Graham Potter lifts lid on Swansea City’s £100m crisis and the season that reshaped the club

When Graham Potter reflects on his single season in charge of Swansea City, you can hear something in his voice that goes beyond the usual managerial nostalgia. It isn’t bitterness and it isn’t self‑praise. It’s something closer to a quiet pride mixed with the realism of a man who walked into a job that turned out to be nothing like the one he thought he’d accepted.

Potter arrived in 2018 with a reputation for innovation, emotional intelligence and a willingness to back young players. Swansea, freshly relegated from the Premier League, looked like the perfect stage for a reset. The parachute payments were there, the infrastructure was there, and the club still carried the identity forged during its rise from League Two to the top flight. On paper, it felt like a club ready to bounce back.

Except it wasn’t. And Potter has now put a number on the scale of the challenge he inherited. A £100m black hole. Not a gap, not a shortfall, but a chasm that swallowed the assumptions he and his staff had made about what the job would be.

He describes those first six months as a real challenge. Anyone who lived through that summer doesn’t need convincing. Eighteen first‑team players out the door. Senior pros gone. Wages slashed. A squad stripped back to its bones. For supporters, it felt like the club was being dismantled in real time. For Potter, it meant the job he thought he’d taken simply didn’t exist anymore.

Yet this is where the nuance matters. It’s easy, with hindsight, to turn every financial revelation into a stick to beat the previous ownership with. But football is rarely that simple. Swansea’s relegation was the culmination of years of drift, missteps and misalignment between ambition and reality. The financial hole wasn’t created overnight, and it wasn’t the result of one decision or one person. It was the result of a club that had lost its way after years of punching above its weight.

Potter doesn’t point fingers. He doesn’t need to. The facts speak for themselves. What he does instead is explain how the situation forced him to rethink everything. The plan to use parachute money to build a promotion‑ready squad evaporated. Instead, he had to rebuild from the academy upwards. And this is where the story becomes something more than a tale of financial struggle.

Because if you strip away the chaos of that summer, what remains is one of the most quietly impressive coaching jobs Swansea have seen in the modern era. Daniel James, Joe Rodon, Connor Roberts, Oli McBurnie. These weren’t just names on a team sheet. They were the foundations of a new identity. Players who embodied the club’s values. Players who ran, pressed, believed and played without fear. Players who, under Potter, rediscovered something Swansea had been missing.

Potter’s Swansea didn’t get promoted. They finished tenth. But anyone who watched that team knows the league table doesn’t tell the full story. The football had purpose again. The crowd reconnected with the players. The club felt alive in a way it hadn’t for years. And crucially, those young players didn’t just fill gaps. They became assets that would later bring in tens of millions of pounds, helping stabilise the club long after Potter had gone.

When he says that year made him a better coach, you believe him. Not because it sounds good, but because it’s true. He had to manage a squad in flux, build trust with players who had never played Championship football, and create a style that suited a group assembled out of necessity rather than design. He had to lead through uncertainty, and he did it with calmness and clarity.

There’s a temptation among supporters to wonder what might have happened if the financial situation had been different. If the club had been able to keep a core of senior players. If Potter had been given the tools he expected. If the rebuild had been strategic rather than reactive. But football doesn’t deal in hypotheticals. It deals in moments, and Potter’s year was one of those rare moments where adversity forced a club to rediscover itself.

His comments now don’t feel like a criticism of Swansea. They feel like an honest reflection of a situation that shaped him and shaped the club. And perhaps that’s why they resonate. Because Swansea fans know what that season felt like. They know the frustration, the uncertainty, the sense of starting again. But they also know the pride of watching academy players step up and prove they belonged.

Potter’s year wasn’t perfect. No season built on financial necessity ever is. But it was authentic. It was grounded. It was Swansea in its purest form. A club forced to rely on its identity rather than its bank balance. A club that had to trust its young players. A club that had to rebuild from the inside out.

And maybe that’s why, even now, supporters look back on that season with a strange affection. Because it reminded everyone what Swansea City is supposed to be. A club that plays with purpose. A club that gives young players a chance. A club that doesn’t hide from challenges but grows through them.

Potter may have moved on, and Swansea certainly have, but the echoes of that year remain. Not in the league table, but in the belief that even in the toughest circumstances, the club can find its way back to itself.

If anything, his comments simply confirm what many already knew. That season wasn’t a failure. It was a foundation. And sometimes, in football, that’s the most important thing of all.

This article first appeared on JACKARMY.net.