Viktor Gyokeres has not stopped scoring for Sweden. According to Graham Potter’s interview with The Independent, published by Lawrence Ostlere on 11 November, the striker has 10 goals in 11 games under the new head coach and has scored in each of Sweden’s first four Nations League fixtures.
That record is why the English coach brushed off the ongoing debate about his minutes at the Emirates.
“It doesn’t really matter, is the truth, because he’s done brilliant for us when he’s been playing every week, and he’s done brilliant for us when he hasn’t been,” Potter told The Independent.
Gyokeres scored a hat-trick against Ukraine in the World Cup play-off semi-final and then the late winner against Poland that sent Sweden to the finals. At the tournament itself, he was on the scoresheet in the group stage, including in the 5-1 win against Tunisia that opened Sweden’s campaign.
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The France loss Potter still turns over
The tournament ended at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey with a 3-0 defeat to France in the round of 32 on 30 June. What the 51-year-old coach regrets is not the elimination itself but the way his team went about it.
He told The Independent that Sweden had been more proactive in their 5-1 group defeat to the Netherlands than in the knockout against France, and that he would rather lose the way his side had lost to the Dutch.
Potter pointed to the absences that shaped that France night: Alexander Isak was not firing after a stop-start club season at Liverpool, Dejan Kulusevski was still out injured, and first-choice centre-back Isak Hien was unavailable. The learning point, he said, was that his team had not been able to impose themselves on France the way he wanted.
The bubble, and then it is gone
Potter also described the emotional whiplash of a short tournament run, telling The Independent that for about a week after the France game he felt “a bit of an empty state” and comparing a World Cup squad to a bubble in which players and staff eat, sleep and work together until the moment it ends.
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He is now four months out from that France night and in the middle of a rebuild in Nations League B. Sweden sit top of Group 4 with 10 points from four games, two points clear of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with Poland third and Romania winless at the bottom. The group winner goes up to League A for 2028-29.
Kulusevski and Anthony Elanga have both been recalled to the squad for this window, with Kulusevski returning for the first time in two years after a long knee layoff at Tottenham.
Östersund, and a wife who cried every day
Potter’s attachment to Sweden runs through his seven years at Östersunds FK, the fourth-tier club he joined at 35 with a master’s degree in leadership from Leeds Metropolitan University and little else. Two of his sons, twins Sam and Theo, were born there.
He told The Independent that his wife had “cried every day for months” after the family landed in January temperatures around minus 20, and that it had not been like moving to Monaco. It is also, he said, the best thing they ever did.
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Sweden host Bosnia and Herzegovina at Strawberry Arena in Solna on Saturday, 14 November at 8.45pm local time, before travelling to Tarczyński Arena in Wrocław to face Poland three days later, also at 8.45pm local time. A win over Bosnia would put promotion to League A within touching distance.
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