‘I don’t think I have’ – Chelsea v RB Salzburg set to be Graham Potter’s first-ever Champions League match

Chelsea boss Graham Potter has made the remarkable admission that his new side’s Champions League tie with RB Salzburg on Wednesday night will be the first time he has ever attended a match in the competition.

Potter, who was appointed as the new Blues boss last week replacing Thomas Tuchel, has managed in Europe before but only at Europa League level when he was in charge of Sweden’s Ostersunds.

This now is an altogether different challenge for the Englishman, but one he is relishing.

“Off the top of my head, I don’t think I have [attended a Champions League game],” Potter said. “But it’s a good time for me to get into the dugout.

“My experiences in the Champions League are just at supporter level. But obviously I’ve experienced the Europa League with Ostersunds, winning at Galatasaray [over two legs in 2017] and getting through the group stage.

“Wherever we would start it would be a heck of an introduction, wherever we start it’s going to be brilliant, so why not start here?

“You have to look at the tradition, the quality, size and ambition of the club here. It’s a completely different challenge from the one I had at Brighton.

“I had three fantastic years there, but I’m very thankful to the owners here for putting their trust in me.”

Potter admitted his transition to London from the South Coast has been a “whirlwind”, but that he believes he has made the right choice for himself and his career.

“It’s nine days but it feels like nine weeks or nine months,” Potter said. “The beauty of football is that you never know what’s around the corner.

“Everything’s happened very quickly, with a lot of intense conversations. Chelsea’s owners are good people, intelligent people who want to achieve something here.

“It’s a really exciting project and they have some big ideas about how to take the club forward. It felt really positive.

“If we walk across the road, there’s a risk – that’s what life is. I left England aged 30 and I went to a club that had sacked the manager every year for four years. I left a secure job and my wife left her business.

“Now I’m here 17 years later and I think I’ve taken careful steps with my career. Life’s about going outside your comfort zone, taking responsibility and believing there’s more to us than is here now.

“When I went to Sweden I was working in in the ninth tier of English football. There was the bottom, a few more levels, then there was me. I didn’t ever have a plan to be sitting at a level like this.

“But while ambition is good, responsibility is better. And my responsibility is to do my absolute best at every level.”

BOEHLY EXPLAINS WHY HE SACKED TUCHEL

Meanwhile Chelsea owner Todd Boehly was talking at the SALT conference in New York on Tuesday and gave a number of intriguing comments about why Tuchel was removed from his post.

Boehly, who fronts the club’s ownership consortium alongside Clearlake Capital, said: “When you take over any business, you have to make sure you’re aligned with the people who are operating the business.

“Tuchel is obviously extremely talented and someone who had great success at Chelsea. Our vision for the club was to find a manager who really wanted to collaborate with us, a coach who really wanted to collaborate.

“There are a lot of walls to break down at Chelsea. Before [we arrived], the first team and academy didn’t really share data, didn’t share information about where the top players were coming from. Our goal is to bring a team together; all of that needs to be a well-oiled machine.

“The reality of our decision was that we weren’t sure that Thomas saw it the same way we saw it. No one is right or wrong, we just didn’t have a shared vision for the future. It wasn’t about [the Champions League loss in] Zagreb, it was about the shared vision for what we wanted Chelsea to look like.

“It wasn’t a decision that was made because of a single win or loss. It was a decision that we thought was the right vision for the club.”

Separately, Boehly suggested he is already thinking about how to positively impact the rest of English football, outlining the possibility of a showpiece game that could raise funds for the lower leagues.

“MLB [Major League Baseball in the US] did their all-star game this year,” Boehly said.

“They made $200m (£173m) from a Monday and a Tuesday, you could do a North vs South all-star game from the Premier League to fund the pyramid very easily.”