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Post by jezzascfc on Nov 22, 2019 18:03:21 GMT
Friday 8 November 2019. Michael O’Neill is at Stoke City’s training ground ahead of being confirmed as the club’s new manager early that afternoon. After being briefed by the caretaker staff about their plans for the next day’s trip to Barnsley, O’Neill is inclined to leave everything alone, even if doing so goes against his better judgment. After all, there is barely any time to do any tactical work.
The idea of playing with three central defenders at Oakwell doesn’t sit particularly well with O’Neill, however, and he wonders whether he should intervene. He discusses what is going through his mind with one of the Stoke board. The easy decision would be to do nothing. But O’Neill decides to go with his instinct.
Determined to get a result before resuming international duties with Northern Ireland, O’Neill changes the lineup and the system. It feels like a bold call, especially as he’s only just stepped into the job and won’t see the players again for another 12 days. What if it goes wrong?
Set up in an attacking 4-3-3 formation, Stoke get off to the perfect start when they go 1-0 up inside eight minutes after Sam Clucas scores a wonder goal from the halfway line. By the time the interval arrives, Lee Gregory has converted a penalty to double Stoke’s lead. Stoke add another two goals in the second half and run out 4-2 winners.
Come the end of the afternoon, Stoke are off the bottom of the Championship table and the travelling supporters are doing the conga behind the goal.
The last time Stoke scored four goals in a league game was December 2015. Or, to put it another way, 157 matches ago. They came from behind to win 4-3 at Goodison Park on that occasion. Two days earlier, Stoke had defeated Manchester United 2-0. Manchester City were beaten by the same scoreline at the start of that month. Chelsea lost 1-0 at Stoke the previous month. This was the Stoke of Marko Arnautovic, Bojan Krkic and Xherdan Shaqiri. Stokealona, as they were briefly known.
Stoke finished ninth that season for the third time in succession and, on the back of a £220 million net spend, became part of the Premier League furniture for a decade. Then, however, the wheels came off.
Stoke slipped into the Championship in 2018 after finishing second from bottom. Two managers in 11-and-a-half years became five in the space of 22 chaotic months. An automatic promotion challenge with the most expensively-assembled squad in the Championship turned into another relegation battle. A model club started to fall apart.
How did it come to this?
Titan Soccer Complex, Florida, 27 July 2016. Stoke are beating Orlando City 2-1 in a pre-season friendly. The clock has just ticked into the final 10 minutes when Charlie Adam starts ball-juggling inside his own penalty area before eventually clearing upfield. Giannelli Imbula is not impressed. He walks around for a bit and lifts his arms in exasperation. Then he breaks into a jog, walks again and, after another minute of not touching the ball, decides he’s had enough.
Stoke are in possession inside the Orlando half but Imbula is making the substitution gesture while walking towards the side of the pitch. His withdrawal is not a matter of debate as far as he’s concerned. Mark Hughes, Stoke’s manager, and Mark Bowen, his assistant, are looking at Imbula and wondering what on earth is going on. The answer turns out to be straightforward: Imbula is substituting himself.
Imbula had joined from Porto on deadline-day in the February of that year for a club-record fee of £18.3 million. He signed a five-and-a-half-year contract and, as those who watched him in the final three months of that 2015-16 season will testify, is clearly a talented player. In fact, Stoke had a chance to move Imbula on for a profit that summer — Juventus wanted to sign him. But Hughes didn’t want to lose the midfielder; he saw a chance to build a team around him.
Then everything imploded. Imbula lost his way so badly the following season that Stoke spent the summer of 2017 trying to find a club to take him off their hands. He seemed unhappy with the style of play at Stoke — something he mentioned to staff — mixed with very few players off the field and could be difficult to manage at times. The incident in Orlando was not the last time Imbula walked off a pitch — he did it in training too.
Imbula joined Toulouse on loan for a year, spent the following season at Rayo Vallecano and is currently with Italian side Lecce. Aged 27, he is still under contract at Stoke for another year and a half. Remarkably, Imbula has not kicked a ball for Stoke in a competitive game for 32 months. His signing, which was seen as something of a coup for the club at the time, is now a symbol for where it all started to go wrong.
