The Stoke paradox

It’s not so long ago that Stoke City were a solid mid-table Premier League club.   The regression has been stark. Stoke have won just 12 of their 43 home games in the Championship since April 2022 and concerns over how this season ends simmer.   Relegation to English football’s third tier, a level they have not seen since the 2001-02 season, cannot be discounted as two points split Stoke from the Championship’s relegation places with eight games left.    There they could encounter Port Vale from Burslem, although they may well be relegated.

This, almost certainly, will be Stoke’s sixth consecutive season ending in the Championship’s bottom half. Two finishes of 14th (2020-21 and 2021-22) are as good as it has got since relegation from the Premier League in 2018. The average gap to the team finishing sixth, and so taking the final play-offs place, in the five completed seasons has been almost 16 points. In the current one, they are 20 adrift of sixth-placed Norwich.

Stoke, all the while, have become the Championship’s greatest contradiction. They continue to be backed by the enormous wealth and ambition of the Coates family, owners of online bookmakers Bet365 and lifelong Stoke supporters, yet appear to have grown incapable of progress. 

There are few English clubs — if any — so deeply dependent on their owners. The wealth of the Coates family represents the continued financial health of Stoke City. It is estimated that £338million has been invested since 2006, with heavy losses worn without complaint since relegation from the Premier League almost five years ago.

That number would be ruinous to plenty of owners in the EFL but the Coates family, led by Peter and his children Denise and John, have the level of reserves where it scarcely matters.

The latest Sunday Times Rich List reckoned the family fortune to be £8.8billion, placing them 16th among the UK’s wealthiest. Denise Coates alone earned more than £260m in salary and bonuses in 2022 from her role as Bet365’s co-chief executive.

The Coates family would dearly love to throw their money at the problem. They have historically lobbied for the EFL’s financial fair play (FFP) rules to be altered, a framework which prohibits them from amassing more than £39million in attributable losses across a three-year accounting period. 

Wages have fallen every year since relegation and last season’s £30.1million outlay was almost half of what was being paid in 2018-19, their first back in the second division. Last season was the first time in four years that wages had not eclipsed turnover. Revenue streams, though, have dried up. Turnover was static at £31m for 2022-23 and less than a quarter of what it was in 2017-18 (£127m), the club’s most recent season in the Premier League.

Only the sale of both the stadium and their Clayton Wood training ground to Bet365 for a combined £85million in 2021 — an accounting trick now prohibited by the EFL — kept Stoke within FFP boundaries. Today, they wear a financial straitjacket.

It is the benevolence of the family locally, with millions given away through charitable foundations every year, that has undeniably won them loyalty as Stoke’s owners. Yet there is a sense that this is the season where a tide of approval began to turn. 

Some of those The Athketic spoke to who have played or worked for Stoke in the past six years consider life at the club to be too comfortable — not an environment conducive to success.

“They’ve never got the culture right,” says one former employee. “It’s a very cold culture. It’s the one club I’ve been at where there’s no collective will to want to win. I’ve been at other clubs where players know what the badge means and who they’re playing for. It’s about livelihoods and jobs.

Those within the club consider too many of Stoke’s signings to have been more safe than brave, continuing a pattern that has seen them traditionally recruit players whose careers were on a downward trajectory. There is rarely financial efficiency. 

The longer Stoke have spent in the Championship, the harder it has become to get back to the top flight. They continue to be among the best-paying clubs, outside of those still in receipt of parachute payments, yet cannot escape the rut that has deepened beneath their feet.

Stoke as a city has its economic and social challenges but it also inspires fierce loyalty.  Levelling up is hardly a success, but one boost for the city would be better performance on the pitch.