Diet Stoke; or, when stagnation takes over a football club
Since they fell from the Premier League in 2018, Stoke City have burned through 6 managers but haven't finished above 14th in the table. So... what gives?
If there is such a place as footballing purgatory, that place may currently be Stoke-on-Trent. It’s now been six seasons since Stoke City were relegated from the Premier League following a decade-long stay. But since they finally fell through the trapdoor they’ve barely uttered a peep towards reclaiming their place back among the top twenty. How has this come to pass, and what does it tell us about the ownership of the club?
On the 6th January 2018, the first Saturday of the new year and the central day of that season’s FA Cup Third Round weekend, Stoke were beaten 2-1 away from home by Coventry City. The big problem over what to 2024 eyes looks like a pretty innocuous result was that Coventry were in League Two at the time. Still worse, Stoke were also third from bottom of the Premier League.
Mark Hughes, who’d been in the position for the previous five years, paid for that loss with his job, but things didn’t improve under his replacement Paul Lambert and come the end of the season Stoke were relegated in 19th place in the table. By mutual agreement, they parted at the end of the season, Lambert becoming the first in line for what has increasingly come to look like a revolving door policy with regard to managers since then.
Since the sacking of Mark Hughes, Stoke have had a total of seven permanent managers, as well as six different caretaker-managers, if we count the joint one game in charge of Alex Morris and Ryan Shawcross as two separate people. That’s thirteen people in less than six and a half seasons. They’d had two in the previous twelve.
And they’ve already shot their bolt for this season, too. Steven Schumacher was sacked in the middle of September, five games into the new campaign, with Stoke having won two and lost three. NarcÃs Pèlach, who had previous experience as a coach in the Championship with Huddersfield Town and Norwich City, was appointed as his replacement.
Things have… kind of improved since then. At the time of writing, Stoke have lost just one of their last eight games but, while that is an improvement on what came before, it does come with the not-significant asterisk that four of those games ended in draws, and that it did follow him losing his first two games in charge. Stoke’s improvement has been modest. They were 13th in the table when Schumacher was sacked five games in, and they remain there now having now played fifteen.
If anything, a strange combination of turbulence and inertia has been the story of the club since their return to the Championship. In the Premier League, they’d been fighters. Under Mark Hughes they’d finished ninth for three consecutive seasons, though their fall from the Premier League did up up being strangely supine.
And since returning to a lower level they’ve seemed unable to find their feet. Over those six seasons they’ve finished 16th, 15th, 14th, 14th, 16th and 17th, and they’re currently 13th. Premier League parachute money dried up years ago, and Stoke have somehow become… just another mid-table Championship club. It’s all a long way from Tony Pulis, an appearance in the FA Cup final, and consecutive seasons in the top half of the top flight.
Under Gary Rowett, almost £60m was spent on new players. The club later had to sell their stadium to their owners to balance their books from a regulations perspective, though as we’ll see it is now back under their ownership. Rowett lasted eight months and was replaced by Nathan Jones, who lasted ten. Michael O’Neill lasted a full three years, and on a lower budget, but things were seldom better than mediocre.
The door started spinning again when O’Neill left the building. His replacement, Alex Neil, lasted 15 months. They then poached Steven Schumacher from Plymouth Argyle, who’d he taken into the Championship with 101 points the season before. He lasted nine months. NarcÃs Pèlach is now ten games in, and he’s won just three of them to this point.
His position isn’t necessarily secure. This, it would seem, is a season of the Chaos Championship, in which anything could happen to anyone, and although in a relatively secure looking 13th place in the table, they’re only six points from the play-off places and four from the relegation places. Stoke may have been undergoing some sort of collective ennui this last few years, but there remains a possibility that they could yet get pulled into something a little more exciting later this season, whether they want to or not.
Of course, when things are going wrong on a Saturday afternoon the obvious direction of ire will be the manager. That is an entirely normal state of affairs. But when consecutive managers find themselves in an identical-looking rut over a period of several years, attention has to turn slightly higher up the food chain. Whatever you may or may not think of the owners’ choices of managers, it is surely clear that this trigger-happy approach towards them simply has not been the producing the results that they’ve wanted it to.
It would be a mischaracterisation to describe the Coates family as ‘bad’ owners, though many might consider the source of their wealth to be… unpalatable. They’ve been at Stoke for a very long time, clearly love the club very much, and would almost certainly put more money in were they not restricted by financial rules. They are, after all, worth more than £8bn. But when you pause to consider that they own the local football club and employ 5,000 local people in their business, it just feels as though this form of stagnation probably isn’t ultimately doing their brand much good.
Of course, everyone in Stoke knows what the Coates family have put into the club over the years, so criticism of them will always be muted. In several senses, the fans couldn’t have done much more. Attendances haven’t hugely dropped in recent seasons, and at present they’re the 10th highest in the division, averaging a little shy 23,000. The fans have stuck by the club, even if things may have become a little boring, these last few years.
And there was one big change during the summer, with the deal to make John Coates the sole owner of the club, which cleared Stoke’s debts and returned the ground and the training ground back to their ownership. The move was a slightly surprising one. After all, the company through which the Coates owned the club has been growing and is making a lot of money. There didn’t seem to be much of a reason to transfer ownership to one particular person. When asked at an eve-of-season supporters Q&A material change would come to the club as a result of all this, he had an answer:
Hopefully we’ll win more football games! It’s now completely debt free, which I think is a real positive. We’ve moved both the stadium and the training ground into the football group and that’s good. But the ambition and the investment remains the same.
We’ve got the infrastructure projects that started off as a five-year plan that I think is now a six or seven-year plan. That all continues and the ambitions remain the same, we just want a successful football club.
Well, he hasn’t exactly got one yet. What he’s got is a team that has played fifteen games in the league so far this season, has scored eighteen goals, and has conceded nineteen. They’re better than they were at the start of the season, but they were bad at the start of the season. If anything, it says something about the pull of football that 20,000 people will turn out for this, year after year.
To a point, it should come as no surprise that a city that was one of the twelve founders of the Football League across the Midlands and the North-West of England in 1888 still has such a hunger for its local club. A place so steeped in the history of the game already knows fully well that boredom is an essential part of the true football experience.
But for how much longer can that be depended? Stoke lost access to that sweet, sweet parachute money several years ago. They’re in that morass of clubs who simply do not have that level of financial wherewithal now, and they’ve been performing below expectations and potential for more than half a decade. So where is the change coming from which gets them performing above expectations? Isn’t it about time that happened?
To be absolutely clear, the Coates have not been bad owners of Stoke City. The potential for worse ones to come in at this level of football is not-insignificant. Debts have been cleared and the club and the ground have been brought back together, although specifically why all this has happened does remain unknown. Things could be worse. But then, things could also be better, and all concerned with Stoke City already know this. The problem is, after this much stasis, what do you actually do about it?
Image by Ronnie Macdonald via Wikipedia Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 licence.