To put Hughes’ time at Stoke into context, he delivered three consecutive top-10 finishes across 2014-2016 and during that time there were moments when his teams produced some terrific attacking football.
The 2-0 win over Manchester City in 2015 will stand out for many. Shaqiri was unplayable that day and Manuel Pellegrini’s side were totally outclassed. Stoke could still “mix it” too but there was a clear sense they were evolving into a much more rounded team than the one that revelled in ruffling feathers under Tony Pulis.
To trace the beginning of the downturn on the pitch, you have to go back to the season before relegation. Stoke finished 13th in that campaign, only two points off eighth place, but it felt as though they were drifting for much of the second half of the season. A 2-1 home loss against Chelsea on March 18th was the start of a run of four successive league defeats, which was something that had never happened before under Hughes. Alarm bells were ringing.
Some around the club felt Hughes lost a bit of focus after his third season in charge, almost as if it was hard to know where to take Stoke following those successive ninth-place finishes. “There were signs he was becoming a bit bored,” one source says.
Maybe his head had been turned a little by talk of opportunities elsewhere. Or perhaps, as often happens at clubs when a manager has been in position for a long time, it was just that everything had gone a bit stale.
Either way, with the benefit of hindsight, the summer of 2017 would have been a good time for Hughes and Stoke to part company. Hughes could have walked out with his reputation enhanced after four solid years in the Premier League and Stoke would have been able to freshen things up with a new manager.
That, however, was easier said than done for Stoke, who felt it would have been harsh to move on a manager who was well-liked within the club and still had plenty of credit in the bank at that point. Little did either party know how quickly he would use it up.
For some at Stoke, the seeds for relegation were sown when they reported back that summer. “We called it in pre-season, it was that bad,” Glen Johnson told the BBC earlier this year, alluding to the negative vibe around the dressing room.
Although Johnson’s comments are taken with a large pinch of salt at Stoke, there is no doubt that things changed, off as well as on the field around that time.
One player has told The Athletic there was a growing divide among the squad and genuine concern about who was leaving — three important characters in the shape of Glenn Whelan, Phil Bardsley and Jon Walters — and the type of player coming in.
Stoke had taken the view after the disappointment of the previous season that they needed to re-establish themselves as a top 10 club. Jese Rodriguez, who arrived on loan from Paris Saint-Germain, and Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting, who was seen as a replacement for Arnautovic, were brought in with that in mind.
At the other end of the pitch, Stoke signed Bruno Martins Indi from Porto and, in another one of those transfers that Stoke would come to deeply regret, Kevin Wimmer joined from Spurs in a deal worth £18 million.
Wimmer’s move raised eyebrows. Spurs paid Cologne £4.3 million for him in 2015. Two years and only 13 Premier League starts later and his value had more than quadrupled. “Within three days of training, I knew we’d wasted our money,” one source told The Athletic.
Wimmer was part of a Stoke defence that conceded 50 goals in the first 23 games of the season. The half-century was racked up in a 3-0 defeat at Old Trafford, where Paul Lambert, the new manager, was watching from the director’s box. Wimmer never played for Stoke again.
If there was a post-mortem into Stoke’s relegation in 2018, recruitment would be flagged up as one of the main causes. There was some bad luck along the way that season — poor refereeing decisions and missed penalties are still cursed to this day — and it’s also true that long-serving players underperformed. But the decision to spend the best part of £50 million on Imbula, Wimmer and Saido Berahino across three successive transfer windows, and to bring in Jese on an expensive loan deal, proved calamitous.
Berahino was sacked by Stoke last season. As for Wimmer and Imbula, both are out on loan and there has been next to no interest in either player when it comes to signing them permanently.
“They were bad, costly mistakes, but you can’t condemn the system,” says one Stoke source. “There isn’t a football club that doesn’t have bad signings.”
Although trying to find out exactly who was responsible for the signings of Imbula and Wimmer can easily end up in a game of claim and counter-claim, The Athletic has established the chain of events behind both deals and, more generally, how transfers worked at Stoke at that time.
