Neville: Potter asked to be sacked and tells Chelsea who to appoint

Gary Neville asserts that Graham Potter will be content to leave Chelsea and that former Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino will succeed him.

On Sunday night, less than seven months after taking over at Stamford Bridge, Potter was fired. The team was 11th in the table following a disappointing home loss to Aston Villa.

The odds appeared to be stacked against the English manager, who struggled to earn the respect of his players, win over the fans, and collaborate with the Blues’ new ownership, which was implementing sweeping changes in the background.

Neville believes that Potter will be relieved to have left a club in chaos, despite the poor results on the field—only 12 wins in 31 games—where the real damage appears to have been done.

Sky Sports was told by the Manchester United legend: “Graham Potter is a good man. He’ll have gone home after he was sacked and I bet there was an element of relief.

“I don’t think he was enjoying it there, I bet he will have thought it was mad.

“What he has been used to in terms of what his view of football is, he will have seen what is going on behind the scenes – they lost Petr Cech and Marina Granovskaia at the start of the season, that wasn’t planned.

“They lost [Thomas] Tuchel, that wasn’t planned. He has come into a club that is in massive transition, they [Todd Boehly and co.] have paid millions of pounds, they don’t know what they are doing to be fair, they are learning on the job.

“He’ll probably think, “These lot are mad”, and actually I suspect that Graham Potter has gone to Winstanley and said, “Get me out of here”.”

Now, the question of who will take Potter’s place is being debated. Former Bayern Munich manager Julian Nagelsmann is the early front-runner, but Pochettino, former Barcelona manager Luis Enrique, and Napoli manager Luciano Spalletti are also on a very long list of candidates.

Neville is of the opinion that Pochettino, who has not held a job since leaving PSG in the summer, is the ideal candidate for the position because the Argentine will not be content with simply signing new players.

He added: “Everything Chelsea is saying and Boehly is saying is that they have spent £600million and they have done their spending apart from a centre-forward for the next three years.

“If they sign [Zinedine] Zidane, [Diego] Simeone, Enrique, they are going to want another £300m because they won’t like some of the players they have signed.