Tactics and Transfers: Career Risk and Investing in Graham Potter

When things were still redeemable though to not make decisions as a man who understood the greater scenario, as it was implied Potter was hired to do, then sealed this.

Graham Potter is a good manager and will likely have a great career.

The good news is being fired by Chelsea essentially means that you’re a great coach and is so common that it never really gets held against a manager in the long-term. His success in the future is the sort of stick that will be used to beat Chelsea in the future. It will be the same stick that was used with Conte, Mourinho, Ancelotti, and soon-to-be Thomas Tuchel I assume.

So would I have done this?

No, no I wouldn’t have. But of all the firings of note this one I at least understood.

The issue here though is now Boehly and Co will have an even harder job trying to prove that they’re not incredibly impulsive and hot-headed in the way that they were claiming not to be. They’re also likely getting a first-degree course in how football is unlike any other sport and that stats though fun and cute to look at are not as telling in football as say another sport like…baseball.

America’s pastime in many ways is a collection of individual competitions. The pitcher vs the hitter, the fielder vs the hitter, and so on. A few times per game genuine chemistry and work together are required to create a greater opportunity but not too often. You can to a certain degree simply collect statistics which is one of the reasons why the game is so popular with American finance types and the mathematics genius’ some genuinely are but all believe themselves to be.

But as Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics have found and more recently Boehly’s Dodgers that will only guarantee you a certain level of success but the magic needed to win championships it does not.

The Dodgers, for example, have despite spending more highly than even the New York Yankees over the past 10 years have won many trips to the playoffs but only one World Series and it is one that people discount from the circumstances around COVID.