ANGELOF THE SOUTH
Graham Potter doesn’t like coaching. Or at least, he didn’t. It’s not the sort of confession you would expect to hear from one of the Premier League’s brightest managerial prospects. Yet as the Brighton & Hove Albion manager sits down with FFT at the Seagulls’ plush performance centre, he confides that his first training ground experience wasn’t so positive. In fact, if it wasn’t for the sage advice of Potter’s wife, one of European football’s most remarkable underdog stories may not have made it past the first chapter.
“I remember doing my C Licence [FA coaching badge] and feeling really uncomfortable – I didn’t enjoy it at all,” Potter says with a smile at the irony. “It was always standing up in front of your peers with the ‘stop, stand still’ and all that stuff – I didn’t enjoy it and didn’t feel like I was any good at it.
“Then I did my UEFA B when I was playing for Macclesfield Town – I did my practice hours with the centre of excellence there. I spoke to my wife after the first session and said, ‘This is terrible, it feels awful, I’m no good at this’. She said, ‘Of course you’re not – you haven’t done it before’. It was just a case of practising.”
A decade and a half on, any concerns Potter had about a coaching career have been put to bed. Since then, he’s put together a CV that propelled him from the Swedish fourth division to the Premier League in little over seven years.
Potter’s journey – from coaching university students, to cutting his teeth with Ostersund in the Swedish wilderness, then returning to the UK with Swansea City and Brighton – proves there’s more than just the traditional route to the top.
At a time when many
