Archive August 13, 2025

West Ham United face newly promoted Sunderland in the Premier League on Saturday, with manager Graham Potter determined that any improvements this season should emerge from solid foundations.

Potter felt he inherited a mess at the London Stadium when he was brought in to replace Julen Lopetegui in January.

While he could identify what was wrong, the 50-year-old could not start fixing the issues properly until this summer.

That meant he oversaw just one victory in his first six games and a run of eight without a win, before an end of season rally took West Ham up to 14th.

It represented a fairly underwhelming introduction to life at London Stadium for Potter on his return to the game, 21 months after being sacked by Chelsea.

Given new signings have been slow to arrive, it is easy to imagine the likes of Antonio Conte or Jose Mourinho reacting to the same scenario by furiously demanding more bodies, no matter the cost.

But that is not Potter’s way.

He can lose his cool – and he did in Chicago last month, with Potter fiercely criticising the decision to have cooling breaks when West Ham beat Everton on a cold, wet and windy night during the Premier League Summer Series.

But Potter prefers to address issues in a more measured, methodical way.

“The coach’s job is to build something,” he said.

“You’ve got to try and improve your team, improve the club, improve the players. That’s the trick.

“I don’t know what the perception of me is to be honest. I can have my water-break tirade with the best of them.

“But everybody’s different, I suppose. I’ve always tried to do what I think is the right thing for the club.

There wasn’t much of a transfer budget at Swedish fourth-tier outfit Ostersunds, where Potter began his managerial career.

Yet his patient, clear-sighted approach brought three promotions and a historic Swedish Cup triumph that secured the club’s first European campaign, courtesy of getting through three qualifying rounds.

Ostersunds were eventually eliminated in the last 32 by Arsenal – but not before winning at Emirates Stadium.

The lessons learned during that time served Potter well at Swansea and Brighton, but it was impossible to adopt the same approach when he left for Chelsea in September 2022.

In the transfer window just before Potter arrived, Chelsea signed 10 players and either sold or loaned out 15 – and that was just among those who could be considered first-team squad members.

In that January, Chelsea spent more than £280m on another seven players and signed Joao Felix on loan.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Potter found it difficult to implement the plans he wanted and was sacked after just seven months in charge.

“I’ve experienced what £300m can do,” he said. “It’s not always positive.

“You just deal with what you have, work with the people in the club and represent it the best way, by staying as close to the person I am as I can.

Including striker Michail Antonio – whose exit as a player was confirmed on 7 August – West Ham have released six senior members of Potter’s squad since the end of last season.

Striker Callum Wilson and defender Kyle Walker-Peters have arrived on free transfers, while the £55m generated by the sale of Mohammed Kudus to Tottenham has been spent on goalkeeper Mads Hermansen and El Hadji Malick Diouf, as well as paying a large chunk of the £34.2m it cost to turn Jean-Clair Todibo’s loan from Nice into a permanent deal.

Many West Ham supporters think it is not enough.

Potter accepts the club’s recruitment chiefs will keep looking for targets but cautions against the temptation to buy for the sake of it.

“I don’t think we needed drastic change,” he said.

“It’s tempting to think that the solution is going to be external but, from my perspective, the focus should always be on the players you have – with an eye on improving.

“When we arrived there was, for different reasons, a low-trust environment. When you change the manager halfway through the season, there’s a feeling something isn’t quite working.

“If you look back over a 12-month period up to that point, the team had conceded a lot of goals which is an indication that, maybe, something wasn’t quite right on a cultural or foundation level.

Nine-time Grand Slam champion Monica Seles has revealed she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis – a neuromuscular autoimmune disease – three years ago.

The 51-year-old has chosen to go public with the rare long-term condition, which causes muscle weakness, to raise awareness before this month’s US Open.

Seles first noticed symptoms of the condition, which can affect most parts of the body – including the muscles that control the eyes, around five years ago.

“I would be playing [tennis] with some kids or family members, and I would miss a ball,” former world number one Seles told The Associated Press.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I see two balls.’ These are obviously symptoms that you can’t ignore.

“It took me quite some time to really absorb it, speak openly about it, because it’s a difficult one. It affects my day-to-day life quite a lot.”

Seles decided to reveal her condition in the hope of using her platform to educate people about the disease, for which there is currently no cure.

The American won eight major titles by the age of 19, after capturing her first aged 16 at the 1990 French Open.

But she won just one more after she was stabbed with a knife by a fan during a match in Hamburg in 1993 and took time away from the sport to recover.

A “wee Champions League ball” is bouncing perfectly for Lennon Miller in the Aberdeen players’ lounge.

Father Lee, then a striker at the Pittodrie club, is blown away by the freakish technique of his two-year-old son when he “absolutely creams one” on the volley.

With the ball mid-flight, his astonishment instantly turns to horror when the wife of then Aberdeen manager Jimmy Calderwood swings open the door to the lounge with a glass of wine in her hand.

Smash. Splash.

