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Post by spitshaw on Aug 18, 2020 13:25:27 GMT
Last Thursday, a group of Stoke City players got together and watched the Champions League quarter-final tie between Paris Saint-Germain and Atalanta.
There was an extra layer of interest for those able to call Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting a former team-mate. He might have only been a Stoke player for one season but he left a lasting impression on a club that got relegated from the Premier League in 2017-18.
Depending on who you speak to, Choupo-Moting either didn’t care about Stoke at all or was actually a ray of sunshine in a campaign that ended in misery.
When the 79th-minute substitute struck the winner for PSG with only moments remaining — having already assisted their equaliser — one Stoke player sitting in front of the TV apparently shook his head and muttered to himself, “Sod’s law…”
While Stoke just about stopped themselves from dropping into League One last month, Choupo-Moting is heading in the opposite direction.
Should he make it off the substitute’s bench tonight against RB Leipzig, it will mean that the relegated Stoke squad of 2017-18 included players who have featured in the 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2019 and 2020 Champions League semi-finals; a revelation brought to light on Twitter by the journalist Richard Jolly.
How, then, did a club once associated with stability end up in such a position? Perhaps it is telling when you realise that the maverick Marko Arnautovic could have been an eighth member of that particular Stoke squad to feature in a Champions League semi-final. That is had he not been so desperate to get away from Stoke in the summer of 2017 and, equally, been absent when Inter Milan steered their way through the latter stages of European football’s most coveted prize in 2010. Jose Mourinho, Inter’s manager at the time, later explained why, describing Arnautovic as “a fantastic person” but nevertheless, someone “with the attitude of a child…”
Step forward Stoke’s “magnificent” seven, featuring:
The pint-sized striker who brought Carles Puyol to the training ground as his agent to negotiate a new contract
The future Premier League and Champions League winner who spent 20 minutes arguing with his brother after being subbed
The forward whom Stoke had tracked since the age of 16 and who one scout believed had the potential to become the next Cristiano Ronaldo
Stoke were relegated with Paul Lambert in charge but it was a team constructed by his predecessor. All but one of the Champions League semi-finalists were bought by Mark Hughes.
The first arrival came under Tony Pulis in 2011 and Peter Coates, Stoke’s chairman and owner, thinks he proved to be the best of the recruits. “Peter Crouch was an excellent player for us,” he tells The Athletic. “Never let you down. Always played for you. Never moaned. And was good around the club.”
Crouch had made it to the Champions League semi-final with Liverpool in 2007. Though he was a big signing, he was also one of the least glamorous and proof that technical forwards could flourish under Tony Pulis — as long as you were 6ft 7in.
(Photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Hughes was able to take Stoke higher up the league table than Pulis but after three ninth-placed finishes, the conversations with Coates about how the club could push on to the next level increased.
Stoke’s identity under Pulis was a throwback to a lost age: this was a side with hulking central defenders at full-back, energetic full-backs in central midfield and powerful centre-forwards positioned on the wing. Opponents would try to avoid conceding free kicks, corners and throw-ins. Hughes had brought in more skilful attacking players such as Bojan Krkic and Xherdan Shaqiri and had taken confidence from their early success. He wanted to build more of a possession-based team.
Hughes made it clear to Coates that the club needed to let go of players that had served both him and Pulis well. This eventually led to the departures of Jonathan Walters, Glenn Whelan and Phil Bardsley. “We replaced them with, in theory, better players,” Coates says. “But we weren’t so effective. We lost that commitment.”
In his earliest weeks as manager, Hughes told the club’s recruitment staff that he wanted a ball-playing central defender because the established pairing of Ryan Shawcross and Marc Wilson did not possess the qualities he was looking for.
Senior scout Kevin Cruickshank suggested Marc Muniesa from Barcelona. At the time, it was suggested that Hughes — a former Barcelona player — was using old links to help bring the Catalan to Staffordshire but, in reality, some inside the club felt Hughes’ connections at the Camp Nou were overstated.
Muniesa was a good professional and could play in both full-back positions but Hughes came to realise that he did not possess the necessary level of speed or endurance to play every week. Yet his arrival gave Stoke a reference when they attempted to sign other star players. Muniesa had been a team-mate of Bojan and Ibrahim Afellay at Barcelona — both Champions League winners. In 2014, Bojan signed for Stoke and a year later Afellay joined him. After Stoke initially failed to receive direct feedback from one agent claiming to represent Bojan, Muniesa contacted his former team-mate on his behalf to ascertain the correct intermediary and the deal was concluded within a week.
