Why Graham Potter really is perfect for Man United or England

As we approach the first anniversary of Graham Potter’s last stand, I’ve found myself thinking back to a conversation we once shared in his office at Swansea City. That was in March 2019, so a good while before his journey of 1,000 miles was interrupted by a faceplant into the great wall of Chelsea.

The immediate possibilities that afternoon centred on Swansea’s FA Cup quarter-final against Manchester City, which was his first major game in British football, but his future and past were where the curiosity really lived.

Being honest, there was nothing overly original in the idea – he’d been a subject of intrigue ever since it emerged years earlier that he was going well at an outpost near the arctic circle. What might this English fella go on to do? How high might he climb from such a colourful beginning?

We know his story well enough to skip a full rehash here, but Potter remains the only elite manager I’ve met who could tell you the temperature at which a ball freezes in Sweden (-18C), the logistics of coaching in China, and the nuances of the women’s game in Ghana.

It was a fascinating afternoon in the company of an adventurer who had taken the road less travelled and was self-deprecating at every turn in his telling of it.

Naturally, the sense of wonder has long since been overtaken by events. He stepped up marvellously at Brighton, fell traumatically at Chelsea, and the unknown is where and when he will resurface.

We started asking about that soon after his dismissal on April 2, 2023, and we are still asking it around a manager who, to this day, is trying to find his place in the game. Wandering and searching; doubted by others and convinced in himself.

Manchester United? That’s possible, or more so than it is England, and he has admirers at both. But as it happens, the grapevine is whispering louder in a different direction – West Ham in the summer if David Moyes goes.

Maybe it will happen. Or maybe it won’t, just as it didn’t with Lyon and Crystal Palace. But Palace were particularly fond of him and, depending on who you ask, they might have been the party that did the shunning.

So what is he? A man for a giant or a man for a relegation struggler? Football just cannot quite agree on all that.

But I hope it works out for him because, aside from the charm of a very good tale, he is a very good manager and one whose situation brings to mind a pair of questions: why are reputations such a flimsy, transient property in his line of work? And are we not in danger of attaching far too much weight to what went on at a club as dysfunctional as Chelsea?

It seems inevitable that Potter’s appointment would be deemed woefully underwhelming to many if he ends up at United. Same goes for England. Doubly so. But that strikes me as misguided – I would love to see him in either job. Just as I could see him excelling in them.

He is a manager who found Brighton in 17th and took them into the Premier League’s top 10 playing brilliant, attacking football.

A manager who is invariably described as intelligent, empathetic and firm by his players.

A manager who embraced a modern, progressive structure built on Tony Bloom’s analytics and left them in fourth.

A manager who gifted Roberto De Zerbi the comfiest of beds for his own reputation and a manager who has achieved more in the club game than Gareth Southgate had before taking England on these wonderful joy rides.

All of which is to say that falling out of Chelsea’s cuckoo’s nest should not count punitively against him. We can question with some pertinence if he is up to the pressure of a massive job – he did seem awfully unsure of himself at altitude – but if you are to question the shrinking, you also have to question the ambient forces of incompetence that squeezed him from all sides.

We do that on a weekly basis around Chelsea. We study it, scrutinise it, look at what was spent in making them so cheap and cluttered and unmanageable. And unanimously the view is that this has become a sham of a club in the Boehly-Eghbali era. It is a club that is fast becoming a free pass on the CV for all who fail under the current regime. An asterisk club.

Their own supporters’ trust described it the other day as ‘helpless’ and a ‘laughing stock’. They wrote of an ‘irreversible toxicity’ in the stands and we saw that with the booing of Mauricio Pochettino last weekend.

‘Don’t know what you’re doing,’ they sang, but he does, because Pochettino is also a good manager in the wrong place at a bad time. If a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link, then a manager is often only as good as the clowns above allow him to be.

That is not an exoneration, but it should go a long way in mitigation.

If Pochettino fails there, which now seems to hinge on the FA Cup run, because their league spot is the same as Potter’s last known resting place, will we say Pochettino is not a good manager? That would be an exercise in insanity.

Sure, he would have a major point to prove in his next job, but he has money in that reputational bank from Tottenham. Just as Eddie Howe does if the Saudi gets twitchy at Newcastle. Just as Potter should have enough from those hard yards.

Their respective situations draw me to other conversations that occurred a couple of years ago, so before all three hit turbulence. It concerns what the FA were thinking a couple of years ago, when they were carrying out succession planning for England after Southgate. It is understood they had four names in mind, one of whom was Pep Guardiola. The other three? Pochettino, Howe and Potter.

None can make a serious claim to being better than Guardiola. But none should be ruled out based on isolated stumbles on long walks, especially if those long walks took place on a high-wire within a burning circus.