IT’S YET ANOTHER FRESH START AS JON AND SCHUEY MOULD POTTERS
STOKE City have had more facelifts than Katie Price in the last six years. Now they are on yet another one.
The Potters were FA Cup finalists and a top half Premier League club until relegated six years ago today.
They’ve finished in the bottom half of the Championship every season since and relegation rather than promotion has been the buzz word.
The season that came to an end yesterday has just been an extension of that gloom.
Stoke managed to stay in the Championship after falling into the relegation zone in February with two crucial wins over Plymouth (3-0 at home) and Southampton (1-0 away).
It was a close run thing, giving latest manager Steven Schumacher one game to sit back and sieve through who he wants to keep and who is going out of 30 players.
Stoke are hitting repeat yet again.
Alex Neil, made manager in August 2022, binned players and promised a new era. He signed 19 in what was billed a “once in a lifetime rebuild”.
He was binned himself in December with 11 defeats in 20 games and Stoke two points from the relegation zone.
Technical director Ricky Martin was then sacked in February as that makeover was in need of new surgery.
Now it’s Schumacher and Jon Walters, who served a sixweek trial in place of Martin, impressed, and is now sporting director with a poisoned chalice to get rid of.
Schumacher was wobbling after only three months as Stoke boss with three victories in 12 games and Stoke deeply in the relegation scrap.
But those two key wins, with one of them ironically against his old club Argyle, dumping the relegation pressure on them, saw Schumacher through and Stoke’s latest dynamic duo still in situ.
After Tony Pulis took Stoke to the FA Cup final and into European football 11 years ago, the Potters became serial top half finishers in the Premier League under Mark Hughes.
He had them ninth three seasons on the trot but couldn’t sustain it and was booted out
as relegation fear bit. The outcome was a reality check as Stoke churned through Paul Lambert, Gary Rowett, Nathan Jones, Michael O’Neill and Neil in four years.
After Hughes was sacked, Lambert was hired to save them. He didn’t. Rowett was taken from Derby and given big chunks of parachute money to take Stoke back at the first attempt. He couldn’t.
Passion
Jones was brought in to fire the club up again, get some Welsh passion in there. He couldn’t.
O’Neill was hired with at least one hand tied behind his back. Get rid of the big- earning players hanging on from the Premier League days and then get us up, he was told.
The books balanced a bit better, but he couldn’t get them up.
Neil promised a revolution, a new playing staff, new playing style, new attitude. He couldn’t do it.
What all that has cost in hiring, firing, broken master plans and a public now back to where it was pre-Pulis, supporting a club that has been second class for so long on the pitch, can be judged in Stoke City’s latest accounts.
The club’s debt is down from £170m to £105m. Prior to that it was £212m, reduced to £120m. The constant factor is the Coates family. Peter Coates’ son, John, runs the club and thankfully there’s a Potters load of money to keep turning to.
John’s sister Denise, for instance, who runs bet365, paid herself £221m last year and has £1b in her purse from the last four years. There is no bank debt. It is all down to the bank of Coates. But John Coates needs to get a more solid hand on the tiller. There were players O’Neill inherited who were nowhere near the team earning £200,000 a week between them.
Players on big contracts but not wanted are difficult to move but with the ogre of Financial Fair
Play raising its head, it was O’Neill’s brief to do just that.
He had to launch a major rebuilding programme with a cheaper player.
Neil then took that on but the numbers mounted again with 35 players on the books and little happening on the pitch.
Neil and Martin signed eight wingers for £9m and missed out on Jaden Philogene, who went to Hull for £5m.
Upgrades
Stoke have signed 41 players over the last six summers looking for a grip on anything above halfway but they still need upgrades on goalkeeper, centre-half, striker and winger.
By the time the current loans are off back to their clubs this week, Stoke will have 16 senior players left. There are about ten youngsters to have a look at and Walters isn’t going to have much of a summer holiday.
This is Stoke makeover No.5 and Walters, 40, as he was as a player, busy, encouraging and looking to win, is very aware of the responsibility he has to make it work this time.
His overall brief is to bring the club together with his personality and drive.
“From the amount of clubs I’ve been around, visited, researched and seen different roles, myself and John think this title, sporting director, resonates with me the most and the remit at this club. The title fits,” he says.
“We know what it entails, it’s right across every department, a huge responsibility.”
Walters was a big success as a Stoke player, scoring twice in their 5-0 FA Cup semi-final win over Bolton, losing in the final 1-0 to Manchester City, and playing in Europe with the Potters.
Over 226 games and 43 goals from 2010 to 2017, he got to know the club. As they say in Stoke, he knows his oat cakes.
“I’m a custodian of the football club in a way and I don’t take it lightly,” he adds. “I know what this football club means to everyone in the area. I know what it means to me.
“It’s a privilege to be trusted in this role. There’s a lot of trust on my shoulders. Bring it on because the bigger the challenge, the more I’ll take it on.”