“Bojan became the darling of the crowd, but then he got a bad injury and he was never the same player,” says Coates, who can remember the awkwardness after his return to the squad when the Stoke crowd called for his name but Hughes would not bring him on. “He captured their imagination. You got the odd little cameo from him but he became a luxury player.”
Hughes had decided to sign Bojan over a pint of lager with Cruickshank and Mark Cartwright, the club’s technical director. The conversation was flowing casually when Hughes asked Cruickshank where he’d been that weekend and it turned out he’d seen Bojan play for Ajax in Holland and, despite a few rough years after leaving Barcelona, it was clear to Cruickshank that he’d not lost any of his talent.
“The mood at the club began to change once he joined,” says one of the squad’s old guard, who liked Bojan both as a player and a person. “Suddenly we had superstar quality mixed with lads who’d been at the club in the Championship all those years before. It was exciting but none of us was totally sure it would all work out.”
Bojan did so well in those early days that Jose Mourinho, back at Chelsea, would set up his team to stop him, telling Bojan on the field afterwards that he had used Nemanja Matic and John Obi Mikel to negate his threat. While Liverpool thought about signing him during Brendan Rodgers’ spell in charge, Everton’s fans thought he was so dangerous that they used lasers to try and distract him. Before he got injured, Vicente del Bosque considered giving Bojan a second cap for Spain, some six or seven years after his first. When he changed representatives, his new agent Carles Puyol turned up at Stoke’s training ground to discuss terms over a new contract. One club insider says, “everyone was a bit starstruck that day”.
Bojan scoring against Arsenal in December 2014 (Photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Hughes had tried to sign him at Manchester City and Fulham. For the first time in his career, Bojan felt truly appreciated. Hughes made him feel confident, fitter and stronger. In his first three months, he put on 3kg of muscle and when Arsenal found themselves 3-0 down at Stoke before half-time in December 2014, the source of the visiting team’s destruction had been Bojan. “We felt like we could take on the entire world,” says one of the club’s backroom staff from the period, who then describes the “horrible night” at Rochdale barely a month later when Bojan ruptured his ACL — an injury that curtailed his debut season. “The injury really killed him. It became a mental block with him. It was another setback in his career when he thought, ‘How can I come back from this?’”
There were other moments of light: playing exceptionally in victories over Manchester City and Manchester United, as well as a key role in a 4-3 win at Everton. This kept his stock sky-high among supporters. Managers who did not think along the same lines proved unpopular. After Hughes had gone, Gary Rowett told fans that the club “had to move forward” after they called for him to introduce the forward at a game at Bolton. Such comments were packaged in an uncomfortable press conference where he insisted they should blame him and not the players for bad results. A few weeks later, he was sacked.
Locally, at least, the team had a new name: “Stokealona.” In the summer of 2015, Afellay became the third former Barca player to move to Staffordshire. The Dutch winger also had a history with ACL injuries but he remained, according to a former member of the club’s recruitment department, “a dynamic player who wanted to move the ball at pace high up the pitch”.
“He did not suffer fools,” says another source who believes some players mistook his demanding personality for arrogance and that really, he remained a “top, top professional”.
Before Stoke’s relegation season, Afellay’s influence on the pitch diminished due to his lack of availability. In Stoke’s relegation season, he was banned from the training ground for allegedly telling American full-back Geoff Cameron what he thought of his passing abilities. One former staff member says: “If Ibby thought you were crap, he would tell you. It was A or B with Ibby and he was very direct.”
“Ibrahim was a decent lad but we couldn’t afford to carry anyone in a relegation fight,” says a team-mate from the squad of the doomed 2017-18 campaign. “The same goes for Shaq…”
Shaqiri had arrived that same summer as Afellay. Though he was not as popular as Bojan, he became the team’s main source of inspiration. The club had attempted to sign him six months earlier and had agreed terms with Bayern Munich only for Shaqiri to decide to go to Inter Milan. However, Hughes’ meeting with the player clearly had an impact and, just like Bojan, the persistence paid off down the line.
Under Hughes, Stoke were just about to peak: finishing ninth again in the league and reaching a League Cup semi-final. “With all these players, we took them from clubs with a winning culture,” says another significantly placed club source. “There were criticisms of Shaq over the defensive side of his game but when he had the ball, he could change a game for us.”
