What was it about your time at Brighton that worked so well?
“It was a really good, reciprocal relationship from the start, because I’d only had a year at Swansea and when you talk about the path from the EFL into the Premier league, we’dfinished 10th. So that’s not exactly a ticket if you’re looking at it just purely from the league table. We had to sell 16 players, it was a £100m black hole, we played some young players. We had the youngest team in the EFL, a good style of play.
“But what Tony [Bloom] had enough data on me from back in Sweden, so he could sort of measure, “okay, this coach with these group of players gets these results. This coach with these group of players gets these results.”
“So therefore you’re a good coach or not. He was able to look past the 10th place, which most chairmen and people in football aren’t able to do.
“They were trying to create a club that was aligned towards a certain playing style and a recruitment model. To do that, you have to not just be a football coach, you have to be able to strategically think, where are the opportunities here? Where are our blocks? Where can we be challenged? And that was the job.
“When Tony spoke, it was about keeping the club in the Premier League, but working towards becoming a top-10Premier League club. At the time they were fourth from bottom when we took over, there were a lot of players and the recruitment hadn’t quite aligned itself. They’d spent £30m to £50m on players that didn’t quite work out as well as they’d like.
“They spent £6m a year on an academy and there wasn’t a pathway for the academy into the first team. So to do all those things, to keep the club in the Premier League, to play a more attacking playing style, to use a recruitment model which was about using players from outside of the Premier League, younger players, players that needed something to prove, and then also academy spaces and to keep developing the Premier League at a team that was fourthfrom bottom – it was a big job. Everyone needs to understand what it is what it’s going to look like going forward. And I think if that’s the case, you’ve got a chance.”
How tough was it to leave Brighton for Chelsea given what you had built under Tony Bloom?
“Very difficult. I’d had an opportunity the season before which didn’t feel like the right time. If I went back to the start of whyI moved to Brighton, it was to try and get the club into the top 10. That was my remit.
“When we left, we felt the team was probably, pound-for-pound, the best squad in the Premier League in terms of the players that were there. Leandro Trossard, Alexis Mac Allister, Moises Caicedo, Robert Sanchez, Lewis Dunk, Pascal Gross – it was a top team and they were fourth in the table. It was early season, but we had got them into that point.
“In some ways, you want to see out that point, but at the same time, you look through your life and you have these opportunities, and you live and you learn. If I had my time again, would I do something different? Who knows? But the opportunity came up, I liked the sound of what they were trying to do, and it felt like I wanted to give it a go, but it was with a heavy heart and an acknowledgement that it wasn’tbrilliant timing.
“One thing that you can’t buy as a manager is when people believe in you. I mean players, I mean supporters, all the leadership around the club. When people believe in you, that is priceless. You go into an environment where you’ve got to prove yourself again. It’s quite easy to be dismissed quicklybut that’s the challenge you have to take.
“Until you’ve been at those clubs, you don’t know what it’slike. The Arsenals, Manchester United, the Chelseas and the Liverpools – at these clubs, there’s a different level of expectations, a different level of spotlight. It’s a bit like when you go from the Championship to the Premier League, youcan’t get away from that difference. I just look back at it as an incredible learning opportunity.
“I probably went at the wrong time, in terms of where Chelsea were at that point. But again, I’m grateful for that opportunityand the experience. Not so long back I’d lost my mum, I’dlost my dad, so you just realise that life isn’t that easy, it’sprecious, and there are only opportunities and you’ve got to look at them.
“I left Brighton in a really good place. If I think back to where the club was and where I left it, I gave everything for three-and-a-half years and the club was in a really good, healthy spot when I left. And then it’s just about, “okay, is it time for another journey?” and Brighton were still in a place where they could move forward. They got a lot of compensation, sothere’s a lot of pluses, for sure. Brighton certainly haven’tsuffered, and I never thought they would because of everything that was in place. As a football manager, I think you can only take a place and try and improve it. And I think that’s what we did.”
What attracted you to West Ham?
Lots of things, to be honest. The size of the club, and alsothe feeling of the club, like a family club. There’s a connection to the community that I’ve always valued that I think is really important here. An ambitious board, an ambitious club. If you look at the clubs in the world in terms of size, it’s probably the biggest club that hasn’t played in the Champions League, so it has that potential.
“It’s about aligning resources. It’s about everybody going in the same direction. But there’s an academy that has a strong feeling here, so there’s a development part of the club and the job that is also appealing. And the playing squad is talented. When I align all those things, it felt like it was the right opportunity for me.
“My experience of football is that expectations can be here, but it depends where reality is. The bigger the gap, the bigger problem that you can have. At the same time, we should be ambitious and we should have high expectations, for sure, because of the size of the club, the resources that we potentially have. It’s about aligning it in a good way so that we’re all on the same page and that we’re all using the resources as well as we can.
“In the Premier League, there’s a lot of that around – what you’ve done in the past and your history doesn’t necessarily guarantee you anything, because there are other clubs that are progressing and progressing. But we have enough here to be proud of. I’m really excited by the challenge, for sure.
“When you come in, especially when we did, it was more about assessing where the club was and where the team was. You want to finish off as strongly as you can and I think we do that by trying to focus on the next game. But for us it was about learning about the team and learning about the club. Until you go into the bonnet, you never know for sure.
“But as I said before, the ambition of this club, we shouldn’t put a ceiling on it because the resources are there, the size of the club is there, the support is there. The trick is making good decisions over a period of time, being together, being aligned, and then you can dream. That’s what football is,that’s what we should be doing.”
Featured image: “Graham Potter, Brighton & Hove Albion vs RCD Espanyol, 30 July 2022 (1) (cropped)” by jamesboyes is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
View the full interview with Graham on the Seaman Says Podcast via Betway.
Callum McFadden 