THE INS AND OUTS OF AN EVENTFUL 15 MONTHS WHICH LED TO EXIT OF TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
EVENTFUL doesn’t quite cut it. Ricky Martin’s 15 months at Stoke City have been a blur.
He was given a task of overseeing a club reset and it wasn’t just a case of turning it off and on again. This was an unprecedented turnaround in personnel in the club’s long history.
Stoke had been in a Financial Fair Play hole for pretty much three years already by November 2022 when Martin came in as technical director, a role identified as needed by Alex Neil, who had himself arrived as manager late in August.
Neil, right, had worked with Martin at Norwich, recommended him for the job and he was appointed from West Ham after interviews.
The first transfer window was important for two reasons: firstly, Stoke were in a pretty precarious position in the bottom half of the Championship and needed to bolster the squad; secondly, they needed to sell to avoid FFP sanction.
It spoke volumes about Stoke’s situation that they were also counting every penny from FA Cup wins over Hartlepool and Stevenage and compensation from Fifa for Souttar playing at the World Cup.
They got into the black by sending Joe Bursik to Club Brugge and then pumped up the bank balance with the £15m deadline day exit of Harry Souttar to Leicester. “We had to hold our nerve but we also had a plan, we knew what it looked like,” said Martin, while the shock exit of club legend Rory Delap as first team coach hinted at the scale of the whole project.
No department on the football side of the business would be untouched, including medical, academy and recruitment – plus the women’s side, which Martin took control of last spring when it was announced they would be turning semi-pro.
Martin was keen to be seen by supporters and accept responsibility for decisions, even if in time that meant he would also be there to be shot at.
He spelled out his vision for building a squad with what he called his “five pillars”. In his own words these were key assets, Championship-established players, high potential players, key architects and emerging talent. The incredible thing was that this was a once-in-alifetime opportunity to pretty much build that squad from scratch.
The 2022/23 season – apart from a strong run from mid-february to early April – stuttered to a 16thplaced finish and then Stoke had a fresh piece of paper to start again, armed with the strongest budget they had enjoyed in years.
There were eight senior players for the first week of pre-season training but after Enda Stevens was unveiled on July 5, there were signings confirmed once every three days up to the start of September.
There were 18 new players in all, including Chiquinho who was shipped back to Wolves as soon as possible, then 19 when Ciaran Clark joined in October.
Five more were added in January, although by then poor results had spelled the end of Neil to be replaced by Steven Schumacher.
But the squad is unbalanced. Mehdi Leris, Nikola Jojic, Lynden Gooch and Million Manhoef were all brought in on the right wing, for example, but Stevens was the only out-and-out left-back and he has not been available to start 21 out of Stoke’s 33 league games as his injury luck from the previous two seasons spilled unsurprisingly into this one.
More damning from Stoke’s perspective is the need to discipline at least one of those summer signings, with Ryan Mmaee sent to train with the under-21s.
Stoke supporters might accept that not every transfer will work but due diligence should have been top priority on anyone coming into a club which had been stunk out by bad eggs in the recent past.
A cursory flick through Mmaee’s CV does not make clever reading and several reported incidents both on and off the field should have been red flags.
That saga has been another narrative as Stoke have gone from looking over their shoulder as January progressed to realising they were standing knee deep in muck.
The head of Neil alone wasn’t going to satisfy an increasingly angry fan base.
There is a consensus that Wouter Burger, Bae Junho and Junior Tchamadeu will prove to be valuable additions, potentially in financial terms as well as on the pitch, but the hit rate has been nowhere near good enough. Results have been nowhere near good enough and the discrepancy between expectations and reality were horrifying.
Martin was on stage with Schumacher and joint-chairman John Coates as recently as February 8 and continued questions about recruitment failings – on the back of the big sell at the start of last summer about a new era dawning – must have been awkward for Coates, who looked pained by déjà vu.
He has continued his work at Clayton Wood this week but the wind was gathering and he was informed on Thursday morning that his time had run out – heading towards an exit door that has been well used during his reign.
There will be some people who are happier about the news than others, some who are disappointed and others who are relieved.
Whatever. It is a line in the sand for Stoke.
They have to get better particularly at recruitment but, with the unifying appointment of a club hero in Jon Walters at least in the short-term, the first priority is to stay up.