Roughly once a month, Peter Coates, the chairman, John Coates, the vice-chairman, Tony Scholes, the chief executive, Mark Cartwright, the technical director, and Hughes would get together to discuss the make-up of the squad and the club’s transfer strategy.
In the case of Imbula, the midfielder made a big impression on Hughes when he played against Stoke in a pre-season friendly in 2015. Cartwright rated him highly too. The club carried out extensive background checks on the player, who had excelled at Marseille but struggled with Porto.
Imbula’s ability was not in doubt. But there were major question marks around his character and that was something that was flagged up in reports as well as being public knowledge.
“Giannelli has quality to play for any team in Europe,” Jocelyn Gourvennec, Imbula’s former coach at Guingamp, said in 2015. “His position is all about fighting. Motivation has always been the main issue with him. The question is whether he wants to play or not.”
Stoke knew, in other words, what they were getting into when they pressed ahead with the transfer. It was a lot of money and there was an element of risk but the way that Hughes had not only handled but got the best out of Arnautovic, who arrived at Stoke from Werder Bremen with enough baggage to fill a small plane, convinced the board it was a deal worth doing.
As for Wimmer, Stoke ideally only wanted to sign one permanent central defender in the summer of 2017 and it was initially a choice between Martins Indi and the Spurs player. Hughes’ preference between the two was Wimmer but in the end the Stoke board, with one eye on Kurt Zouma returning to Chelsea on loan the following summer, sanctioned both deals.
The extent to which Stoke watched Wimmer beforehand is a contentious issue, especially as the Austrian rarely played for Spurs. At a fans’ forum in March, during which Scholes and John Coates addressed more than 150 supporters, Wimmer’s name was brought up. Scholes said in response that Stoke typically watch a player 25 times before signing them.
That comment may have been meant in more general terms but it went down badly with Stoke’s scouting department, who claim they played no part in the club’s decision to buy Wimmer.
Sandwiched between the signings of Imbula and Wimmer was Berahino. Stoke’s willingness to pay West Bromwich Albion £12 million for Berahino and give the striker a five-and-a-half year contract was a huge leap of faith.
As with Imbula, they did their homework on Berahino and heard about the good (his exceptional finishing) and the bad (his lack of professionalism). They were told to sign him. And they were told to leave him well alone.
In the end Stoke rolled the dice, hoping t they could find the 15-20 goal-a-season Premier League striker that had proved so elusive, and in this case one who Spurs had tried and failed to sign in 2015, back in the days when Berahino was seen as one of the brightest prospects in English football, and a viable alternative to Harry Kane.
Stoke’s gamble badly backfired. In fact, the transfer was a total disaster. Berahino took 913 days to register his first goal for the club. He drove managers around the bend with his behaviour and his car when he’d been drinking. Stoke decided enough was enough and Berahino’s contract was terminated by mutual consent in August.
When transfers go wrong, supporters and the media want to know who should carry the can. Not surprisingly, hands go up a lot quicker when you’re trying to find out the person responsible for unearthing a gem. “Everybody owns the successes, and you’re an orphan when it fails,” says one Stoke source.
Cartwright, as the technical director, and the man who was charged with overseeing recruitment at Stoke, received plenty of flak from supporters prior to his departure last summer.
In January this year, and at a time when his position was coming under growing scrutiny, the Stoke Sentinel ran an online article asking supporters to rank all 69 transfers since Cartwright arrived at the club.
Survey the Stoke board about Cartwright’s seven-and-a-half years there and some will robustly defend him. Cartwright, they say, was made the fall-guy for some of the high-profile failed transfers that were driven largely by managers.
Others see things in a more rounded way and, because of the nature of that five-man transfer committee that operated in the Premier League days, claim that Cartwright has to take his share of the blame like everyone else.
What is clear is that Cartwright was not a technical director in the true sense. That title means different things to different clubs, and Cartwright certainly had nothing like the level of responsibility that Dan Ashworth has at Brighton or Stuart Webber at Norwich.
In many ways, Cartwright, who had previously been working as an agent for Beswicks, the Stoke-based law firm who have close ties with the club, was a glorified chief scout. He had the ear of the manager and the board and recommended transfer targets to them, but he also picked up players from the airport.
