Brobbey in Swan Lake? Ajax candidate Potter has special training methods

• Thierry Boon

  editor/reporter NOS Sport

He is an important candidate to shape the new Ajax: Graham Potter. According to various media, the 48-year-old English coach has turned down an initial offer from the Amsterdam team, but is still in discussions to become the new head coach.

His latest achievement as a trainer? A dismissal from Chelsea, the club that had paid 24 million euros for him seven months earlier. It earned Potter, who had signed a five-year contract, 68 million euros (!) in buyout money, according to English media.

Although he failed at Chelsea, Potter has had a special coaching career. Special in performance, but also in methods. Because if you zoom in on his early years as a trainer, you will come across remarkable things.

After a modest career as a left back, starting at Birmingham City in 1992 and ending at Macclesfield Town in 2005, Potter avoided a black hole by quickly starting work at the University of Hull.

A young enthusiast is being sought who wants to get involved in football development there. Former professor Potter is happy with it, settles for a salary of less than 20,000 euros per year and devotes himself fully to his new job.

Thinking about training schedules, the field layout, picking up players with a minibus, coaching the first team; Potter, who himself graduated as a social scientist, does it all.

He appears to have different methods than the average college coach. He has the first team play a game where talking is prohibited. In doing so, he forces the players to look even closer than normal and make decisions based on eye contact.

“You have to take people out of their comfort zone, then you become a better person. And it’s the same with footballers,” is Potter’s adage. And he tries that with himself too.

He came into contact with the Ghanaian Football Association through the university. And before he knows it, he can accompany the Ghanaian football players to the 2007 World Cup in China, as technical director.

Potter is concerned about the way the team plays and ensures that the conditions are good for performance. BBC Humberside, for Hull and the surrounding area, gets wind of it and lets Potter keep an online diary.

Kroes is tight-lipped about Potter’s possible arrival at Ajax

Ghana will be beaten in that World Cup. 4-1 by Australia, 4-0 by Canada and 7-2 by Norway. “This has been one of the most frustrating and difficult weeks of my life,” Potter wrote after the elimination. “Six weeks felt like six months.”

Yet the negative experience feels like an enrichment moments later. Potter has gone out of his comfort zone and learned a lot. When he got an opportunity to become a trainer in Sweden a few years later, he grabbed it with both hands.

Potter ends up at Östersund, from the ski town of the same name in the center of the country. The club has just been relegated and will play at the fourth Swedish level. Everyone around him thinks Potter is crazy.

He takes his family with him. “Charlie, my eldest, was only eleven months old at the time. We just dressed him in his English clothes on the plane. But it turned out to be minus twenty degrees in Sweden. So we all got blankets to make sure Charlie was warm enough outside. had.”

The development of Östersund under Potter’s leadership is unprecedented. In seven years, the club rose from the fourth division to the highest level, where it also won the cup and qualified for the last 32 in the Europa League.

The advance is accompanied by special team activities. Potter has his players perform a play, writes a book with them, visits art exhibitions and plays with the football players in a musical, for which they receive singing lessons.

“If you want to develop as a person, you have to go through those uncomfortable experiences,” is Potter’s idea. “If as a footballer you can sing in front of a thousand people, you can also play football.”

“Our first performance was sold out. We played in front of five hundred people and felt incredibly vulnerable. But if you can deal with it as a team, it’s a great way to develop self-awareness and responsibility.”

And once again the coach himself takes up the challenge. He sings the national anthem of Lapland on stage. “The first part was also a cappella. Let me put it this way: I didn’t exactly sound like Rod Stewart.” People in Amsterdam will not expect that from him anytime soon.