“A few of them just had to sit on the floor” - Ex-Chelsea boss Graham Potter opens up on managing bloated Blues squad following £300m January plunge
Graham Potter has admitted that he found it hard to manage Chelsea's bloated squad. He added that the players needed to sit on the floor as the dressing room was overcrowded after the club splashed £300m in the January 2022 window.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Potter stated that the new owners decided to spend after the injury to Reece James and Wesley Fofana. He added that the new players were all signed from outside of the Premier League and it took time for all to adapt. He said:
“A few of them just had to sit on the floor. It’s not ideal, of course. Everybody recognised it was a really difficult situation because you can only pick 11 players and if you’ve got 20 players not playing, it doesn’t matter where you are. If you can find a coach out there who says: ‘Yeah, that’s the best condition for me,’ I’d be very surprised.”
He continued:
“Then the ownership decided to invest a lot of money in the squad, £300 million in the January transfer window. Now, if you are spending £300 million on players that are coming from outside the Premier League, from countries that are having a mid-season break, then the reality is you can’t just imagine they are going to hit the ground running and everything’s going to be fine."
“But, obviously, if you spend £300 million, the pressure on the team goes up and the pressure on the coach goes up. And people go: ‘Come on then, you’ve spent all this money.’ I think if I’d have spent it on Harry Kane and Declan Rice, then fair enough, but at the time that was the decision. We tried to support it as best we could, but it left us with a challenge of a lot of players after January and then they can’t go anywhere,” he added.
Chelsea signed Enzo Fernandez, Benoit Badiashile, Malo Gusto, Mykhailo Mudryk, Andrey Santos, David Datro Fofana, and Noni Madueke in the January 2022 window. They also loaned in Joao Felix while Gusto was loaned out to Lyon until the end of the season.
Graham Potter struggled at Chelsea after replacing Thomas Tuchel
Graham Potter was brought in from Brighton & Hove Albion after Chelsea sacked Thomas Tuchel. The new owners stunned the fans and the German coach in September 2021 by releasing the manager from his duties days after the transfer window closed.
The Englishman then lasted just 31 matches at the club before he was sacked. He won 12 games and lost 11 times during his stint at the club, with just 33 goals scored in those matches. They also conceded 31 times and were struggling for points in the league but had managed to get past Borussia Dortmund in the UEFA Champions League.
Frank Lampard was brought in as the interim manager after the sacking of Potter. However, he failed to turn things around and was not handed the role permanently at the end of the season by Chelsea.