Some players got on well with him and still speak highly of him now. Some managers certainly didn’t. And once that working relationship broke down, it invariably led to problems.
Mark Hughes had a hard-man image on the pitch. As a manager, however, he could not have been more different. Quietly spoken and measured with his thoughts, he was never keen on confrontation. “He would avoid it and get other people to do it,” says one source.
Hughes was a players’ manager. He pushed for the best hotels for players to stay in, encouraged the club to upgrade the training ground facilities to look after the squad even better, and listened when someone said they needed a day off. His default setting was to cut players some slack rather than crack the whip.
That relaxed approach worked really well for at least three years and helped to bring out the best in some players, including a few difficult characters. It became a problem, however, when results started to unravel in the 2017-18 season and the mood in the dressing room shifted.
A lack of discipline off the pitch and poor performances on it was a dangerous mix, and by the middle of December supporters were chanting “Hughes out”. Rather surprisingly, Hughes stayed on for another five matches, until an FA Cup defeat at Coventry in January made his position untenable.
The managerial search that followed turned into a mess. Stoke went after Gary Rowett and Quique Sanchez Flores and held talks with Martin O’Neill. At the end of it all, they appointed Paul Lambert, the only one of the four who was out of work and a choice that did not exactly inspire supporters.
Not long after Lambert took over, he asked eight of the club’s senior players to attend a meeting at the training ground where Scholes would also be present. Lambert wanted to know what the players thought had gone wrong at the club. Recruitment was one of the issues that was flagged up.
Lambert had already identified another of his own: the lack of professionalism within the Stoke squad. He introduced a tough fines system to try to instil some discipline, but even then some players were still blasé about when they reported for training and reluctant to pay up after they were caught.
Exasperated with the problems that he was dealing with away from matches, Lambert ended up cutting several players adrift, including Wimmer and Berahino, who were placed on special fitness regimes to get into shape.
The former Norwich and Aston Villa manager identified Shaqiri as Stoke’s best chance of beating the drop. He went big on Shaqiri. Too big in the view of some players. Nobody at Stoke questioned Shaqiri’s talent, but plenty wondered about his work ethic and desire to be a team player.
“There is a fine line between being mercurial and just doing what you want,” Peter Crouch writes in his new book. “People will point out, rightly, that Shaqiri scored eight goals and had seven assists during the 2017-18 season in a team relegated. But for 85 minutes each weekend he would be making everyone else’s job slightly harder.”
Although a moment of brilliance from Shaqiri gave Stoke hope in the penultimate game of the 2017-18 season, two second-half Crystal Palace goals condemned them to the defeat that ended their 10-year stay in the Premier League.
Afterwards, Jack Butland, who had been in tears on the pitch at the final whistle, said publicly what the players had said privately in that early meeting with Lambert. “There’s been transfers that aren’t even part of the squad for all kinds of reasons, whether it be discipline, whether it be lack of performance. You’ve got to look at that — what decisions are being made and the type of characters.
“Too many of the recent investments, and over the years, are completely unused and that’s unacceptable. So before anyone is signed, and any changes happen, that’s got to be looked at because it’s been farcical really.”
To rub salt into Stoke wounds, Hughes kept Southampton up the following week.
As for Lambert, he won only two of his 15 league games in charge — the first and the last. The Scot hoped that he would get the chance to lead Stoke in the Championship and, less than 24 hours after a final day victory over Swansea, called the players in for one-on-one meetings that started at the crack of dawn.
Lambert wanted to establish how many were interested in playing in the Championship the following season. At least half a dozen made it clear that it was not for them. Five days later, Stoke decided that it was not for Lambert either.
Stoke’s board had only one thing in mind after relegation: getting back to the Premier League at the first opportunity. While Swansea, who had also been relegated in the 2017-18 season after a lengthy stay in the top flight, stripped everything back and had a firesale, Stoke threw a small fortune at a promotion challenge.
They appointed Gary Rowett as manager, convinced that his experience in the Championship with Birmingham City and Derby County would be a huge asset, and spent more than £40 million on players believing — not hoping — that they would regain their Premier League status at the first attempt.
