A miracle in the forest
Graham Potter at Östersund.
Drawing by Sammy Moody
Thore Haugstad
5 Jan 2023
In January 2011, a young English coach turned up in the Swedish city of Östersund to take charge of a team in the fourth tier that even its own fans wanted to lose. At thirty-six, Graham Potter had got the job because no one else wanted it. He was moving to Vinterstaden, the winter city, where fifty thousand people lived six hours north of Stockholm with no football culture at all. The club chairman, Daniel Kindberg, called it “the poor, strange team from the forest”. On his first day Potter turned up to darkness and minus twenty-five degrees, with arctic winds blowing in from Storsjön lake. He had given up a stable life in York, and his wife, Rachel, had left a pilates business she had built up over a decade. Their son, Charlie, was eleven months old. Rachel later said that she cried every day for the first six months.
One time she visited a nursery in Östersund. She was asked, “What are you doing here?”
She said, “My husband’s got a job.”
“Great, what is it?”
“Football coach.”
“Who for?”
“Östersund.”
“I’d go home if I were you.”
Yet Potter knew what he was getting into. He’d gone to Östersund the previous year to meet Kindberg, only to show up on a bank holiday and see empty streets and closed shops. The timing had been off, since Rachel was pregnant, but now he was here, driven to test out ideas and pull off what he’d failed to do as a player. The son of a factory engineer, Potter had always been too cerebral to fit into England’s 90s football culture. He loved school, but instead of going to university, like his mum wanted him to, he enrolled at the Birmingham City academy. He later moved to Southampton, where he found a game-wide culture of fear and blame. His skin wasn’t thick enough to deal with it. Like his dad, he was a worrier, and where others looked for someone else to accuse, Potter would start with himself.
He had little natural talent to fall back on. A tidy but slow left-back, Potter was, in his own words, “bang average” and “could play badly anywhere”. He’d play eight times for Southampton in the Premier League and come on as a sub in the 6–3 win over Manchester United. His only cap was an U21s win over Moldova in Chișinău. Soon he was at WBA, where he was loaned out to Northampton (twice) and Reading, before he moved on to York. One day he went, “Hang on, I’ve gone from young and promising to this?”
What hurt even more was the lack of intellectual stimulation. Potter played for coaches who reverted to hoofing it long; one told him that if the ball rolled out for a goal kick down the other end, great, as it would be further away from their goal. The dressing room culture was hardly studious, and Potter became part of it. One day when he was skim-reading a tabloid, he paused for a moment and though, “I used to be quite bright.”
So he went back to school, beginning a part-time degree in social sciences at the Open University. “I was always interested in the world, how it works,” he’d tell The Athletic. “What I liked about study was that you could do a piece of work, somebody would give you a mark and nobody could take that away from you. Whereas in football you win, you lose; you can have a game on Saturday, play well on Tuesday, get beat, then all of a sudden it’s not the best again.” He’d bring books onto the team bus, where players would ask him what he was reading. He’d say American politics or the social-economic challenges in Asia. They would be reading Loaded.
Potter did not retire at the top. At York, writes the Swedish paper Expressen, he found out he’d been released by reading teletext on his wedding day. When he went to Boston United, says the paper, the club couldn’t pay him, so they had a sponsor make up for it by offering him a frozen Christmas turkey. After a loan at Shrewsbury and a stint at Macclesfield, he retired at thirty, walking before he was pushed. As he told the BBC, “The phone calls from Barcelona and United weren’t exactly coming my way.”
Potter had no plan. He had graduated from the Open University and thought about teaching. Coaching might be nice too, but he knew he had a long way to go. At Macclesfield he had taken a training session and felt uncomfortable standing in front of people. “I was just terrible,” he told The Guardian. When he took his first coaching courses, he felt they were a box-ticking exercise for ex-pros who just wanted their licence. He later told Expressen that the first courses gave him nothing. “I knew that I didn’t know anything at all.”
One day in 2006 he spotted an ad for a job as football development manager at the University of Hull. After being grilled by three panellists, he got a role there on £17,000 a year. He studied, coached kids in schools and led the uni first team. The students called him “Potts”. Where other teams were in it for a laugh, Potter held up to four sessions a week. He never mentioned his playing career unless asked. Sometimes he’d double up as minibus driver. Already then he valued the human aspect, unlike the culture in which he worked. When he asked the players, “How are you?” they thought it was a trick question.
