Stoke have now finished in the bottom half of the table for 10 seasons in a row, two in the Premier League and eight in the Championship. Their last half-decade has seen glacially slow decline but decline all the same: 14th, 16th, 17th, 18th. Finishing 19th is still in their hands and who would bet against them? Ask the owners, I guess.
The most lamentable element of this story is that Stoke have so many advantages. They have a local family who are extremely wealthy and perfectly prepared to fund the club. The Coates have written off £210m in loans to leave Stoke debt-free. The club now own the training ground and stadium. Ticket prices have been frozen for almost 20 years. Stoke rank in the top half for Championship wage bills. They get 24,000 in most weeks.
And for what? Persistent failure versus expectation and stated ambition. A fanbase that laughs at the lack of progress otherwise it would cry and cry. A blame game that is often more interesting to supporters than the matches – and seasons – that they are forced to endure.
That blame starts with the players. This team perennially collapses when in promising positions – remember they were second in the Championship at the end of November. What happens to them in the second half of each season? Three wins in their last 19 now. Five wins in their last 23 last season. Six in 22 in 2023-24.
But then the faces change and everything else stays the same. Stoke have signed 30 players – an entire first-team squad – since June 2023 and that fails to include 18 incoming loans over the same period. They can’t all share some deep physical or psychological weakness.
And how on earth is this club so continually incapable of servicing its strikers? The last time a Stoke player scored more than 15 league goals in a season, Ashley Cole had just made his England debut. It is the longest run in English professional football.
So we should blame the managers, then. Certainly Mark Robins has done himself few favours and is under pressure. Stoke rank 20th for xG and 19th for xG against – translation: this is quite a bad football team. His 30-odd per cent win record is not what anyone was signing up for.
But then that’s just what happens in this Bermuda triangle of managerial competence. Stoke have had eight different head coaches in eight years, of various shapes, sizes and philosophies. Each arrives with hope and hunger and sees both fade into the fog. See the paragraph on players and play it again.
Blame the sporting director, then, and plenty of supporters are. Former player Jon Walters was appointed to oversee long-term development and football operations in April 2024. Recruitment has not worked. Managers have not worked out. Performances and results have not improved. They ask: is he just here because he knows the place?
One emblematic issue is Dutch striker Milan Smit, signed on loan in January with Nathan Lowe leaving for League One, also on a loan deal. Smit has scored two goals and there is a reported £4.8m obligation to make the move permanent this summer. It all just smacks of expensive tail-chasing.
Blame the guy who appointed Walters, then. John Coates – sister of Denise – was appointed vice-chairman in 2015, joint-chair in 2020 and became outright owner in 2024. He is the ultimate authority and the decision maker. The buck stops with him.
And we arrive roughly back where we started. The Coates family have certainly spent money – north of £400m. There is no doubting the commitment or the generosity. But at every level of this club, application is lacking.
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Nostalgia can be unhelpful inside football clubs and their fanbases. That’s one theory here: Stoke had such an extended purple patch, a decade in the Premier League after almost quarter of a century without top-flight football, that its absence created a vacuum where little could grow because nothing could ever match up. You start falling and realise that drifting might be the only other thing you ever do.
I think that lets Stoke City off the hook. Supporters aren’t yearning for Tony Pulis, Rory Delap and the 2010s, as much as they might still think of them and the pictures still adorn the walls. They’re simply asking for a little competence and for this desperate cloud of futility to be lifted by those who clearly possess the wealth to do so, if they could only get things right.
Fail to do so soon and the problems really start stacking up. A generation of Stoke City supporters will see atrophy as normality and will rightly wonder what the point is at all.
