Graham Potter

I got a job as a football development manager which meant I could coach the students and work with the sports sciences department, all the people in university sector.

I want to take people out of their comfort zones and teach them to rely on their team-mates.

But any squad needs players who are hungry to do well, with their careers ahead of them. That's important for the dynamic of the group, but it also needs a balance of guys who have seen it, done it and have that quality of leadership. It is all about the quality of the player.

It is about building the best team you can, not just one to play in the Championship. You look short-term because you need to be competitive, that's the nature of the business. But it's exciting to have players whose potential is exciting.

If you identify those guys - something we have done in the past - who are not as valued in the current market for whatever reason and you look to get them to play at a higher level than where they have come from. That's how you develop the team.

The profile is to find if someone can perform in the Championship and help you win, and also play in the Premier League because that has to be the goal.

The competition that is the Premier League is the biggest challenge in itself. It's my job to get the players to believe that they can go in to every match and win.

My mum had always pressed on me to continue my education, and it was just the volatility of sport in terms of not being able to control the result.

Like everybody I needed to learn to be a coach, I needed to practise that and make mistakes in a decent environment where I could develop myself and not fear I was going to lose my job.

I had five years in the university sector which was a time where I could make my mistakes, develop with the students and players there. I also worked with the people at the university to put some concept and theory on my own experiences.

I was fairly rubbish as a player.

I was only picking up short-term contracts in the lower leagues. I thought that rather than the game kick me out, I'd be proactive about it.

Any coach in my era will reference or look at Guardiola's teams. If you look at the style of play, he has had a huge influence on football. And he has innovated it again.

I remember playing against the great Manchester United teams when I was a player.

My playing career that was a bit up but mostly down. I played in the Premier League at Southampton but most of my career was in the lower divisions.

Educating players and being part of the community are very important.

From a football perspective, putting young footballers into art, or singing - you're doing something that's not so familiar. It has helped us build a team and build a spirit.

You make mistakes at the results end of football and you can be out on your ear pretty quickly.

I can't sing, I can't dance, I can't do much else to be honest.

We want to help the players be more comfortable in their own skin, a bit braver, a bit more aware and more understanding of each other.

Ostersund has marketed itself as a winter city. But that's changing now, with the success of the football team.

Sometimes it helps to see the world through someone else's eyes.

Ultimately, good players need to play and they don't always at a young age in England.

I don't think it's fair to say the standard of English coaching is bad. It's more about pathway: how you can get a break and then progress from there. Even at the lowest levels there is impatience now, so you need a bit of luck in terms of the owner or chairman that you work with.

We thought of cultural activities as a way of taking players out of their comfort zone and building team spirit, helping them be braver, and a bit more comfortable in the uncomfortable situations.When you involve the community in that they get interested.

It's hard to get opportunities anywhere. There are a lot of coaches out there and a lot of talented coaches too. It's not easy. Quite often there's no perfect situation that emerges.

My situation, and my opportunity, was the fourth tier in Swedish football and a place that nobody really wanted to go to. Of course it's turned out well for me.

I was obviously never good enough to play at a top level, or even anywhere close to that, if I'm being honest. That's the reality.

If you can have a career as a footballer for 13 years then you're really lucky, but there will probably be plenty of supporters up and down the country saying that I wasn't a top player, to put it kindly. That's for sure.

You have to respect and understand the environment. So I don't think it's a case of taking anything from Ostersund and transferring it to somewhere else.

We are our own worst enemies and as a coach you can help people recognise that, raise their self-awareness and then see if they change or do anything about it.

People think that coaching is about winning football matches - which, of course, it is - but throughout my career it has also been about helping people become better, more able to deal with life and be more successful in their lives, on and off the football pitch.

You cannot win all the time and, often, we don't win that much. You have to have something and I think if we can create an environment where people genuinely think that we are trying to help them, trying to improve them and make them better, then OK, maybe they will try a bit harder, and do a bit better for the team and the club.

I remember doing my first coaching sessions at Macclesfield, when I was still playing, and I was just terrible. I felt really uncomfortable standing in front of people, and it felt very odd. It was not something I was naturally comfortable with at all.

I needed to learn to be a coach initially. I think if I'd gone into professional football when I stopped playing when I was 30 years old I'd have failed because I'd have made too many mistakes because I had no real idea at that time.

They're human beings before they're footballers and it's important to understand how can I help them. What do they need? How can they feel part of this? How can they feel they're improving in their career, because my job is to help them get better, play better football, earn a better contract, whatever it is.

All I can promise is I'll do my very best. I'll try as hard as I can.

We want our teams to be able to entertain the supporters - they're such an important part of the industry, sometimes forgotten a bit. At the Amex they'll be very important for us. So we'll try and entertain. At the same time I know we're in the results business. I'm not naive.

Sometimes there is a disconnect between footballers and supporters, because there are highly-paid people here and supporters over there, and nothing in between.

I was at Leeds Carnegie, the ninth tier. And I was coaching students. There would have been hundreds of managers with more experience. So I had to go to the fourth tier of Swedish football, pretty much in the Arctic circle.

I'd read a classics book on the bus when I was at York.

It was a huge move for me to leave Sweden, because I was really happy there. It was a club we thought we could carry on developing and try to win the league with. And my family were really settled.

I played football because I loved the game - but I didn't enjoy the focus on not making mistakes and the culture being essentially one of blame and a little fear.

I was used to football supporters hammering me and I thought my name was Graham Potter-Boo at one point.

When it is 1-0 and you have been dominant and you have restricted the home team to pretty much nothing, if you do not score the second goal then that is football. Any action can happen in the game.

But concepts around how a team functions, the importance of the relationship between football and the person, how you develop both, are always valid.

Whenever you start a new job, it's always a bit daunting, the unknown.

Players are fundamentally the same - regardless of what they earn. They want to improve and want to be part of something.

At Ostersunds, we had half the players who were part-time and working and the other half were full-time.

The pressure of the Premier League is huge but so is moving your family across the world to a club where they had sacked the manager every year for the last five.