Potter also studied other teams. At Boston he had befriended Graeme Jones, who was now assistant to Roberto Martínez at Swansea, and on Fridays Potter would travel down to South Wales to watch the two take training. Potter adored Johan Cruyff, and the only team in the English lower leagues to play his football were Swansea, led by Martínez, a Catalan who had fallen in love with the Dream Team. Over the next few years Potter would see smart foreign signings and patient build-up play hoist Swansea up to the Championship. He was trying to steal ideas, in part because they worked, and in part because he had few of his own.
In this period Potter also got first-hand experience from top-level football. Hull University had close ties with Ghana and exchanged coaches with the Ghanaian Football Association. In August 2006, Potter had flown to Accra to lead sessions alongside local coaches. A month later he returned, at which point Hull University invited one of the national teams up to their campus. The team to accept the proposal were the women’s seniors, The Black Queens, who stayed for two weeks in 2007. The visit helped the university, which did a research paper on the team, while players used the camp as preparation for the World Cup in China that year. They got help with nutrition, training and rehab. By the time they left they had also got a new coach for the World Cup campaign: Graham Potter.
The run-up tested Potter to his limits. On 12 August he flew to Accra, where he led the team to a 1–0 win over Nigeria in the Olympic qualifiers. He then spent two weeks at the national football centre in Prampram, a town one hour up the coast that Potter said was “in the middle of nowhere”. On his first night the centre suffered a blackout. “I don’t think I have ever experienced darkness like it,” he wrote in a diary he kept at the time.
When the team flew to South Africa for another Olympic qualifier, Potter was still waiting for a visa to enter China and had to stay behind. Once he and the players were finally in Hangzhou, the preparations began. They got a police escort out to the Yellow Dragon Stadium, where they trained in front of fifty thousand empty seats. “This made us feel like real VIPs!” Potter wrote in his diary. They went sightseeing, shopping and visited the National Silk Museum. Yet the games were brutal. Ghana lost 4–1 to Australia in front of twenty-five thousand at the Yellow Dragon. Three days later they faced Canada at the same place and lost 4–0. They then flew to Shanghai to meet Norway in the last group game, only for a typhoon to hit Eastern China, displacing two million people. The game was delayed for twenty-four hours and moved back to the Yellow Dragon, where Ghana lost 7–2.
The Ghana project had lasted six weeks. To Potter it had felt like six months. “I can quite honestly say this has been one of the most frustrating and difficult experiences of my life,” he wrote. “Working with the players has been a positive and experiencing a World Cup first-hand, I’m sure, has been a great learning experience. But I can’t help feeling I’ve witnessed how not to do it.”
Potter stayed in uni football. In 2009 he moved to Leeds Beckett University to take charge of the first team, in the ninth tier. He was trying out new ideas, such as a midfield diamond, two wingers and no strikers. He also took up an MSc in Leadership, Personal & Professional Development. On the course, the students were trained outdoors by the British military. At a time when the British army was in Afghanistan, the tutor talked about how stress and technically difficult tasks lead to errors, and how crucial it is to handle these well. “It was really good,” said Potter, the only one on the course from a sporting background. The majority were surgeons, who were used to making calls on life and death.
The emotional intelligence course was a response to the blame culture Potter had seen as a player. He wrote a thesis on the art of reflective practice, which his tutor, writes The Times, deemed so good as to be publishable. Potter knew mistakes happen in football, and so, he thought, how could he handle that? How could he spread empathy, patience and understanding? “Everyone can watch a training session on YouTube,” he told Expressen. “If the environment is bad, it won’t work.”
After two years at Leeds, Potter finished his studies. At thirty-six, he was an ex-journeyman left-back with little coaching experience outside the universities. When he applied for jobs, none of the clubs were really interested—and the same often applied the other way around. All chairmen would want to know was the kind of players he’d sign, whether he had coached in the division before and how he’d get the team out of the league. Nobody wanted to hear about ideas or methods. “I knew I had to take a different road,” he told Expressen. When John Hall, a senior coach at Leeds Beckett, heard that Potter had gone to Östersund, he had to google it. He’d remember the joke he had told Potter as he left through the door. “Anyway, Pottsy,” Hall had said, “don’t forget my Champions League tickets when you get there.”
