  A thermal potential can be defined to facilitate understanding the behavior
of quarkonia in quark-gluon plasma. A nonperturbative evaluation of this
potential from lattice QCD is difficult, as it involves real-time corelation
function, and has often involved the use of Bayesian analysis, with its
associated systematics. In this work we show that using the properties of the
static quarkonia thermal correlation functions, one can directly extract a
thermal potential for quarkonia from Euclidean Wilson loop data. This leads to
a controlled extraction, and allows us to judge the suitability of various
model potentials. We also discuss the phenomenology of quarkonia in the gluonic
plasma.
