'Pep at City a year before he won anything' - Potter demands patience

Stuart Telford

• 8 Jan 2023 12:50 GMT
• 3 min read

Graham Potter has hit out suggestions that Chelsea should already be looking for a new manager with the Blues 10th in the Premier League despite spending millions under Todd Boehly.

American billionaire Boehly succeeded Roman Abramovich as Chelsea owner in May, and he sanctioned more than €280 million worth of player purchases last summer, with Thomas Tuchel still Chelsea manager at the time.

Tuchel was replaced by Graham Potter in the Stamford Bridge dugout at the end Boehly's first transfer window, and the Englishman has been trying to mould a team in his image that he has had very little hand in recruiting until now.

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The Blues have already spent big again this winter, with Benoit Badiashile, David Datro Fofana and Andrey Santos arriving from Monaco, Molde and Vasco da Gama respectively costing a total of €62m.

To a man, each of them remains eligible for under-21 football, and former Brighton mastermind Potter wants to be given more time before he is judged on the job he is doing in west London.

'Pep there a year before they won anything'

"I think Pep [Guardiola] was there [at Manchester City] a year before they won anything, was it a year?" he said. "And then obviously Mikel [Arteta, at Arsenal] and Jurgen [Klopp, with Liverpool] took a bit of time, but obviously it's maybe different for me, for some reason.

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"The owners a billionaire so they're quite smart, smarter than me, that's for sure, so they understand the challenges that we have and the direction we want to go in. I've been here four months. Five, six weeks of that have been lost to international football."

Potter's record at Chelsea so far reads: 17 games played, eight won, four drawn and five lost, giving him a win percentage of 47.1. He lost four consecutive games in all competitions before the World Cup, and has picked up four of a possible nine points since.