Graham Potter on his Swedish love affair, Viktor Gyokeres and World Cup pain: ‘You’re in this amazing bubble and then it’s gone’
What does it feel like to be knocked out of the World Cup? For weeks you’re inside your own fraternity, a brotherhood going into battle every few days. Then you lose 3-0 to France and it all stops. Cancel the hotels and the flights. No more games, no more training sessions, no more team meetings. One manager recently described the desolation of defeat, wallowing alone in their hotel room as players and staff left for the nearest airport.
“It’s a good description of it,” nods Graham Potter, whose Sweden side were beaten by France this summer in the round of 32. “There’s a week or so where you’re in a bit of an empty state. It’s nothing that I’ve experienced before. For weeks you’re in this amazing bubble where you eat, sleep, drink, work, everything together with these people, and then it’s gone. You don’t know whether that group of people are going to be together again.”
Sweden did have one last evening before they went their separate ways, and they just so happened to be a short ride from Manhattan. “We were in a hotel in New Jersey, so we managed to find our way into New York and had a dinner and a few drinks with the staff, and just enjoyed one night together. And then everybody’s away, and it feels very strange.”
Once the dust had settled, Potter gathered his assistants and analysts to pore over Sweden’s tournament in detail – “a fun part of the job,” he says. Some joined on Zoom calls from their club roles while others met at the Swedish FA headquarters in Stockholm, including the former Sunderland midfielder Seb Larsson, who can often be seen in Potter’s ear. “I haven’t played international football and certainly not for Sweden, and he’s played 130 games, so his experience and understanding of the national team is fantastic,” Potter says.
There were mixed feelings. The World Cup had started perfectly, with a 5-1 win over Tunisia. But a 5-1 defeat by Netherlands and a 1-1 draw with Japan left Sweden third in the group, sending them into the path of the all-powerful French, and they were played off the pitch in New Jersey.
“It’s never nice to lose but sometimes you have to go, ‘OK, maybe the better team won’. But then you have to go, ‘how could we have played better?’ Those thoughts aren’t necessarily in detail on that evening [in Manhattan] but that’s certainly where your brain goes quickly. You have to zoom out and go, ‘OK, we’re disappointed now and it feels really s**t. But would we have taken this when we came in?’ Yeah, of course.”
Potter is meeting The Independent in London in the midst of an impressive Nations League campaign, with Sweden on the verge of promotion to the top tier. He is enjoying the wild ride that has been his first international job, in charge of his adopted country. Potter says he feels Swedish and he sings the national anthem with West Midlands gusto.
It is an unlikely love affair which began when the 35-year-old Potter, who had just graduated from Leeds Metropolitan University with a master’s degree in leadership, took a job no one else wanted in the remote city of Ostersund. The Potters arrived in the depths of winter, when enormous piles of snow line the roads and the sun shines for barely five hours. His wife cried every day for months.
“She’d left her job, her life. It wasn’t like moving to Monaco, especially when you arrive in January, when it’s minus 20-something outside and dark by two o’clock in the afternoon. It’s a wonderful place, but it was tough initially. It’s the fourth tier of Swedish football. So there are times where you’re going, ‘OK, is this right for life and family?’ But you have to give it that time, and thankfully we stuck together and stuck it out, and it was the best thing we’ve ever done. It was worth it.”
After 15 years of highs and lows in the club game, Potter took charge of Sweden last October following a disastrous World Cup qualifying campaign under predecessor Jon Dahl Tomasson. Sweden had one last shot at salvation through the play-offs in March.
He quickly learnt two things about the rhythms of international football. The first is time: enormous gaps of time, yawning canyons of time, almost too much of it. Potter, who owns a house in Sweden but still lives near Brighton, spent the four-month wait for the play-offs flying around Europe meeting his new players. He’d be in the centre of Dortmund one day and the medieval streets of Bergamo the next, then on to London, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow.
“My passport was crammed because you’re just having a half-hour, 40-minute coffee and conversation with players. It’s nice to get a sense of where their careers are at, where their family are at, how they see the situation, because I came into a bad situation. I found it’s very useful to build a relationship, and then it’s very useful to have an understanding of what they’re doing in their clubs.”
