Ostersunds’ rapping English boss Graham Potter knows Arsenal will face the music in Europa League clash
Potter has taken Ostersunds from fourth tier of Swedish football to a last-32 clash against Gunners superstars
IT IS hardly how you would expect a team to prepare for a major European match.
Back in November, Graham Potter’s Ostersunds were about to host Ukrainians Zorya Luhansk, knowing a win would put them into the Europa League last 32.
Yet just a few days before their monumental clash, the Swedes were staging a very different performance — an open-air rap concert!
Potter and his players wrote their own tunes and sang outside a museum a short stroll from the Jamtkraft Arena, where they host Premier League giants Arsenal tomorrow.
It was just the latest end-of-year show this football-cum-culture club have held, following other productions including a rock gig and a performance of the ballet Swan Lake.
Laughing at a picture of him rapping, Solihull-born boss Potter, 42, admitted to SunSport: “That’s me trying to look a bit gangster!
“I wouldn’t call what I did a rap, it was more rhyming. But some of the boys rapped and were really good.
“I was thinking, this is quite bizarre that we are practising and doing this before we’ve got this massive game.
“But it was good because it took our minds off the game and we won 2-0.”
That victory set up Ostersunds’ next big show — tomorrow’s clash with the Gunners, which Potter says is the “talk of the town”.
Arsenal are visiting Sweden’s ‘Winter City’, where they will play on an artificial pitch and the average temperature in February is -8C.
Potter smiled: “It was -20 degrees just a few days ago. It’s -5 today, but we don’t think that’s cold!”
Minnows Ostersunds were only formed in 1996 — 19 days AFTER Arsene Wenger’s first match as Arsenal boss.
In seven seasons under Potter they have won three promotions, lifted the Swedish Cup and come through a Europa League group containing Athletic Bilbao and Hertha Berlin.
They have done so with a team of misfits and migrants — and minimal financial resources.
Ostersunds’ annual turnover is only £5million, one hundred times smaller than that of Arsenal.
Their top earner is on £2,000 a week, with their entire budget for transfer fees and wages last year just £1m.
The club’s biggest-ever buy is £65,000 striker Saman Ghoddos — some way off the club-record £60m Arsenal splashed out on forward Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang last month.
Potter admitted: “That puts it into perspective. The differences are stark, that’s for sure.”
The lakeside town of Ostersund in mid-Sweden has a population of fewer than 50,000 and Potter added: “There are more people who go to the Emirates on a matchday than there are living in Ostersund.
“Arsenal shouldn’t be playing against us, that’s the reality. But it’s fantastic for us. It’s going to be a proud night. Fans have been queuing up outside to buy tickets and they could have sold the game out a few times over.
“It’s the biggest game in the club’s history but we seemed to say that every other week in 2017.
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“We haven’t really any history or tradition, so we are breaking ground all the time.
“Arsenal are obviously the big favourites and we will have to play really well — but it’s a bit boring if you don’t think you have a chance of winning.”
Former defender Potter never faced Arsenal as a player. He was at Birmingham, Stoke and West Brom but spent much of his time in the lower leagues, where he made his most appearances for York.
He was working at Leeds Beckett University when he was approached about taking over the fourth-tier Swedes, after his old Boston team-mate Graeme Jones recommended him to chairman Daniel Kindberg.
Potter recalled: “It was really difficult at the start. My wife Rachel admitted to me later that, for the first six months, she pretty much cried every day.
“I remember she went to the nursery with our boy Charlie. They asked what she was doing there and she said, ‘My husband has got a job here’.
“They said, ‘What does he do?’, and she answered, ‘He’s a football coach’.
“They asked who I coached and when she told them it was Ostersunds, they said, ‘I’d go home if I were you’.
“The club had just been relegated and we didn’t really have supporters, we just had people watching football. They weren’t too bothered whether we won or lost.
“At the time, the record attendance inside our stadium was for snow-cross — racing snowmobiles.
“So what has happened has been incredible. You think, ‘Wow, we’ve done quite a bit’.
“This is our home now. We’ve had twins born here, my wife is really settled and our eldest Charlie, who came here at 11 months, is seven years old and fluent in Swedish.
“It’s been an amazing journey and transformation.”
Potter certainly would never have expected to have been rapping on stage when he first moved here.
But he is a huge advocate of the club’s annual cultural projects — a brainchild of Kindberg — with work already under way on this year’s performance, a collaboration with a Swedish theatre group.
Potter is sitting in his small office next to the stadium, which has a capacity of just 9,000 and even fewer for European matches.
There is a picture of the club’s Swan Lake production hanging up on his wall and he explained: “We try to help our players improve as footballers but also as people. You see the lads in uncomfortable situations outside their football environment and it has been really powerful from a team-building perspective.”
Given his achievements, Potter is, quite rightly, recognised as a hero here.
A giant flag of his face was waved during Friday’s 3-0 Swedish Cup win over Trelleborgs — their first match of the new domestic season, with the previous one finishing in November.
In an interview with SunSport in October, Potter revealed there was a proposal to get a statue built in his honour, which he said he hoped would not happen as it was “embarrassing”.
The relieved boss said: “That article got back to Sweden and it was like, ‘Oh, if it’s embarrassing for him, then it’s not something we should do’.”
In recent weeks Potter’s name has been linked with jobs back in England, including posts at West Brom, Swansea and Stoke.
But he added: “There have been no offers. Often it’s just paper talk but it reflects that we’ve done well here.
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“When I look from afar at the English game, it’s a precarious business in terms of time and ownership.
“I have spent a long time building what I’ve got here. I’d have to be sure of the next step, wherever that is.
“But I’m settled here, I’m happy here. Of course I’m ambitious, but I think the club is ambitious as well. We want to try to win the league and then try to get into the Champions League.”