Shaqiri scores a free kick against Hull City (Photo: Nigel Roddis/Getty Images)
In one of his first training sessions, Shaqiri chipped Jack Butland from 20 yards and all of the players recognised Stoke had signed a seriously talented footballer. Yet some inside the club think his brother and agent was a problem because he fed the idea that he was a better player than Stoke’s level. In the middle of one game, when an injury to Shaqiri led to an early substitution, he stormed up to his family’s suite in the main stand and proceeded to have a family argument that lasted the remaining 20 or so minutes of the first half. He’d left the ground before the end of the game.
The year Stoke went down, there was a fourth attacking midfield option in Jese, a Spanish winger who had reached the Champions League semi-finals in each of the previous two seasons with Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain. “Another disaster, though he could play,” says a boardroom figure. “That’s the frustration — these guys have got talent, but they weren’t suited to our environment. It didn’t turn out to be what they thought it was. And they weren’t scrappers.”
On another occasion, Jese was on the bench and Stoke had used all three substitutes. He returned to the dressing room before deciding to drive home before the end of the game. When Lambert came in and increased fines for players, latecomers would get docked 25 per cent of their weekly wage and Jese was regularly punished for his tardiness.
One member of Stoke’s scouting department had watched him since the age of 16 and one scout noted in his first written report that he believed Jese had the potential to become the next Cristiano Ronaldo. Yet it felt like he did not have the desire to back up that promise. Stoke was a culture shock. Having lived in Madrid and Paris, he moved into Wychwood Park, just outside of the town centre, and he would do his shopping at an Asda megastore in Crewe. Some club figures wonder whether he would have fared better had he joined two years earlier when the team was full of confidence. There was also sympathy because one of his children was ill back in Gran Canaria and this made it harder for him to focus.
(Photo: Robbie Jay Barratt/AMA/West Bromwich Albion FC via Getty Images)
Hughes liked the squad to manage itself and, for the first three years of his reign, the approach worked. He would make the big decisions, Mark Bowen and Eddie Niedzwiecki did the coaching and then it was down to his captain Shawcross to run the dressing room. When his friends were there, it was fine. When his power lessened, the dressing room could not manage itself any more.
By 2017, senior figures had totally given up on putting their arm around players and the mood had turned, with cliques forming. The English and Irish players stuck together, along with Cameron, while the French-speakers did the same. Wilson, Whelan, Walters and Bardsley all left, while Shawcross no longer had the presence of a captain because his performances had dipped so drastically. “You could see their power in the dressing room diminishing every year as one more of those older guys went out,” says a senior source. Charlie Adam was frustrated and very vocal in his criticism of certain players. Afellay, “typically Dutch and direct” according to one source, was the same.
It is said that Jese was the hardest work but Glen Johnson was a problem for Hughes as well. Of all of the Champions League semi-finalists, Stoke had only paid a fee for Shaqiri. Johnson was another free, from Liverpool, but in contract negotiations it was agreed that he could live in London and travel north by train with Peter Crouch for training sessions, only staying near Stoke for a couple of nights a week. A different source, it should be said, described Johnson as an “excellent professional”.
Johnson in action for Stoke against Memphis Depay, then with United but now part of the Lyon side in this year’s Champions League semi-finals (Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
Though he did well in his first season, Johnson picked up a knee injury in his second and that is when he and Hughes fell out. Coaching staff and club management questioned whether he really wanted to be at Stoke — “I’d rather have had Bardsley,” says one senior source, and in the relegation season, Johnson played just nine league games.
Darren Fletcher, another British player with vast experience and three Champions League semi-finals to his name with Manchester United, managed 27 appearances but it was quickly viewed that his legs had gone. As a midfielder, this had a major impact on the energy of the whole team. Fletcher’s professionalism in the dressing room was not in doubt, but his influence on the pitch was reflected in the decision to spend £14 million on Badou Ndiaye from Galatasaray five months after his arrival. Some recruitment figures did harbour concerns over Fletcher’s physical suitability before he was signed but his character and reputation took precedence.
(Photo: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)
Arnautovic, meanwhile, did not feature in the Champions League semi-finals but does have a winners’ medal from Inter Milan. At £2 million, he was a steal but the club’s initial due diligence brought reports of a “problem child”, while cuttings from German newspapers were not complimentary. Stoke scouts had reports on him from as far back as 2008.
Hughes and Cartwright flew to Germany, where they took Arnautovic for dinner and they were impressed by his attitude. He had recently been married and insisted his boyish days were over and he wanted to knuckle down. Indeed, he even admitted to certain misdeeds the Stoke pair had not previously been aware of. One training ground source says: “He was one who flitted between the cliques. His shoulders were back, his chest was out and he was a Zlatan-esque figure. We had very few problems with Arnie.”