Then, suddenly there’s no time at all. The players flew into Valencia for the play-offs on Monday, and on Thursday they played Ukraine in a semi-final. “We had a day and a half [to prepare] and it’s a play-off to go to the World Cup,” Potter says. “So is the game going to be about intricate passes from the back and nice patterns of attacking play? We needed to win two matches. So our starting point was defensive stability, strong in set-pieces and counter-attacking, because we had big-space players like Viktor Gyokeres and Anthony Elanga who are as good as anybody in the world attacking big areas.”
Gyokeres scored a hat-trick to beat Ukraine and then smashed home a dramatic, last-gasp winner to beat Poland and send Sweden to the World Cup, where Potter learnt something else: the brutal finality of tournament football, that shock at a journey ending in the middle.
He spoke to players individually over the summer and found a consensus: they relished the World Cup but left desperate to compete with teams as strong as Netherlands and France. There were signs of life against the Dutch, despite the lopsided scoreline, when Potter changed to a more attacking formation in the first hydration break and Sweden dominated until half-time. The French game, however, was utterly one-sided.
“How do we get to the point where we can beat France? The reality is, if you’re Sweden, you have to have Alex Isak firing off the back of a good season, and probably he wasn’t at that stage. You need Dejan Kulusevski, one of your best players. Isak Hien wasn’t available, our first-choice centre-back. So you want to arrive with the very best that you have.
“The players that we have, when you look at Gyokeres and Isak and Kulusevski and [Yasin] Ayari and [Lucas] Bergvall, there’s a certain profile to them that you have to set up to be proactive against whoever you face, and that’s probably the disappointing thing or the learning point – we weren’t able to do that against France, and if you’re going to lose a game, you’d rather lose in the way we played against the Dutch than how we did against France, even though the scoreline is still painful.
“The players are at a point where they want that type of football. They want to play proactively, they want to play positively, and that’s the exciting challenge.”
There have been signs of evolving into a front-foot team in Sweden’s impressive start to the Nations League, after winning three games and drawing one to take control of Group H with Bosnia, Poland and Romania. Another win over Bosnia on Saturday will seal promotion to League A with Europe’s heavyweights.
Gyokeres has led the charge, scoring in all four Nations League games to take his Sweden record under Potter to 10 goals in 11 matches. He has featured only intermittently for Arsenal this season, but Potter isn’t concerned.
“It doesn’t really matter, is the truth, because he’s done brilliant for us when he’s been playing every week [for Arsenal], and he’s done brilliant for us when he hasn’t been playing every week. Whatever he does in his club, that’s part of the thing that you can’t control. You just have to accept that, and then you just make sure that from a loading perspective, when he comes in you’re careful with him. But he’s such a professional, fit guy that loves playing football for Sweden.”
Kulusevski missed the World Cup through injury but made his long-awaited return to the Tottenham team last month, and Potter sent him a text ahead of the game. “It was just a beautiful moment to see him on the pitch. I’ve not worked with him, that's how long he’s been away, but everybody in the national team says he’s so important, so influential.”
While Kulusevski has been absent, his future brother-in-law has become essential. Yasin Ayari, who is engaged to Kulusevski’s sister Sandra, has been at the heart of Brighton’s flying start to the season and his form for Sweden has been outstanding, with two goals at the World Cup and a starring role in recent Nations League games. “His improvement, I would say from November last year, has been incredible,” beams Potter.
The task now, with Euro 2028 ahead, is to turn Sweden’s most talented group for a generation into a side who can go toe-to-toe with the best teams in the world, to give themselves every chance of staying a little longer before the music stops.
“We all shared the same thing, which was that the World Cup was an amazing experience. But we want to keep going, we want to evolve, we want to improve. It’s not like we’re happy with what we did. We’ve done a lot of good things. The atmosphere in the group was fantastic, amazing, so we took some important steps. But at the same time, you want it to go on. We weren’t ready to go home.”
