Potter launched his career as a manager in Sweden back in 2011, taking the third-division team Östersunds FK into the Superettan and then winning the Swedish Cup and qualifying for the UEFA Europa League in one of the most extraordinary stories in Swedish football history.
The team went on to score a near-miraculous 2-1 victory against Arsenal at the Emirates stadium in London in February 2018, but was later knocked out of the league.
In his speech, Potter described what an honour it was to be able coach Sweden's national team, telling an interviewer from SVT afterwards that the years he spent in Sweden had stayed with him.
"It was an incredibly special period of my life," he said of his seven years managing Östersund. "It was my home, my twins were born in Sweden. Many friends here. Formed my career as a coach. So it's somewhere I'll always be really grateful to. I love this place."
When he switched to English during the conference he joked that otherwise "your ears are going to bleed if I carry on speaking too much bad Swedish".
Given that he has been out of Sweden for seven years, however, his Swedish is actually pretty decent.
We asked Jenny Crowther, who runs The Local's online Swedish course, to rate the Swedish he used in his one-minute thank you speech.
"I would say that his Swedish is very good," she told us. "He has a British accent when he speaks, but it’s absolutely understandable. His grammar is correct throughout, except towards the end where it becomes a bit more difficult for him."
You can watch the speech below, or if the embedded video is not working, listen with this link, to see if you agree with her.
The only grammatical mistakes Crowther could find, she said, were when Potter said svenska fotboll, meaning "Swedish football", when it should have been just svensk fotboll.
(In Swedish you add an -a ending to adjectives after a definitive article or for plurals, so you'd say engelsk musik for English music, amerikansk mat for American food, but det svenska huset for The Swedish House.)
He also, she said, appeared to struggle to decide whether ära, meaning "honour" should take the particle ett or en.
"det är stor... stor ära för mig," should, she said, have been "det är en stor ära för mig.”
But otherwise, Crowther added, Potter appeared to have Swedish at B2 level in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) or possibly higher. B2 level is considered upper intermediate, and would be good enough to meet future language requirements for citizenship.
"He uses correct sentence structures and even demonstrates more advanced constructions, including a subordinate clause," she said. "He is also able to use words like först och främst, möjlighet, and adjectives like spännande and otroligt, which indicate an upper-level proficiency in Swedish."
As well as starting his speech in Swedish, Potter also took questions in Swedish throughout the press conference, something his Danish predecessor Jon Dahl Tomasson, who was unceremoniously sacked last week after a 0-1 defeat against Kosovo, had irritated Swedish journalists by refusing to do.
You can find out more and join the waiting list for Jenny Crowther's beginner-friendly Swedish course here.
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