's first joke upon his return, "Is the internet password still the same?" This is not a joke; he needs the team's roster in front of him all the time to know which Fofana he's addressing.
Everything now depends on the extensive search process undertaken by the owners. It is the only way to rescue the project and transform it into a cohesive entity. Yes, it will mean getting rid of several players, some of whom are recent signings, but ultimately there will be one clear foundation for what is happening at Stamford Bridge. Then, it will be possible to hold any coach accountable, just as coaches are held accountable.
If Lampard did what Roberto Di Matteo did in 2012 when he won the Champions League as an interim coach and earned a full opportunity, it would undoubtedly be more enjoyable. Firstly, because it would mean that the extensive search process was nothing but another deception, similar to the "shared vision."
Secondly, because everyone invokes the example of Di Matteo, which resonates with the fans, to the extent that Lampard was asked about it in his first press conference. However, since we only take from stories what pleases us, do you know what happened after Di Matteo won the prestigious European title? He was fired in the following November.
In Conclusion
Talking to an enthusiastic Boehly admirer who saw the American as a genius many months ago, I had this to say
The question now moves to Lampard, what is Lampard supposed to do now? What style of play do you play with this team? If you line up all the Chelsea players in front of you now, assuming that you'd actually have time to even finish naming, how could even line them up? Even in a FIFA or PES setup, it would be difficult to fit them all under one formation. You can't build a team with your players constantly undercutting each other in terms of playstyle.
This really wasn't a difficult problem to see. The best solution was to not cause this market mess in the first place, the second best was to at least keep a pillar that you could build around slowly, I.E the coach. Or maybe I am justifying myself because I simply couldn't think of a reality where Chelsea would sack Potter, to begin with in interaction with @talesfrmthecrypt.
He's simply staying.
I was simply wrong. Perhaps my brain simply can't make sense of what happened to Chelsea this season.
Well when you leave the running of a football club to people who don’t understand football, then you should always expect irrational/poor decision making, at least as far things that actually happen on the pitch.
I just read your blog on City and there you have a wealthy owner who understands that it’s better to let the experts dictate how to run the footballing side of things!
Let’s see if the Chelsea hierarchy have learned anything in their first season and let’s see if Poch has learned how to effectively ‘manage up’ in situations where your boss is overstepping the mark. He was a bit naive in that regard when at Spurs.