Will Graham Potter end the season as Chelsea manager?

It is a common complaint of football fans in England that when a “big” team is looking to replace a manager who has been sacked or walked of their own accord, they always tend to look abroad. At the present time, the top three teams in England are managed by two former Spanish internationals and a Dutch ex-pro who has shone more in the dugout than he ever did on the pitch. You need to drop to fifth place, with Newcastle under Eddie Howe the highest-placed team with an English boss. Next, after him, is Graham Potter in tenth. The bigger sticking point about this latter fact is that he’s managing Chelsea, who have spent enough to be much higher up the table.

Leaving aside the fact that Potter is currently looking up at Brighton, the team he left to take the job at Stamford Bridge - on which you’d have got very long odds at any sportsbook on sitesnotongamstop.com - the real concern for Chelsea as a club is that he’s presiding over a team that seems to be sliding backwards, hasn’t won in five games and has only scored once during that spell. Potter is on a five-year deal, which would make it expensive to sack him, but Chelsea can afford that. The question is, would that be in their interests right now? Or is it something they might put off, hoping he can turn things around or be removed at the end of the season?

Is all of this Potter’s fault?

New club owner Todd Boehly has arrived at Chelsea with the intention of making an impact on the football world. A lot of money has been spent to ensure that Chelsea have a squad capable of winning the league, including well over a quarter of a billion pounds just in the January transfer window. Chelsea now have more than enough players capable of creating chances for their strike force. They just don’t really have a strike force.

It’s not that they don’t have forwards. Kai Havertz, Joao Felix and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang are all capable centre-forwards; it’s just that the first two are not natural finishers and the third has a tendency to annoy managers. Spending close to £80million on Mykhailo Mudryk when you already have a huge stockpile of wingers seems a bizarre decision, and it’s not Potter who made it.

Is Chelsea where he should be?

Potter has built a reputation as a manager who gets players to buy into a project, and through getting everyone to believe in one another, turns workaday squads into something better. It can’t be stated enough that there probably isn’t a worse place for that approach than Stamford Bridge. Great players have passed through there and played great football. The club culture, however, has for most of the 21st century been about bringing in galactico signings and hoping they can win the league before they turn on one another and - more commonly - the manager. If that turn happens, even the best performance of Swan Lake ever won’t save Potter.

Who would replace him if he left?

Many would make the point that to harness the qualities of an expensively-assembled squad, you need a giant personality who has shown the ability to achieve at the highest level. The problem is that those managers tend to already be in a job. One who is not, currently, is Zinedine Zidane. Although he seems tethered by forces beyond human understanding to Madrid, having already had two stints at Real, he might be persuaded to take on the job,

He would want to bring in his own players, though, and that would mean either the most bloated squad in Europe, or a fire sale of players who have been at the club less than a year. And he’d probably up sticks three years from now to manage France. So be careful what you wish for, if you’re a Chelsea fan.