Given how unusual Potter was for his time, it took an unusual chairman to hire him. Daniel Kindberg had served in the Swedish military in Bosnia and the Congo; he was a lieutenant colonel and a tank commander. He had then moved into real estate before taking charge of Östersund. “I feel quite calm when everything is falling down around me,” he told CNN. “Nobody is shooting at you on the football pitch.”
But in 2010 he thought about quitting football. Östersund, a club formed in 1996, had slid down to the fourth tier, and Kindberg was so embarrassed that he wanted to resign. The players replied that if he did not come back, they’d quit. So Kindberg returned and gathered his closest associates. “We sat down and talked, six to seven people, put out the emotions and asked ourselves why,” he told the BBC. “Why do we do this? Why are we in the club? We work for free, why do we put in all this effort? What do we want to see? What do we want with our ambitions in football? What is everything about?”
Then Kindberg called up one of his friends, which happened to be Graeme Jones. He asked, “Why can I never find a good manager? They are all lousy.”
Jones said, “Daniel, the problem is you. You keep picking the wrong ones.”
Kindberg asked Jones for a name. A few weeks later Jones called back saying he had consulted a few people, one being Martínez, and found a great coach: Graham Potter. Kindberg flew over to meet Potter and realised he was right.
Near the end of 2010, Potter boarded the plane with his family and flew to Östersund to build a new life. Potter felt this was his chance; a team in a place no one else wanted to go. He knew the cold and the dark would test them—“It’s not as if we were coming to Monte Carlo,” he told the BBC—but he always put a positive spin on it. When The Guardian flew over to interview him, it was minus twenty-five degrees. “You do notice it,” Potter said, only to add that the climate was different to the UK. “This is a dry cold,” he told the interviewer. “Not too bad, is it?”
Potter soon noticed a negativity that surrounded the club. When two hundred people met up for the first game, Potter was convinced that at least half wanted Östersund to lose. “People didn’t believe in the club and didn’t really like the club,” he told the BBC. When he told people that he was trying to build a great team, they’d look puzzled or concerned. The responses would vary between “useless” and “impossible” to “you’re crazy”. Potter took little notice. “Fortunately,” he said, “I was sufficiently naive and optimistic not to believe what I was hearing.” An even bigger optimist was Kindberg, who had told people that he wanted Östersund to reach the top division and play European football. “People thought we were lunatics,” Kindberg told the BBC. “Maybe they were right.”
The first aim was to get back into the third tier. Potter soon found some of the accepted truths he knew from England. Many teams were physical and direct, and some coaches believed homegrown players weren’t “born” skilful enough to play another way. Potter wanted to bust this myth, yet he led a team that nobody really wanted to join. Young people looked south towards Stockholm, and even Potter said that “we’re up here in the woods”. When chasing players from the south, Östersund had neither big money nor football heritage to put on the table. Potter realised he needed something else to tempt them up there. As agents used to tell him, “They’re not going to come for the snow.”
Potter decided to create a culture and a playing style that stood out from Swedish football. But first he had to find the right players. The first two months, Potter had no video, so he’d drive nine hours to scout signings. He told one journalist that he practically lived in his car. Some clubs thought that if this strange Englishman had come all the way from Östersund, they might as well take him seriously. Rachel told him he was insane. Yet Potter believed he would succeed, in part because he had no choice. “When you make this sort of move, with these sacrifices, you’ve got to make it work,” he told The Guardian. There were moments of doubt. “You think we’ve got no chance because we haven’t got the finances, the history, anything. But it was just fleeting. I believed.”
That first year every Östersund signing was free, according to Transfermarkt. Some came from clubs such as Evesham and North Ferriby United. One centre-back, Juanjo Hervías, was plucked from La Muela, a team from a town outside of Zaragoza that had dropped to the fourth tier and been dissolved. The winger Troy Pennycooke-Morgan came from Sheffield United’s U18s. Potter wanted players who dared to make mistakes and have fun. “If the players are enjoying their football,” he told i, “there’s a chance that the supporters will enjoy it as well.”
Potter drew on his studies to create a culture where errors were accepted and corrected. “In football we focus on the mistake,” he told The Coaches’ Voice. “We want to blame something, or someone. But in the military and the operating theatre—life-and-death situations—it’s the opposite. It’s about how you deal with the mistake. And creating an environment that allows you to learn from it. In my first season at Östersund this was key. Negative results would spiral into negative feelings. Negative attitudes. I had to get the players to enjoy their football. To come away from the traditional blame and fear culture. To understand that mistakes, failures, losses will happen—but that we have to try and respond in a good way.”
