The club are desperately searching for something they may never get back
Let’s begin at the end. At full-time of their home game against Bristol City last Tuesday, loud boos rang around the
bet365 Stadium. It caught me off guard, both because Stoke City didn’t even lose the match and because this was
manager Narcis Pelach’s sixth game in charge.
I don’t think that those boos reflect entitlement, because my goodness you aren’t still coming to watch this team
every other week because you honestly think that they belong in the Premier League. I don’t think it reflects a lack of
patience in Pelach; he is simply collateral. I don’t even think that it was a reaction to letting a two-goal lead slip,
although few things annoy home fans more than wasted joy.
It’s simply that Stoke City supporters can see their future played out on repeat but it reflects their recent past. It’s
nothing against Pelach, but he is already being cast as an unwitting part of a wider malaise. A club that had
everything going for it is now stuck in a desperate cycle.
It used to be bristling in this stadium, during those afternoons and nights when the bigger boys came to town and
tried to leave without their noses being bloodied. Nobody liked Stoke was the cliché, and they didn’t care one bit
because they were too busy loving life.
Stoke finished ninth for three seasons in a row and enjoyed ten straight seasons of Premier League football because
they had a stronger identity than many of their peers.
Now the bet365 Stadium has a listless feel, as if everyone inside is merely waiting for the inevitable. The
unpleasantness, if any even exists at all, is saved for the catcalling and groans towards their own players. They know
it doesn’t help, but it’s all they have.
In an ideal Stoke City world, the Coates family would spend their way out of this self-inflicted crisis.
Financial rules are supposed to stop owners from entering a club, loading them with debts and unsustainable
financial responsibilities and then walking off into the sunset to let someone else – or nobody else – clean up the
mess. That doesn’t really apply to a family who have a wealth of more than £8bn and employ 5,000 local people in
their business.
But that misses the point. Stoke knew the rules and knew the likely limitations if they were unable to engineer
promotion. The stadium and the Clayton Wood training ground were both sold to bet365 for £85m to keep the
Financial Fair Play (FFP) wolf from the door, but you can’t keep spending money, regularly changing managers and
finishing in the bottom half of the second tier and avoid comparative austerity forever.
Michael O’Neill at least steadied the ship for a while, and operated under smaller budgets than predecessors. In
doing so, he probably made things worse and better simultaneously. He was not a great manager here, perhaps not
even a good one.
But he inherited the messy leftovers of three different predecessors and one horrible fall from grace. He brought with
him mediocrity, which felt insufficient and yet was just about the best anyone could hope for in the circumstances.
You know the routine by now: manager arrives, has a list of targets, contracts are handed out, manager leaves before
they are halfway expired, rinse and repeat. You are left building a house out of dry sand and misplaced hope.
Since June 2023, 23 players have left Stoke City and 22 have arrived on permanent deals with another 11 loan
arrivals.
This recruitment model, scouting across Europe for a high volume of mid-range signings aged between 19-23, can
certainly work and did represent a shift in strategy, but it does rely upon those players working out. The six most
expensive signings that Stoke made in summer 2023 have started 20 league games between them this season. Three
of them have already left the club, permanently or on loan.
In February, Jon Walters was appointed as Stoke City’s sporting director on a permanent basis. In his first interview
Walters spoke extensively about using his own successful history as a player here to recapture what has broken.
“It’s a case of building brick-by-brick towards a long-term ambition of being better than we’ve ever been before,”
Walters said.
“We will do that by instilling a culture of high standards in everything we do and being true to the local DNA of
dedication, relentless hard work, having each other’s backs and never giving in.”
Walters is surely right; it is those core values that were lost too easily and have never been regained. But it’s also far
easier said than done when that decline has been continuing, unabated, for more than half a decade.
How does this break in practice? You give a manager time, but what if he’s not the right one and what if it isn’t his
fault? What if the culture doesn’t need fixing but rebuilding from the foundations up? Football clubs don’t get to stop
the clock until they’ve worked it all out.
manager this season and appointed another, a 36-year-old Catalan who was a coach at Norwich City. It feels like
another lurch in another different direction. Pelach has won one of his eight matches and Stoke are a point above the
bottom three. So does this one just play out to the end?
And that’s the biggest problem here: you could have written this piece last season, the one before or the one before
that. Change the actors but the script remains painfully similar.
That might all sound like stagnation, but in fact it’s worse than that because of the people you lose on the way: those
who question what the point is; those who see another new manager and crop of players but can’t believe anything
has changed; those who promise themselves that it’ll be worth the time and money when they see something new.
That’s not a lack of loyalty, it’s emotional self-preservation. It isn’t fun to pretend that you care less than you do
because it makes you too angry otherwise.
So, having begun at the end let’s scroll back to the beginning and the Bristol City boos. They weren’t a display of
anger or upset because they weren’t a reaction at all. Instead, they were a involuntary warning of what comes
next: apathy. Get hurt in the same way enough times and you subconsciously protect yourself against the pain.
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