The Comparison: Eddie Howe vs Graham Potter

Eddie Howe is an English manager and former player who is currently the head coach of Newcastle United.

Howe started his professional playing career at AFC Bournemouth in 1995 and played as a centre-back until he secured a transfer worth £400,000 to Portsmouth in 2002. However, his playing career at Portsmouth was ruined by two successive season-long knee injuries, which lead him to return to Bournemouth for the remaining two years of his career.

Eddie first took over as head coach of Bournemouth as a caretaker role in 2008. Despite the fact that his two games in charge as caretaker manager were away defeats, he was hired as the permanent manager of the club on 19 January 2009 and brought the club out of the relegation zone despite a 17-point deficit.

Regardless of Bournemouth’s transfer ban, Howe managed to get the club promoted to League One in 2010 after rejecting Peterborough United's job offer at the start of the season.

In 2011 Howe became the new Burnley FC manager in a compensation deal with Bournemouth where the cherries received around £300,000 for the Manager and his assistant, he remained at Burnley for two seasons and finished just above mid-table on two occasions and soon after, the Englishman left Turf Moor for cited ‘Personal Reasons’.

Howe then returned to Bournemouth in October 2012 and got them promoted to the Championship by the end of the season with AFC Bournemouth finishing as runners-up and one point behind champions Doncaster Rovers. In the 2013–14 season, Howe's Bournemouth finished 10th in the Championship, six points outside of the play-off positions.

At the start of April 2015 the 44-year-old was named the EFL manager of the decade and by the end of the month had secured Bournemouth’s promotion to the Premier League, after being crowned champions of the Championship.

Howe kept the Cherries in the top-flight for five seasons whilst playing expansive attacking football with low resources when compared to other premier league sides, at the end of the 19/20 campaign Howe left Bournemouth by mutual consent after they were relegated back to the second-tier.

Most recently in November 2021 the Englishman was appointed Newcastle United manager and has recently guided them to a resurgence from 20th to 14th place in the Premier League over a matter of months whilst displaying the ability to transform a football team’s mentality and style over a short period of time. With examples such as changing the position of previously struggling players like Joelinton to a centre midfielder to take advantage of his physical strengths.

Graham Potter is an English professional football manager and former player who played as a left-back. He is the head coach of Premier League club Brighton & Hove Albion.

Potter had a 13-year playing career where he made 307 appearances in the football leagues from Shrewsbury Town in the Conference to Southampton in the Premier League.

With support from the Professional Footballers' Association, Potter graduated from the Open University in December 2005 with a degree in Social Sciences. He worked as a football development manager for the University of Hull and as technical director at the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup for the Ghana women's team.

In 2010 the Englishman signed a three-year contract with Ostersund a team in the fourth division of Swedish football and by 2013 had achieved two successive promotions with the club and by the end of the 14/15 season, Potter had gotten the club promoted to the highest division of Swedish football, the Swedish Allsvenskan

On 13 April 2017, Potter's Östersund team won the Svenska Cupen (the Swedish domestic cup), beating Norrköping 4–1 in the final. This granted the team a place in the second qualifying round of the 2017–18 UEFA Europa League where they defeated Galatasaray 3–1 on aggregate.

In the third round they defeated Fola Esch 3–1 on aggregate and in the play-offs they knocked out PAOK (3–3 on aggregate with more away goals), thus securing a historic entry into the Europa League group stage. The team surpassed the group stage but were knocked out by Arsenal after beating them away in the second leg 2-1.

In 2018 Potter signed a three-year deal with newly relegated Swansea City in the Championship and stated "This is a Premier League club from the last seven years, and it wants to try to get back, but get back in a way that there is an identity and an understanding of what they want to be on the pitch. That was the interesting thing for me – the chance to build something’.

At the end of his first season with the club, he was heavily linked to Brighton and Hove Albion and rejected another contract offer from the Welsh club. Graham Potter became Brighton's manager from the start of the next season and has been credited with the acknowledgement of his side's ability to play expansive passing football whilst using his own tactics, when facing the stronger sides in the premier league and has many notable victories over clubs such as Liverpool, Arsenal, and Chelsea.

Recently, Potter has been linked with the England job and to be the successor for the current manager Gareth Southgate, who whilst achieving far progressions in the recent international tournaments has left some fans wishing for more exciting styles of play.

Potter could be the man to adapt the English national side into a more progressive team whilst getting the full potential out of the current talent the squad has.

Howe has shown that he is capable of turning a side’s form around in a small period of time and could be the head coach for a very exciting future prospect in Newcastle United, considering the recent takeover. If he can demonstrate and reproduce his previously strong attacking football, with the influx of higher quality players he may be able to take the magpies into European football by the end of next season.