Brighton CEO Paul Barber has explained why Chelsea must not sack Graham Potter despite a turbulent start to the 47-year-old's tenure at Stamford Bridge. In September, the former Seagulls boss left the south coast to replace Thomas Tuchel, penning a five-year deal with the Blues.
Potter began his reign in west London with a nine-game unbeaten streak which saw Chelsea defeat AC Milan quite convincingly, home and away, in the Champions League group stage. But, ironically, a 4-1 loss to Brighton kickstarted the Blues' poor vein of form and it was during the period where sections of the fanbase called for him to be sacked.
But, Todd Boehly has since stuck by his first managerial appointment following the takeover in the summer and the American billionaire is beginning to reap the rewards for his patience. With Potter's project far from complete, Barber has encouraged the Chelsea co-owner to keep faith in the Englishman.
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Speaking on the TBG Podcast, the Brighton CEO said: "He has a particular style of working with players and sometimes, you know, he will very often say that takes time. It takes time to get his systems and his processes into the way the players train every day and play every week.
"Very often, that's best established during a pre-season — he went in to Chelsea a month into the season. Last transfer window they brought in a lot of new players so the work he had done between September and January to a large extent not start again from scratch but he had another group of players that he then had to work with and get his processes and methods across.
"It will always take time if you're working with top clubs with expectations very high to achieve the results the fans expect. And, at Chelsea, it's a bigger club than Brighton in terms of the history and the success that they've had and, therefore because of that, the expectations of the fans are higher so the pressure on Graham is higher, the demand for quicker results, better results is there all the time.
"But, in my experience, he's calm, he's confident in his own abilities, he's a very good person so I think the players will respect him for the values that he has and, I can't speak for Chelsea's owners or board but certainly in our case at Brighton we gave him the time he needed to get his methods across and three seasons into that work we finished in our highest ever position in the club's history.
"That in itself is testament to what he can achieve. With all due respect to the squad of players we've got, which is excellent, Chelsea are able to spend much higher sums of money on players that are the finished article quicker so if he's given time working with some of the world's best players, who knows what's possible?"
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