It is hard to imagine two more different clubs separated by only two league places than Brighton and Chelsea. Brighton have won no major honours; Chelsea have won every trophy available to them at least once since 2015.
This summer, Brighton sold two of their best players for significant profit; Chelsea allowed a £100m signing to go back to his previous club on loan.
Chelsea signed players from Brighton, Manchester City and Aston Villa; Brighton recruited from Villarreal, Libertad, Nordsjaelland and signed Chelsea’s ninth-choice central midfielder.
Over the last half decade, the Premier League has installed an imaginary glass ceiling on its managers that Graham Potter has just smashed through, signing a five-year contract at Stamford Bridge.
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The Big Six, increasingly existing on an island of wealth, have typically appointed from a small subset of managers; either they have big club experience or have overachieved abroad.
Promotion from within is rare and the recent exceptions only cemented the strategy: Frank Lampard at Chelsea (a “DNA” appointment in any case), Nuno at Tottenham, David Moyes at Manchester United – only two lasted a full season. Mauricio Pochettino at Spurs was the only unqualified success.
There is a good reason for that pattern. Managing at an elite club, with elite expectations, really is different to managing lower down the division: dealing with midweek European football, expected to sign readymade players more than potential, the knowledge that every defeat can spark a crisis, the internal politics.
In those circumstances, you play a risk-averse strategy and pick from the “been there, done it” brigade.
But even amongst that Premier League cabal, Chelsea feel different. Manchester City built the club’s off-field structure for Pep Guardiola. Liverpool allowed Jurgen Klopp a rebuilding year.
Arsenal showed faith – and have demonstrated patience – in Mikel Arteta. Tottenham did roughly the same with Pochettino before going for experience in Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte.
Even Manchester United supporters figure that this will take time.
But Chelsea? Under Roman Abramovich, they became the world experts in managerial short-termism. It fuelled their ruthlessness with managers.
They figured, because it had worked before, that loyalty to a manager was an unhelpful superfluity. And now they have hired the most emphatic “project” manager in the country.
If nothing else, this statistic is incredible: Chelsea spent £15m more on a striker that they have since sent away than Potter has spent on players in his coaching career.
It is not the only reason for this appointment to be highly unusual. Since Alan Pardew left Newcastle for Crystal Palace in December 2014, Premier League clubs have appointed 80 managers. None of those were leaving one Premier League club for another in midseason.
Clubs – big and small – prefer to give their managers a full summer and preseason to establish processes that will enable them to be a success. When emergency circumstances dictate that a change is necessary, they usually flick through the contacts book for a firefighter rather than architect.
Maybe none of this matters, or doesn’t matter enough. Perhaps the principles of good coaching are universal. It’s an attractive theory: if Potter has proven that he can quickly turn Moises Caicedo and Enoch Mwepu into excellent Premier League players, just imagine what he will do with Mason Mount and Raheem Sterling.
It would be inherently reassuring if that was the case, because it would help evaporate glass ceilings and provide a pathway.
It would make Potter the leader of a new movement, providing hope that a man can go from the fourth tier of Swedish football to the eighth-biggest club in the world (by revenue) in a decade. Potter would be a dreamweaver for an entire community.
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Reasons for and against Graham Potter replacing the sacked Thomas Tuchel at Chelsea07 September, 2022But the environment must make a difference. At Brighton, Potter was allowed to finish 15th and 16th in his first two full seasons. He was permitted to ride through storms of poor form because the underlying data suggested the sun would shine eventually.
The club created a system of scouting at recruitment that maximised his strengths as a coach. He was, very simply, allowed to get on with his job. He is a fine coach, but a fine coach in the perfect environment. Can we be confident the same will happen at Chelsea, whatever the bland epithets used to welcome him?
That makes a case for Potter rejecting Chelsea’s advances, sidestepping the maelstrom and the half-life of the elite club manager, your neck permanently cricked from looking over your shoulder 23 hours a day.
But it is never, has never, been that simple. Every successful manager – inside and outside sport – is fuelled by a desire to compete at the top of their industry and a career is defined by making moves at the right time to ensure continuous progression of your reputation.
If you had no interest in testing yourself outside of your comfort zone, even in circumstances that make your work more difficult and force you to learn different skills, you wouldn’t be here in the first place.
This is not the ideal job for Graham Potter. Potter is not the ideal fit for Chelsea. On both of these points, you must be wildly optimistic or foolish to suggest anything else.
But sometimes opportunity trumps unfamiliarity and sometimes you have to risk getting your feet wet in the gutter for the view of the stars.
There is only one certainty: this might just be the most fascinating Premier League appointment since Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein’s wife Barbara invited Arsene Wenger to play charades with them in January 1989.
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