The players and staff did respond. “I remember the first year, I sat down and had a chat with Graham,” said the club secretary, Lasse Lindin. “Most football coaches only talk about formations, but Graham was talking about the learning process and how to build a human being. He was totally different as a football coach.” Östersund stormed to the top of the table and clinched the title by nine points. By the time they began the next season, Kindberg had declared that they were going to win every match.
With results in his favour, Potter made more signings. He used his ties with Ghana to get Thomas Boakye, a right-back from the Right to Dream academy. Another recruit, Jamie Hopcutt, had been released by York and drifted around in non-league, his latest club being Tadcaster Albion. Two players came from the Nike Academy, where Potter also had contacts.
By this time Potter and Kindberg had thought long and hard about how they could create a high-performance culture. One day Potter got a call from a woman who said that cultural expression was good for athletes. Soon he and Kindberg set up the Art Academy. The idea was to come up with a project every January that the players would work on during the season and perform in front of an audience after the league had ended in November. This was bound to cause the players discomfort and embarrassment, which was precisely the point. Potter wanted to make them into open-minded people with versatile skills rather than robotic footballers. “It is a training method for decision-making and bravery,” he said. They all had to take part, be they players or staff. “It is not a choice,” Kindberg told The Times. “If they don’t, they are sacked.”
The first project was a theatre play that sold out to five hundred people. The players went on to stage art exhibitions, plays and dances. They started a book club that included works from Dostoyevsky. They collaborated on a book where each player had to write about their journey. They worked with a music group where some members had cognitive disabilities—which Potter found fascinating. Their most famous bit was a version of Swan Lake, the Tchaikovsky ballet, which they performed to more than a thousand people. As part of the ballet, Potter improvised a dance on stage alone. “Which was terrible,” he said. “It really was.”
If the players felt embarrassed, Potter was no exception. Once he opened a show by singing the Lapland national anthem in local dialect. “It was not Rod Stewart, put it that way,” he said. As part of that project they had to learn about reindeer husbandry, and at some point Potter had tried to lasso a reindeer while having a pair of antlers on his head. “Only in Sweden,” he said. He told the BBC, “I can’t say I’m a good dancer or singer, but I’ve done things I would never have done. I’d have never danced on a stage, that’s for sure, or sung in front of people. I call it singing … it’s probably nothing like singing.” Another time Potter rapped on stage, and Kindberg was crying with pride. “I was part of the concert and we were s*** scared,” Kindberg told The Daily Mail. “But he went first, overcame his nerves and was actually quite good. He believed that he should always go first.”
Potter later said that he would never had tried anything like that in England. But in a remote Swedish team with nothing to lose, it worked. That second season Östersund sealed top spot on the final day. The next season they came tenth. By the time the 2014 campaign came around, Kindberg was telling people that he had the best manager in Scandinavia.
If the art academy had been a creative way to find an edge, Kindberg applied the same principle when looking for funds and players. In January 2014 he announced that Östersund had struck a deal with the Libyan government to develop footballers over the next five years. The deal would be worth £47m. At first sixty players would head north to train and study English, computer science and sports management. After that two-hundred and fifty players between eighteen and twenty were going to come. The deal thrilled Kindberg, but amid political infighting in Libya it fell through. Potter shrugged. “What you’ve never had, you never miss,” he said.
And anyway, Östersund had other ways to get players. Many had been rejected elsewhere. One was Brwa Nouri, a Kurd whose parents had fled Iraq when he was a kid and ended up in Sweden, where they had divorced. Nouri had joined AIK and become a star, only to get involved in gang fights and drugs—pills, cannabis, cocaine. One day he was tangled up in a drugs trial, fined by a court and sacked by AIK. He ended up in a Kurdish club in the sixth tier, where he began a slow recovery as a player and as a person. At twenty-seven he got to the third tier, though he said that getting to Allsvenskan felt as easy as walking from Sweden to South Africa.
Another signing was Douglas Bergqvist. “A lot of us were lost, doubted, rejects,” Bergqvist would tell the official Chelsea website. “He loved a turnaround story … He cared more about you as a person than your football skills.” Together they climbed to fifth place in 2014. The year after, Östersund were promoted to Allsvenskan.
