Today’s third-round game at fellow Premier League side Manchester City may be adding to a very crowded fixture schedule, but winning is a habit and our head coach does not see this knockout cup competition as a barrier to success elsewhere.

Indeed he uses the example of City who have won the League Cup in six of the past nine seasons as an example. And while Chelsea have won a healthy amount of trophies ourselves in the recent past, Potter looks at the Premier League standings these past few years as the benchmark for truly competing on all fronts.

• Watch plenty from Potter's conference

• Load up on pre-match facts

• Premier League release news of next season

Focusing on winning in the Carabao Cup, our head coach has this to say:

‘It can help you get to where you want to get to, which is to be a top team at the very top of the Premier League which competes for every single title that you can.

‘If you look historically at the points that Chelsea have got, we're not there at the moment, but that's why we're here, that's what we want to try to do - we want to move towards that direction. If you look at Manchester City, they don’t take this competition lightly. They want to win, and all the top teams have that same mentality.

‘Money and resources of course you need, but you need an environment, you need a culture, you need a mentality, you need an idea that everyone's buying into it and everyone has to be together on it, and you can't buy that. That's work. That's the process. That's the pain.

‘If it was just money then that'd be quite simple. When you look at the success Manchester City have had and the success that Liverpool have had, it's not just about money. It's about other stuff.’

Potter uses the example of when he took over Brighton in the bottom three of the Premier League table as showing that a learning curve is needed.

‘You know football is emotion, it's about results and therefore that overrides everything, but the coaching processes is something that gets better with time,’ he explains, ‘because you go through the ups and downs and then you understand more about this person, who can come with us, who maybe is not on the right path with us together, how you can help them, how they can help you.

‘At Brighton we were trying to change the playing style and at the bottom of the Premier League you get all the narratives that say you can't do that, you need to fight, you have to do this and that.

‘So you have to go through a process of convincing the players, working with the players, developing and changing the players. And over time the team progresses and then the team functions and everything's okay.

‘You have to go through a bit of a pain to get to that point. It'd be wrong of me to say anything else. There’s no shortcut to it in my experience.’