Why Brighton were stunned by Chelsea’s Potter approach

Brighton’s fortunes are closely linked with Chelsea at the moment because the South Coast club have seen their Player of the Year, their manager, several coaches and a key member of their recruitment staff leave to join the Blues in the last few months.

Their CEO Paul Barber has some quotes in Sussex Argus where he admits that he and the club were taken aback by Chelsea’s move to appoint their manager Graham Potter, just as the Seagulls thought they were safe.

“I think they had done their homework. I think if we look back to the summer and we always review what could happen during the season ahead, I think we probably felt that most of the top six clubs were fairly settled with their head coaches and managers for the season,” Barber explained.

“If you look at Liverpool with [Jurgen] Klopp, Man City with [Pep] Guardiola, Arsenal with [Mikel] Arteta, Tottenham with [Antonio] Conte, Chelsea with Tuchel, generally speaking, we felt that there was going to be some consistency.

“Obviously [Erik] Ten Hag was new at Manchester United but when you looked at that landscape, Graham Potter is not going to leave for anyone other than those six clubs if any of them were to come in.

“What we didn’t expect to happen, obviously, was for Chelsea’s new owners to decide Thomas Tuchel wasn’t for them and to suddenly be a gap there.

Tell us about it Paul. Things had certainly gone pretty sour by the time Tuchel was given the boot, but we expected the credit he had in the bank to last him a lot longer than it did.

What we – and Barber – hadn’t taken into account was the new ownership’s desire to get their own man in place. In reality, Tuchel was a dead man walking from the moment Boehly arrived.

Chelsea News