Stoke were immediately installed as promotion favourites by the bookmakers, and some within the club detected an air of overconfidence about how the season would pan out. That soon changed.
A 3-1 defeat at Leeds on the opening day of the season was described by Ryan Shawcross as a “massive wake-up call”. Worse was to come, though. Stoke drew their next two games and were then beaten by Wigan at home in humiliating fashion, losing 3-0 and laying bare the extent of the wider problems at the club.
All but one of the 18 players in the match-day squad that night had Premier League experience and more than half of them had spent the majority of their careers playing at the highest level. Maybe a mid-week fixture against Wigan in the Championship, four matches into a 46-game season, wasn’t such an exciting prospect. “Demotivated” is a word that comes up frequently when people talk about the attitude of the Stoke players in the Championship.
The Stoke board’s desire to go straight back up led to them giving a select group of players new contracts, effectively keeping them on Premier League money. The rest saw their pay slashed, in common with what happens at most relegated clubs. The end result was a two-tier pay system that bred resentment in the dressing room.
The money issues did not start and end there. Stoke decided after losing their Premier League status that there would be no win bonuses paid in the Championship. Their reasoning was that the players were already extremely well-remunerated.
On the face of it, Stoke’s argument seems a perfectly legitimate one, bearing in mind their wage bill is comfortably the highest in the division. Express that view to some players, though, and they will look at you as if you have lost your mind. “Of course it makes a difference,” says one, looking flabbergasted that anyone could think otherwise.
One argument put forward — and it is not without its merits — is that it seems unfair that those players who are nowhere near the first team end up no worse off financially than someone who is in the team every week and makes 46 appearances.
Stoke’s take on this is one of surprise. They sound genuinely amazed that win bonuses have been mentioned as an issue, especially as they claim it has never been raised by a player or a manager to the board with any real strength of feeling.
Back on the pitch, Rowett’s promotion campaign had run aground by the start of January. Stoke were 14th in the table and eight points off the play-offs when the club decided to sack him. The decision felt a little premature to some — Rowett had been in the job for less than eight months and lost only three of his previous 18 matches in charge — but Stoke had paid a price for being indecisive in the Premier League and that came into their thinking here.
Rowett had won only eight league games and there was criticism about the style of football. He had also reacted angrily to the supporters’ calls for Bojan to be restored to the team, pouring fuel on a fire that was already burning well enough. Emotional and frustrated at the time he made those remarks, Rowett would probably reflect now that it was misguided of him to take on the fans.
In the end, though, the single biggest reason for changing the manager was that the team were nowhere near where the board expected them to be and that meant it was time for something new. Something really new.
Several weeks before the inevitable announcement was made, people close to Nathan Jones were telling him that it was time to get out of the Stoke job for his own well-being.
Looking emotionally drained and bordering on ill, Jones was in need of much more than the plasters he wrapped around the nails that he had bitten to the quick, so much so that Stoke players started to pick up on the fact that the manager’s fingers were bleeding.
Jones was the same at his previous club — he is a nervous ball of energy at the best of times — although in many ways that was part of the problem at Stoke. “You’re not at Luton now,” thought the players on too many occasions.
From being bullish and full of life when he was appointed in January last year, Jones sounded like a man desperate to be put out of his misery less than nine months later. He told the Stoke players on at least three separate occasions that he had taken charge of his last game. Loyally, or cruelly in the eyes of some, Stoke’s board allowed Jones to carry on. Maybe they just couldn’t find a replacement.
Remarkably, four days after Jones had given what was essentially a resignation speech in the wake of a chastening 1-0 home defeat against Huddersfield, Stoke picked up their first win of the season, away at Swansea, with the 46-year-old still in charge. That was followed by another victory against Fulham the following week. Had a corner been turned?
No. Stoke lost 1-0 against Sheffield Wednesday and then turned in an abysmal performance at Millwall. Jones, finally, was sacked — bad for his CV but probably good for his health. “Relieved” is the first thought that springs to mind for people at Stoke when they are asked how they think Jones felt at the time.
All of which is totally understandable in the circumstances, of course, but also hard to reconcile with the image of the man who spoke with such conviction, intensity and confidence at the bet365 Stadium when he was presented to the media in January.
