Graham Potter is set to be appointed as Chelsea’s new head coach, replacing Thomas Tuchel, who was sacked by the club’s new owners on Wednesday morning.
Potter has an agreement in place on a long-term contract with Chelsea, which will see his spell with Brighton come to an end, where he was appointed by the club back in May 2019.
Potter was always seen as the favourite by Chelsea to replace Tuchel and held positive talks on Wednesday afternoon in London with Chelsea’s co-controlling owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali where they laid out his plans for the future.
The expectation from Chelsea ever since Wednesday morning was Potter would replace Tuchel and now it is set to become a reality.
Thomas Tuchel’s sacking on Wednesday morning was not something Chelsea planned overnight and had been in the making in the last weeks, where Potter was being considered.
Boehly and Eghbali had already scheduled a face-to-face meeting for Wednesday morning with Thomas Tuchel before their 1-0 defeat against Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League on Tuesday night.
Thomas Tuchel was sacked at 9:30am, with the news coming to a surprise to Tuchel. The 49-year-old’s feeling going into the meeting was he felt it would be a 'normal meeting', who didn’t expect to be sacked and felt he deserved more time to turn things around.
Tuchel’s coaching staff in Arno Michels, Zsolt Low and Benjamin Weber have also departed the club.
The message from Chelsea’s owners to Tuchel was they wanted 'a new face as their coach', since they didn’t see him as the correct fit for their vision going forward and had been a plan in place ever since Boehly’s consortium took over.
Throughout the summer, Chelsea saw a massive change upstairs following the departures of Bruce Buck, Marina Granovskaia, Guy Lawrence, Petr Cech and Scott McLachlan.
It is described Tuchel felt very comfortable in the Roman Abramovich regime and liked the structure where he enjoyed a great relationship with former director Granovskaia and in particular Cech, where he kept in day-to-day contact with.
Whereas with the new the ownership group, Tuchel struggled to adapt.
In the summer, the German was positioned with helping the club make decisions on transfers, which ultimately took a toll on his ability to focus and coach the team.
Tuchel on multiple occasions in press conferences made it known he was looking forward to having full focus on his team again, without the distraction of the transfer market.
Five days after the transfer window had shut, Chelsea have decided to part ways with Tuchel, despite spending a world-record fee of £273 million on summer signings.
By Nathan Gissing
