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Gary Neville suggests Graham Potter asked to be sacked and tells Chelsea to hire Mauricio Pochettino.
Gary Neville believes Graham Potter would be happy to leave Chelsea and claims that ex-Tottenham boss Mauricio Pochettino is the man to replace him.
Less than seven months after taking over at Stamford Bridge, Potter was fired on Sunday night. The team was 11th in the standings following a dismal home loss to Aston Villa.
The odds were never in the English manager’s favour as he battled to gain the fans’ respect, win over his players, and work with the club’s new ownership, who were implementing dramatic and extensive changes behind the scenes.
Just 12 victories in 31 games was a poor record on the field, but Neville believes that Potter will be happy to have left a club in disarray since that is where the real damage appears to have been done.
The Manchester United legend told Sky Sports: ‘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 succeed Potter is in focus. The early front-runner is ex-Bayern Munich manager Julian Nagelsmann, while Pochettino, ex-Barcelona manager Luis Enrique, and Napoli’s Luciano Spalletti are all on the extremely lengthy shortlist.
Neville believes that Pochettino, who has been unemployed since leaving PSG last summer, is the ideal candidate for the position since the Argentinean won’t be careless when it comes to making fresh player signings.
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.
‘They have got to appoint a manager that is going to inherit and like the squad they have already got. I think that man, because a lot of them are young, is Pochettino.’
For the time being, Bruno Saltor will lead Chelsea against Liverpool on Tuesday night.