The pressure of the Premier League is huge but so is moving your family across the world to a club where they had sacked the manager every year for the last five.

Graham Potter

Categorized in : Moving World Pressure Family

We are our own worst enemies and as a coach you can help people recognise that, raise their self-awareness and then see if they change or do anything about it.

enemies you change people

People think that coaching is about winning football matches - which, of course, it is - but throughout my career it has also been about helping people become better, more able to deal with life and be more successful in their lives, on and off the football pitch.

winning football life people

You cannot win all the time and, often, we don't win that much. You have to have something and I think if we can create an environment where people genuinely think that we are trying to help them, trying to improve them and make them better, then OK, maybe they will try a bit harder, and do a bit better for the team and the club.

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I remember doing my first coaching sessions at Macclesfield, when I was still playing, and I was just terrible. I felt really uncomfortable standing in front of people, and it felt very odd. It was not something I was naturally comfortable with at all.

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I needed to learn to be a coach initially. I think if I'd gone into professional football when I stopped playing when I was 30 years old I'd have failed because I'd have made too many mistakes because I had no real idea at that time.

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They're human beings before they're footballers and it's important to understand how can I help them. What do they need? How can they feel part of this? How can they feel they're improving in their career, because my job is to help them get better, play better football, earn a better contract, whatever it is.

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All I can promise is I'll do my very best. I'll try as hard as I can.

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We want our teams to be able to entertain the supporters - they're such an important part of the industry, sometimes forgotten a bit. At the Amex they'll be very important for us. So we'll try and entertain. At the same time I know we're in the results business. I'm not naive.

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Sometimes there is a disconnect between footballers and supporters, because there are highly-paid people here and supporters over there, and nothing in between.

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I was at Leeds Carnegie, the ninth tier. And I was coaching students. There would have been hundreds of managers with more experience. So I had to go to the fourth tier of Swedish football, pretty much in the Arctic circle.

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I'd read a classics book on the bus when I was at York.

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It was a huge move for me to leave Sweden, because I was really happy there. It was a club we thought we could carry on developing and try to win the league with. And my family were really settled.

win me family happy

I played football because I loved the game - but I didn't enjoy the focus on not making mistakes and the culture being essentially one of blame and a little fear.

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I was used to football supporters hammering me and I thought my name was Graham Potter-Boo at one point.

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You have to respect and understand the environment. So I don't think it's a case of taking anything from Ostersund and transferring it to somewhere else.

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But concepts around how a team functions, the importance of the relationship between football and the person, how you develop both, are always valid.

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Whenever you start a new job, it's always a bit daunting, the unknown.

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Players are fundamentally the same - regardless of what they earn. They want to improve and want to be part of something.

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At Ostersunds, we had half the players who were part-time and working and the other half were full-time.

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My unglittering football career came to a halt at the age at 30, and I had to embark on a coaching career: 14 years of hard work and sacrifice, learning and mistakes.

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