>mg: why the marketing spin?
See below
>From a very young age, teachers could see that the boy had the potential to ...(achieve great things,
That makes all the difference: if you state what kind of potential they could see, then your sentence has concrete meaning. If you only say "I see potential in him", the meaning is merely "he may go on to achieve something in some area" unless the context specifies the 'some' (eg "He can hardly tell the stick from the puck now, but I see potential...") [note that it is not a soccer themed example]