Of all of the Champions League semi-finalists, only two have gone on to achieve better things after leaving Stoke. Shaqiri might not play very often for Liverpool but he has become a Champions League and Premier League winner, having also appeared in the 2013 Champions League semi-finals with Bayern. Last week, Choupo-Moting fired Paris Saint-Germain into their first European semi-final since the mid-1990s.
Scouts and the recruitment team were at the centre of that deal, having watched him at Mainz and Schalke. Stoke did a lot of scouting in Germany and he was thought to be experienced and powerful enough to be a success in England. The feedback on his character was good. Team-mates agree that he and another loanee Kurt Zouma brightened up the training ground, introducing themselves to the squad by going around the canteen and shaking everyone’s hand.
Yet Choupo-Moting rubbed up the fans the wrong way, using social media after defeats as if they had never happened. Different sources have different opinions on him. One senior club source describes him as a skilful player who found himself in a situation completely alien to him. He had substance in terms of his ability, “but that season we needed a Jon Walters mentality rather than a Maxim Choupo-Moting mentality”.
(Photo: David Rogers/Getty Images)
When Choupo-Moting arrived at the club he made it clear that he’d see his contract out and then leave, forming the impression that he was cashing in on free transfers. Yet another source says “he really cared”, insisting that if it wasn’t for his and Zouma’s positivity in 2017-18, “it would have been horrific”.
He would score five goals and register five assists for a relegated team before signing at PSG for Thomas Tuchel, a former coach at Mainz. “Sometimes these guys want to play in the Premier League, they come to a club like Stoke, it isn’t what they think, and it hasn’t got the glamour and the profile that they like to have, and then they almost wish they weren’t there,” Coates concludes. “He was a terrific player, but they’ve got to want to play for you.”
Oh, the players Stoke may have had. In the summer of 2013 when Bojan arrived, there were so many targets. Alexandre Lacazette was the headline name. There was Demarai Gray, Gerard Deufoleu, Joaquin Correa, Wissam Ben Yedder and Manuel Lanzini…
By 2016, the scouting list remained an impressive one and at the top of it was Lautaro Martinez, now of Inter, and possibly soon of Barcelona. Chief scout Cruickshank flew to Buenos Aires on four occasions and met with the brothers of former Birmingham striker Mauro Zarate, who represented Maxi Romero (currently at PSV) as well as Martinez.
Cruickshank was encouraged but left Argentina a frustrated man when, having landed in South America, he was told that Martinez had spoken to Diego Simeone and his preferred choice of destination was now Atletico Madrid. Even if the move to Spain was not finalised — the player joined Inter instead — it was an early blow for the travelling Stoke scout. Cruickshank even met Martinez’s parents at a Racing Club game where he spoke pidgin Spanish but the message coming back was not a positive one. Though the Zarate brothers helped with interpreting on the deals for Martinez and Romero, Cruickshank was left alone with Romero and they were left to communicate using Google Translate. Ultimately, Stoke were cautious about buying from Argentina, where they had only limited opportunities to view players live before signing them.
In the case of Lacazette, an agent is understood to have told Stoke’s recruitment team that a deal to sign the striker from Lyon might be possible. It even reached the stage where scouts had prepared a presentation for Hughes and the board, only for the club to quickly discover from Lyon that the deal would not be happening. He later joined Arsenal instead.
There were other near misses. Stoke nearly had Adama Traore through the door only for Aston Villa to blow them out of the water with a higher wage offer. Remarkably, the deal was so advanced that Stoke’s Catalan contingent of Moha El Ouriachi, Muniesa and Bojan even dined with Traore as Stoke thought they had smoothed over a deal. He had impressed scouts in a reserve-team clasico against Real Madrid and Hughes even flew out to watch him live. Curiously, Hughes was more impressed on the day by Sandro Ramirez, who ended up signing for Everton but was watched closely by Stoke.
Sergi Roberto, who started in Barcelona’s 8-2 defeat to Bayern Munich on Friday night, was another one, where Stoke met the player’s agent to discuss a move but it did not go beyond that point. The same was true of Marc Bartra. Deulofeu, meanwhile, came into the picture because his agent, Gines Carvajal, had taken Muniesa and Jese to the club. Stoke had clear lines of communication by that point with leading agents in Spain.
Four or five years later, they are swimming in a very different talent pool.
(Main image designed for The Athletic by Tom Slator)
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) but then we did have some very talented players going forward.
