Graham Potter must be given time at Chelsea or aspiring coaches are doomed | Jonathan Wilson

Perhaps Potter can hack it with a superclub, perhaps he can’t, but these would be difficult times at Stamford Bridge for any manager

The problem for any coach when they step up to a big club is that, until they have been successful at that level, the suspicion will always linger that they cannot be successful at that level. It’s one of the difficulties of the modern game: managing an elite club, with the huge budgets, the vast expectations, the array of egos needing constant maintenance (which these days seems to apply to fans as much as players), is a very different job to managing on a shoestring down the leagues.

As one Premier League director once put it to me, saying his club should have immediately replaced the manager who had just led them to promotion, you don’t put the bloke who runs the corner shop in charge of a multinational. Which is true, even if the thought that football is somehow too loyal takes some getting used to – a function, as much as anything else, of the financial stratification that exists within the game. Corner shops don’t become multinationals overnight; there is no retail outlet equivalent of winning the playoffs.

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