By now Kindberg was telling anyone willing to listen that Potter was international top class. The Times interviewed Kindberg in January 2016, just as Östersund were gearing up for their maiden top-flight campaign. “He can coach any team in the world,” Kindberg said. “He will coach one of the big clubs … but only after he has taken us into Europe.”
The step up to the elite enabled Potter to sign better players. Many were still rejects, often with foreign roots. The midfielder Ken Sema, born to Congolese parents, hadn’t made the first team at Norrköping. The Nigerian striker Alhaji Gero was benched by Viborg and had got his contract terminated. The Ugandan defender Ronald Mukiibi was unused by Häcken when he got an offer from Östersund—and googled it to see how far north it was. The Swedish-Iranian forward Saman Ghoddos had been rejected by Trelleborg in the second tier and, according to the journalist Frida Fagerlund, was working as a phone salesman when he got an offer from Östersund. Like many, he took it knowing full well he’d be living in harsh conditions. Potter also told of two players from Ghana who boarded the plane in Accra in thirty degrees; when they landed in Sweden, it was minus thirty.
Another newcomer that season was Curtis Edwards, who had left the Middlesborough academy having not been offered a new contract. He’d had trials at Hibs and Bristol City with no luck, and after that he was helping his dad on a building site. He had joined a friend playing for Ytterhogdal in the Swedish fifth tier when Potter called him to a trial. Edwards soon found out that the club he had just joined was unusual. One night at 8pm he was at home watching Netflix when the phone rang. It was Potter, who asked him to come to the stadium. There they spent more than an hour talking. “We were just chatting and chatting and we got on to reading,” Potter said. “In the end, I just said, ‘Have a read of that.’” He threw Edwards a book titled Ancient Wisdom, Modern World: Ethics for the New Millennium. The author was the Dalai Lama.
Actual football talk was not what Potter cared most for. “We are our own worst enemies and as a coach you can help people recognise that, raise their self-awareness and then see if they change or do anything about it,” he told The Guardian. “That is actually a very rewarding thing about the job because you are actually helping people’s lives in a way. People think that coaching is about winning football matches—which, of course, it is—but throughout my career it has also been about helping people become better, more able to deal with life and be more successful in their lives.”
This process went hand in hand with attacking football and tactical flexibility. Potter was making Östersund a ‘countercultural’ club. “Swedish football was pretty much 4-4-2, straight lines, big strong Scandinavian guys,” he told The Times. “And we had a lot of second-generation immigrant players and emphasis on technicality rather than physicality.” They played daring football also in Allsvenskan, and would often use three systems in one game. By now they were drawing close to six thousand fans at home games. In the end, they finished eighth.
At this point the next realistic step was European football. In 2017, Östersund made the final of the Swedish cup. On the morning of the game Potter made sure the players got two letters each. One was from him and spoke about how much he valued each one as a human being. The other was from family members saying how proud they were. The players ran out and beat Nörrkoping 4–1. The scorers were Samuel Mensiro, Hosam Aiesh, Alhaji Gero and Ghoddos. The captain was Nouri. The win was not only historic for Östersund; it also handed them a ticket to the second-round qualifiers of the 2017-18 Europa League.
To prepare for European football, Östersund went on a training camp to Tenerife, where Potter showed his authority. “We had a player on trial who had a bit of a bad reputation in Sweden,” Hopcutt told The Guardian. “Potter was hearing whispers of the players saying like, ‘What’s he doing here?’ So he brought us all in a room, sat us all down and started saying to each player, ‘You’ve come from here, you’ve come from there, who are you to judge people?’ He was essentially explaining that all of us were nobodies, really, so who were we to judge someone just because of their background? It was a ‘wow’ moment. It made us remember where we’ve all come from.”
The timing of the Galatasaray tie was unusual. The Swedish season follows the calendar year, so when Östersund had won the cup final in April, they were in the first half of the campaign, where they’d end fifth. When they faced Galatasaray in July, their opponents were just about to get going. In the opener in Sweden, Östersund won 2–0 after goals from Ghoddos and Hopcutt. For the return leg, thirty-three thousand fans expected a ‘Gala’ comeback. Instead Nouri scored after an hour, and Galatasaray could only pull one back. When the final whistle went, Östersund were half expecting to be bombarded with bottles and missiles. Yet as they thanked their fans they were also applauded by the home supporters. None of the players would ever forget it. Potter got goosebumps.