Back then, Jones vowed that any sceptical Stoke players would come to realise that his work is “top-end” and “defies where I’ve come from”. Asked about a message for the supporters, he added: “I can promise you that my staff will give them a team that they can be proud of. I guarantee it.”
Those who know how Stoke operate at boardroom level will need no telling that Jones was anything but a routine appointment for them. From Pulis to Hughes to Lambert to Rowett, experience has always been key for the board, especially Peter Coates.
Jones, in contrast, had managed only one club before Stoke and never higher than League One. Stoke were stepping a long way out of their comfort zone and they knew it. They sought references from other clubs where Jones had worked as a coach — the feedback was excellent — but also went a step further with their due diligence.
The Athletic has learned that Stoke commissioned an outside recruitment agency to put together a comprehensive statistical analysis on the Welshman that extended well beyond highlighting that he had a 51 per cent win ratio at Luton. The numbers that came back only served to strengthen Jones’ case.
After sitting down with the Welshman for talks, the board were won over. Jones’ self-belief about his ability to deliver success was unwavering and his methods were persuasive too. He came across as absolutely certain that he would turn Stoke around and bring success.
From a tactical point of view, the diamond was central to his approach. Within a short time, however, it was circles — circles that he was going around in to try and find a solution to the mess.
Jones, in the view of the Stoke board, could not have worked any harder. Leaving aside the tactics and the coaching, he tried everything with the players, from being nice to being nasty, from giving them more time with their families to getting them in every day. All the while he chopped and changed the line-up. The end result, however, was nearly always the same. His messages, for whatever reason, never got through.
“It’s one of two things,” one of Jones’ close friends told The Athletic. “Either they [the players] don’t give a fuck and just wanna play for themselves. Or they just didn’t respect what he was saying enough to believe it would work.
“You speak to the Luton boys and they would say: ‘If Nathan before a game brought in a pile of candles and said, ‘Eat them and we will win,’ we would have done it.’ Every single thing they worked on came off. If Jones said to play Jack Stacey in behind the opposition left-back, because he switches off, then he’s gonna whizz it across the face of goal and someone will tap it in, it’d be 2-0 and both goals scored as he said. So once it kept happening, the attitude was ‘Whatever he says we’re gonna do’.”
There were fundamental differences between Stoke and Luton, though. Jones was taking the lower-league players at Luton on a journey with him, whereas the majority of the Stoke squad had already been where he wanted to go.
Some players inexplicably lost their form — Jack Butland went through a torrid time — while others were disillusioned. A malaise had set in and it was going to take a lot more than motivational messages on walls and an obsession with diamonds to get players to buy into Jones’ way of working.
On top of everything else was the money factor. Luton’s weekly wage bill for the entire squad was £115,000. Stoke, in comparison, had eight players earning more than £40,000 a week when Jones took over. ‘How do you motivate millionaires?’ was a question that Jones would come to ponder.
“It’s not easy,” admits one Stoke source. “But that’s your job. He has to find a way. Maybe his man-management skills weren’t up to it yet.”
Dealing with some of the personalities in that Stoke dressing room was never going to be easy but maybe Jones didn’t help himself at times. Some players got the impression in one-on-one meetings that Jones was telling them what they wanted to hear, rather than what he intended to do, and once those two things don’t tally up, it’s always going to be a problem for any manager. The overriding feeling come the end was that Jones was out of his depth.
When the Sunday Times published their rich list for 2019, the Coates family had climbed into the top 20 for the first time, after adding £1.1 billion to their net worth last year. “Adding” is the key word in that sentence. The family is now worth £6.865 billion. Or at least that was the case in May.
It seems safe to assume that they are now through the £7 billion barrier, fuelled by the success of bet365, the online betting company which owns Stoke City and is run by Denise Coates, who was the world’s highest-paid female executive last year (£265 million, for the record).
Peter, Denise’s father, is the Stoke chairman. John, her brother, is the club’s vice-chairman and joint chief executive of bet365, where he has an office next door to Peter at the company’s headquarters in Stoke. Richard Smith, Denise’s husband, is a director at bet365 and the football club. Stoke City means something special to them, in particular Peter and John, who are lifelong fans.
