Chelsea owners Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital have been urged to do the right thing by sticking with under-fire Chelsea boss Graham Potter.
Chelsea fans want Potter sacked following the 1-0 defeat to bottom of the league Southampton on Saturday. Chelsea have won just once in 2023 and are 10th in the league.
Manchester United legend Gary Neville said on the Gary Neville Podcast: “Potter is under massive pressure. You can see it in his face.
“The chances they missed in the second half and the boos at the end of the game felt a little ominous.
“I think they’ll want to do the right thing, the Chelsea owners. They’ve sacked a manager very early in the season in Thomas Tuchel, they’ve owned their new manager, they’ve brought recruitment assistants in alongside him, so they’ve invested heavily in Graham and his team… but they have to hold their nerve if they want to see it through.
“But I suspect that nerve is being tested, as any owner’s would be when you’ve spent that level of money and you’re losing games at home to the (side) bottom of the league.”
“He’s a fantastic coach but you feel watching Potter he’s a measured man,” Neville continued.
“He’s a good coach, [but] you get the idea he’d like to build a pattern of play with a group of players on a consistent basis and he’s got 33 of them staring at him down the barrel saying ‘play me’.
“And these aren’t junior players, they’re senior internationals and I can’t imagine what it must be like to have 33 players. I was a manager for a very short period and we had a squad of 22, 23 at Valencia and you’re looking at 11, 12 players every week thinking ‘I’m not going to play you’.
“He’s got 22 players who are not going to play. If they’re all fit – how do you even get them all into a training session?
“A good training session you’d have 16-20 players. If you’ve got 22 players, five of them are training with the reserves or on their own. That isn’t right. They needed to unload players off Graham Potter to take the pressure of handling all those players that are expecting to play every single week.”
“I’ve used the word chaotic and I think it has been chaotic in the first six months of the Boehly ownership. I won’t change my mind on that,” Neville added.
“They’ve invested heavily, they’re putting their money where their mouth is and are saying all the right things. But at this moment in time, it won’t be a successful project when you have 33 players all looking at the manager and a manager who wants to build a measured project.
“It feels a little bit conflicted with what Potter would ordinarily be really strong at and what the ownership seem to want in respect of filling a squad and accumulating players of that sort of volume.”
Neville wanted Manchester United to keep Ole Gunnar Solskjaer but Manchester United are a better team today under Erik ten Hag. As Chelsea fans, we definitely don’t need Neville’s opinion.