Graham Potter guides Sweden back to the World Cup after West Ham exit

Graham Potter arrived in Sweden carrying the kind of baggage that usually crushes a manager rather than redeems him. Instead, he turned a qualifying campaign that had been drifting toward humiliation into a World Cup return, with Viktor Gyökeres striking late in a 3-2 playoff final against Poland at Strawberry Arena in Solna to send Sweden back to the tournament for the first time since Russia 2018.

The turnaround matters because Potter had been written off twice before he got the chance. West Ham dismissed him on September 27, 2025, after only nine months in charge, with the club 19th in the Premier League and just one win in their first five games. The sack came two days before their trip to Everton. Before that, he had already spent nearly two years away from management after Chelsea ended his spell there, and he had taken West Ham’s approach in January after turning down other proposals.

Sweden offered a very different assignment. The Swedish Football Association hired Potter on October 20, 2025, on a short-term deal after Jon Dahl Tomasson was removed following a disastrous start to qualifying. Sweden had collected only one point from their first four World Cup qualifiers and sat bottom of UEFA Group B when Potter took over. Defeats to Switzerland and Kosovo, plus a draw with Slovenia, had left the campaign in ruins before Potter was handed the job of saving it.

What changed was not only the result, but the structure around him. Potter stepped into a national-team role with a clear, finite target rather than a club crisis measured game by game, and he inherited a side built around the finishing power of Viktor Gyökeres and Alexander Isak. Sweden’s play-off win over Poland on March 31, 2026, ended an eight-year absence from the World Cup and gave Potter the strongest case yet that his methods still travel. He called it “the best night of my career” and said he would “dust off my cowboy hat” after completing the short-term mission.

Sweden then opened the World Cup with a 5-1 win, offering the first real test of whether Potter’s revival is durable or merely a brief surge. After that match, he said: “You never know, that's the truth... until the game is played you don't know for sure. That's the beauty of sport.” For Potter, the next proof will matter more than the rescue act.