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Brighton chief Barber offers Chelsea advice on Potter: Why he needs time

Brighton chief Paul Barber has explained why he believes Graham Potter deserves more time at Chelsea.

Barber reluctantly let Potter leave for the Blues earlier this season, eventually replacing him with Roberto De Zerbi.

While the Albion have flourished, Chelsea are enduring a miserable season so far under Potter.

Speaking on the TBG Podcast, the Brighton CEO said: "He has a particular style of working with players and sometimes, you know, he will very often say that takes time. It takes time to get his systems and his processes into the way the players train every day and play every week.

"Very often, that's best established during a pre-season — he went in to Chelsea a month into the season. Last transfer window they brought in a lot of new players so the work he had done between September and January to a large extent not start again from scratch but he had another group of players that he then had to work with and get his processes and methods across.

"It will always take time if you're working with top clubs with expectations very high to achieve the results the fans expect. And, at Chelsea, it's a bigger club than Brighton in terms of the history and the success that they've had and, therefore because of that, the expectations of the fans are higher so the pressure on Graham is higher, the demand for quicker results, better results is there all the time.

"But, in my experience, he's calm, he's confident in his own abilities, he's a very good person so I think the players will respect him for the values that he has and, I can't speak for Chelsea's owners or board but certainly in our case at Brighton we gave him the time he needed to get his methods across and three seasons into that work we finished in our highest ever position in the club's history.

"That in itself is testament to what he can achieve. With all due respect to the squad of players we've got, which is excellent, Chelsea are able to spend much higher sums of money on players that are the finished article quicker so if he's given time working with some of the world's best players, who knows what's possible?"

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Ansser Sadiq

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