Peter was hounded out as Stoke chairman in his first spell but returned in 2006, when the Coates family paid £10 million for the club and reappointed Tony Pulis as manager in what proved to be an inspired move. Within two years, Stoke were promoted to the Premier League, back in the top flight for the first time since 1985.
As the youngest of 14 children and the son of a miner who served in the first world-war, Peter has never forgotten his working-class roots. He has old-fashioned values and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone in football who says a bad word about him — that includes the managers he has sacked.
Aged 81, Peter has taken a step back at Stoke in recent years and his son has taken on a more hands-on role, so much so that some would claim that John is running the club every bit as much as Tony Scholes, the chief executive, these days.
That is not to say Peter’s passion for Stoke has waned in any way. He rarely misses a match and is often seen at the training ground, where he has lunch in the canteen with staff and players every Friday. John usually drops by a couple of times a week too.
In an era when so many owners are either invisible or totally detached from their football clubs, the Coates family are a throwback. They also don’t see Stoke City as a company that exists on a balance sheet. “Me and my family, we don’t look at Stoke as a business,” Peter told The Guardian in an interview four years ago. “For us it’s something important for the area and something we want to do.”
While their decisions are clearly made with all the best intentions and no shortage of money has been invested along the way, that obviously doesn’t mean they are getting everything right or spending their cash wisely.
Yet in the eyes of Stoke’s owners, the good comfortably outweighs the bad. For example, their response to any criticism would be to point out that after Stoke won promotion in 2008, the only other clubs to spend the next 10 seasons in the Premier League were the traditional big six and Everton. They also reference the fact that Stoke were never in serious danger of being relegated until the season they went down.
The high-profile transfer flops that have been mentioned are hard to gloss over. Although it is also true plenty of other Premier League clubs, past and present, have got things badly wrong in the transfer market at times. Some have got away with it. Others, like Stoke, haven’t.
Where the spotlight is much less forgiving for Stoke is specifically in relation to the last couple of years, when it feels as though the club have made one bad decision after another. When that kind of thing happens supporters start to lose confidence and question the roles and accountability of everyone involved.
Stoke, after all, have had five different managers during that period. They have been relegated from the Premier League, finished 16th in the Championship and are currently second from bottom. On top of that they have spent more than £60 million on 20 players across the last three windows, and O’Neill has already been told he will be able to make more signings in January.
It seems legitimate to ask whether there is a strategy to any of this? At what point do Stoke make signings that are for the club as much as for the manager who is in place at the time? And would it not be a good idea to bring in a technical director with football expertise and a proven track record to oversee the whole process?
Stoke did make an appointment in September. They brought in Phil Chapple as head of first-team recruitment. Chapple has plenty of experience with Brighton, Fulham and Charlton, where he worked with Jones, who recommended him for the role. “He’s someone whose judgement I trust implicitly,” said Jones, six weeks before he was sacked.
After years of getting Northern Ireland to punch above their weight, Michael O’Neill has now taken over a group of players at club level who have been specialising in doing the total opposite.
How things pan out on and off the pitch over the next 18 months will be fascinating to watch. Stoke know that if they fail to win promotion, they face a huge challenge to comply with the EFL’s profit and sustainability rules, which stipulate that clubs are not permitted to make losses of more than £39 million over a three-year period.
Stoke have yet to post their financial results for their first campaign in the Championship but it is hard to believe the numbers will make for good reading. They recorded a pre-tax loss of £30.1 million for their last season in the Premier League.
For Stoke, who clearly have the financial wherewithal to carry on spending without jeopardising the long-term future of the club, the EFL’s regulations are a major source of frustration.
They believe a one-size-fits-all approach to finances is unfair and are concerned that, as things stand, the gap between the Premier League and the Championship will only widen when it comes to the quality of the football.
Not that Stoke should be too worried about that right now. It is a measure of how far they have fallen that staying out of the third tier, rather than getting back into the Premier League, is the first objective for O’Neill.
Four goals and the conga at Barnsley was at least a good way to start.
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