Chelsea manager Graham Potter has revealed that he has the “full support” of the Blues owners and players as he tries to turn around the club’s fortunes after a difficult start to his tenure at the London club.
Potter’s team has only won one of their last eight Premier League games. On Thursday, they lost at home to Manchester City by a score of 1-0.
People are talking more and more about the future of the former Brighton manager, who took over at Chelsea in September, but he said he didn’t need anyone outside the club to agree with him.
“The owners are billionaires so they’re quite smart,” he said. “Smarter than me, that’s for sure. So they understand the challenges that we have and the direction we want to go in. I’ve been here four months and five, six weeks of that have been lost to international football.
“I think Pep (Guardiola) was (at Manchester City) a year before they’d won anything, and then obviously Mikel (Arteta) and Jurgen (Klopp) took a bit of time. But obviously it’s maybe different for me, for some reason. But I don’t put a timescale on it. I know the responsibility we have here.
“But also I know that I am capable, and I know the quality that I have and I have the full support of certainly the owners, the players and the staff here.”
Chelsea are set to square off against Manchester City once again when they meet in the FA Cup third round on Sunday but Potters injury woes continued after Raheem Sterling and Christian Pulisic were both forced off the pitch on Thursday.
They now join the likes of N’Golo Kante, Reece James, Wesley Fofana, Mason Mount, Ben Chilwell, Armando Broja, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Edouard Mendy on Chelsea’s long injury list.
“I’ve never experienced anything like it,” Potter added.
“I’m not sitting here (as) some egomaniac that has all the answers and gets everything right,” he said. “Of course that’s not the case. But at the same time, there’s some challenges that we face, there’s some margins in the Premier League that are difficult.
“We’ve had a massive transition — problems in terms of injuries don’t make it easy to be stable.”