“She was soaking,” Lee recalls. “We all just stopped and were thinking, ‘how’s she going to react to this?’. But she just laughed it off.”

At the same age, the former Scotland striker also remembers his young son oddly having the knowledge to dry the ball with his top before taking a throw.

And by the time he was four, Udinese’s newest signing was attempting corners on 11-a-side pitches, even though he “couldn’t hit the 18-yard box”.

Needless to say, football was – and still is – young Miller’s life, but his world was turned upside down at the age of just five following the loss of mother Donna, who died in 2012 after having cancer.

Now 18, and having become a talismanic figure at Fir Park, doing mum proud is what drives Miller, who has become Motherwell’s record sale with his move to Italy.

“Going through that at such a young age, football has been my escape from such a devastating thing,” he told BBC Scotland in 2024.

“I felt like every time I was in the house it was catching up on me and every time I was out on the pitch I forgot about it.

Despite his tender age, Miller played 76 times in claret and amber.

He led out Motherwell as captain at Hampden in a Scottish League Cup semi-final defeat by Rangers last November and he shone in his first two outings for Scotland over the summer.

It was Miller’s 91st-minute penalty against Dundee United that booked the Fir Park side that semi-final spot, their first in more than six years.

The moment referee John Beaton pointed to the spot, dad Lee could barely watch in the stand – not because he doubted his son, but instead because of his history of dinking penalties.

“I’ve always had one in my locker and I’ve always enjoyed seeing the goalie raging,” the teenage Miller joked.

“I’ve probably said to my dad before that if I get one, I’ll dink it. But I’ve seen the goalie go early so I thought I’d leave it.”

The fact someone so young would take the penalty in such a high-pressure situation says it all about the laidback manner in which Miller plays the game.

And it was that composed style that made him “stand out like a sore thumb” when Stuart Ogilvie, Motherwell’s long-serving head of academy recruitment, watched Miller for the first time with Cambusnethan Talbot boys club.

“He was spraying passes all over the place, running the game just the way he does now,” says Ogilvie, who also scouted former Scotland forward James McFadden and ex-Celtic midfielder David Turnbull for Motherwell.

Ogilvie thought Motherwell’s chance had gone when he learned Miller had been training with Celtic, one of many clubs linked with the teenager before his move to Italy.

However, the midfielder dropped out of their academy after feeling the demands were “too much pressure at such a young age”.

Within weeks he was part of Motherwell’s youth set-up and quickly became “the talk of the steamie” within the coaching staff.

Throughout his rapid development, the decision was made for Miller to train and play with older age groups – something the midfielder feels only enhanced his ability to “take the ball under pressure”.

And away from that, father Lee would even allow his son to train with Falkirk while he was their manager.

Interest from south of the border in the youngster was high, but three years later – six days after his 16th birthday – Miller became the youngest player in Motherwell history when he came on in a League Cup win over Inverness Caledonian Thistle.

While he watched some team-mates leave for academies of bigger clubs, Miller understood the importance of the pathway there for him.

“That’s all I wanted to do, play first-team football, because my dad told me that’s the best way of developing,” Miller said.

That patience and understanding, when it might have been easier to jump at a more lucrative academy contract elsewhere, has paid off big time.

Despite a two-month injury lay-off, Miller enjoyed a stellar breakthrough campaign in 2023-24, playing 32 games in a deep-lying midfield position.

His fearless ability to take the ball from the defence and link play caught the eye, but last season showed there are more strings to his bow.

Deployed in a more advanced midfield role for much of the campaign, he scored four goals and assisted eight, despite missing six Premiership games in early 2025 with a hairline ankle fracture.

He ranked in the league’s top 10 for chance creation even with that spell on the sidelines, won the most fouls of any player in the division and won back possession the second-most, behind Celtic captain Callum McGregor.

“It’s completely different to what I was playing,” Miller said of his more advanced role. “It’s taken time to get used to and I’m reaping the rewards now.”

Even with the pressures of first-team football, Miller’s risk-taking remains.

There are far more occasions when those risks do not pay off, but “there’s no point worrying what people think,” he says. “Just reset, get the ball back, and do it again”.

But where does that mindset come from?

Miller has always been inspired by Kevin de Bruyne, but he feels the loss of his mum, who always wanted him to be a footballer, has been a “massive factor”.

That gallus approach has helped him flourish.

Experienced Motherwell duo Andy Halliday and Paul McGinn have said Miller is the best youngster they have ever played with.

When you consider Halliday trained with a teenage Billy Gilmour at Rangers, plus McGinn’s younger brother is Aston Villa captain John, the comments are “obviously a huge honour”.

Miller proved himself alongside Gilmour and McGinn at international level recently and now has the opportunity to shine on a new stage at club level in Serie A.

One thing’s for certain, he will back himself.

After Miller was included in Steve Clarke’s Scotland squad for the first time, he told the media: “I’m obviously not going to go in and be the best player there, but I believe I maybe could be in a couple of months.