Gary Neville has urged Chelsea owner Todd Boehly to 'hold his nerve' and continue to back Graham Potter, despite the Blues' recent struggles.
Potter's men have won just two of their last 14 games in all competitions, leaving them all but out of the race to qualify for the Champions League. The Englishman is coming under serious pressure from supporters, especially after the Blues signed eight players in the January window.
But those signings have done little to improve Chelsea 's fortunes thus far, with Potter struggling to implement his ideas. The latest low point came on Saturday, when the Blues fell to a dismal defeat at home to basement boys Southampton. Despite that defeat, Neville believes club chiefs need to continue to give Potter their backing. But he warned them that patience may start to wear thin if those struggles continue.
"Potter is under massive pressure. You can see it in his face. The chances they missed in the second half and the boos at the end of the game, felt a little ominous," he told the Gary Neville Podcast. "I think they'll want to do the right thing, the Chelsea owners.
"They've sacked a manager very early in the season in Thomas Tuchel, they've owned their new manager, they've brought recruitment assistants in alongside him. They've invested heavily in Graham and his team… but they have to hold their nerve if they want to see it through.
"But I suspect that nerve is being tested, as any owner's would be when you've spent that level of money and you're losing games at home to the (side) bottom of the league.
"He's a fantastic coach but you feel watching Potter he's a measured man, he's a good coach… you get the idea he'd like to build a pattern of play with a group of players on a consistent basis and he's got 33 of them staring at him down the barrel saying 'play me'."
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Mirror Football understands the American is determined to give Potter time and still believes he is the right man for the job. Neville did warn Boehly that he needs to help Potter out by offloading some of the 33 senior players currently on Chelsea's books. Until they do that, the Manchester United legend believes Potter will not succeed.
"I can't imagine what it must be like to have 33 players. I was a manager for a very short period and we had a squad of 22, 23 at Valencia and you're looking at 11, 12 players every week thinking 'I'm not going to play you'," he added.
"A good training session you'd have 16-20 players. If you've got 22 players, five of them are training with the reserves or on their own. That isn't right. They needed to unload players off Graham Potter to take the pressure of handling all those players that are expecting to play every single week.
"I've used the word chaotic and I think it has been chaotic in the first six months of the Boehly ownership. I won't change my mind on that. They've invested heavily, they're putting their money where their mouth is and are saying all the right things.
"But at this moment in time, it won't be a successful project when you have 33 players all looking at the manager and a manager who wants to build a measured project.
"It feels a little bit conflicted with what Potter would ordinarily be really strong at and what the ownership seem to want in respect of filling a squad and accumulating players of that sort of volume."
