After their shock sacking of Thomas Tuchel yesterday morning, Chelsea have moved quickly to secure a replacement with Graham Potter's arrival from Brighton & Hove Albion confirmed.
Potter was immediately the bookies' favourite once the news of Tuchel's dismissal came out and has put pen-to-paper on a five-year-deal after talks progressed quickly over the last 24 hours.
However, before his stints at Brighton, Swansea and Swedish club Östersunds, he actually made his mark on the University level in England.
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Following his career as a player, Potter went back into study at the Open University to get a degree in social sciences before initially coaching at the Unversity of Hull where he was found by senior coach at Leeds Beckett University John Hall.
“I had come across Graham with the Northern and English Universities and had faced his side at Hull and had the chance to talk to him,” he said in an interview with Wales Online.
“He really impressed me with his ideas, we were looking to raise the profile of our first team and programme. We had just been promoted into the seventh tier of English football, we were looking to follow the Team Bath model at the time.
“He was an ideal candidate, he mainly ran the first team but he was also heavily involved in recruitment and he had so much credibility in that role. If he was talking to players who had been let go by clubs at the age of 18, or if he was talking to parents about what we could offer he could relate on all fronts.
“He was a student academically because he was doing his Masters in Leadership, Personal & Professional Development, but he also had a football career behind him. He had so much integrity and I think the players and families he dealt with got that.”
Potter joined Leeds Beckett - then known as Leeds Metropolitan - and would find immediate success. Previously speaking on his time as student and coach simultaneously, Potter said:
“I needed to work out how to communicate, how to lead people, how to structure a programme and when you are working in an university it seemed sensible to take advantage of the courses that were there.
“The Masters I did meant I was with surgeons, I was with the military so you are starting to get an understanding of leadership from different contexts.
“It’s then about applying it to football. Ultimately you still have to try and get good players on the pitch and win football matches.”
Potter and Hall led the team from a seventh-placed finish to fifth and then to promotion over just three seasons, with more success coming in the BUCS (British Universities and College Sports) leagues.
“We had some great coaches including Anna Carter enjoying plenty of success and working at Netball Superleague level with Yorkshire Jets, former Wales fly-half Colin Stephens, while Jack Maitland - the triathlon coach who has worked with the Brownless - shared the office.
"Our director of sport at that time was Malcolm Brown MBE, who had a wealth of Athletics and Triathlon experience. So when we would all have lunch the topic would turn to coaching and everyone would share their experiences.
“Graham was like a sponge, he would just soak all of that information up. He would never bring up the level to which he had played at, he would just listen to all these people and log it away for future use.”
Potter would then leave Leeds Beckett in 2011 to coach Östersunds which were then a 4th-tier club in Sweden where he spent seven years. Of course, since then he has become one of the best coaches in the Premier League after stints with Swansea and Brighton.
With a task like taking over Chelsea ahead of him, he'll have come a long way from his start in coaching with a small University team in Leeds.
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