Their next opponents were Fola Esch from Luxembourg, who Östersund swatted away 3–1. That set up a playoff with PAOK. But when Östersund went down 3–1 in Greece, the dream seemed crushed. In the return leg up north the score long stood at 0–0. With twenty minutes left Edwards struck, and six minutes later Ghoddos added another. The strange team from the woods were in the Europa League.
The group handed them Hertha Berlin, Zorya Luhansk and Athletic Club. Östersund beat Zorya 2–0 twice, sank Hertha 1–0 at home and were minutes away from toppling Athletic 2–1, only for Iñaki Williams to hit a late equaliser. Only a defeat in Bilbao put Athletic top with a better head-to-head record than Östersund. That served up a round-of-32 tie with Arsenal, and as the draw was made, Potter just smiled.
The English press went into overdrive. They noted that Arsène Wenger had managed Arsenal longer than Östersund had existed. They found that Östersund’s annual budget was a third of what Arsenal were paying Mesut Özil. Potter called it “David versus ten Goliaths” and told the players to treat the game as a gift. There was also a bit of humour: When Wenger declared he would play his best team, the Östersund Twitter account said that so would Potter. Östersund played in the eight-thousand-capacity Jämtkraft Arena. Before the opener there, in mid-February, the account posted a video of snow and wind covering the stadium in a guide to Englishmen on how to keep warm. In a separate post they wished Arsenal welcome to their “new dressing room”—and showed photos of match shirts hanging in an igloo. There was snow in the city, though the temperature the night before the game was just below zero. “Cold, is this cold?” Potter asked the press. “Two weeks ago it was minus twenty-three. That was cold.”
What about the game? “We understand where we are in the hierarchy,” Potter said. “We need to play really well and they need to play really badly.”
At first Goliath won 3–0. In the return leg Ghoddos set up goals for Aiesh and Sema to put Östersund 2–0 up at half-time. Only when Sead Kolašinac scored early in the second half did the dream seem over. After Östersund were out, Potter was vary of putting too much emphasis on the tie. “Ultimately we lost to Arsenal, so it doesn’t have any feeling,” he’d tell FourFourTwo. “Those games against Galatasaray and PAOK, plus Hertha Berlin at home when we won 1–0, and drawing at home to Athletic Bilbao—they mean more to me. You don’t want to be that gallant, sad loser.”
The game at the Emirates was the high point for Potter at Östersund. He had wanted to win the league and reach the Champions League, but when he got an offer from Swansea in summer 2018, and a chance to work in the Championship, he took it. He later spoke of how proud he was of his seven years in Sweden, and of the legacy he had left. By now Östersund were an established top club in Allsvenskan. Kids were running around in Östersund shirts. There were football schools in the city. His wife, Rachel, was no longer asked what on earth she was doing there. In one interview, Potter had explained how much she had sacrificed for him to succeed there. In a later game, the Östersund fans had held up a banner thanking her.
Moving back to the UK was not easy for Potter. Their twins, Sam and Theo, had grown up in Östersund. Charlie had lived almost all his life in Sweden. “If you’re a seven-year-old in this country you’re sitting at a desk, doing tests half the time,” Potter told The Times when he was back in the UK. “If you’re seven in Sweden you’re playing up a tree half the day. There’s space. Here every school is like Fort Knox and Charlie’s saying, ‘What’s this Daddy?’ He missed his friends.”
In 2019, Potter moved on to Brighton in the Premier League. By now many of the players he’d managed in Östersund had also gone on to better things. Sema was at Watford and Ghoddos would soon join Brentford. Nouri was enjoying his sunset years at Bali United, and would later describe Potter as one of the best persons he had met. Potter was proud of what the two had achieved. “There were times I wanted to throw him out of the stadium—and I’m sure he’d say the same about me,” Potter said in a separate Times interview. “But there was always a strong bond and understanding between us and desire to help each other. To see him playing in Bali now, having probably had a great time and earned some money … to see him develop as a person is amazing.”
Yet for Potter, life also took things away. During his first season at Brighton, his parents, Steve and Val, died six months apart. The shock of their passing made him reflect on football, work and the meaning of it all. “You think ‘what’s life about?’” Potter told The Times. “We’re not going to be here for ever. There’s going to be a point when we’re not here, when I’m not going to be here—what’s that about? But these are the things life brings up and we have to deal with them. So, choose something meaningful that has purpose, that makes you feel you’re making a difference in somebody’s life. Because that’s ultimately what’s important.”
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