The Bet365 Stadium, not so long ago, was known to be a pit of hostility. It embodied all that Stoke City had become on their climb to the Premier League; uncompromising, raucous, an irritant to the establishment. It was a place to elicit dread, where reputations were routinely dented.
Stoke’s modest home on the outskirts of town has barely changed since those tub-thumping days but it has gradually come to represent a very different club. It is flat and lifeless now, all the old ferocity diluted.
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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. The 3-0 humbling at home against Norwich City in their most recent match continued a meek, deep-rooted pattern.
“Rubbish,” said head coach Steven Schumacher of their performance that day. “Not good enough. It took us 78 minutes to win a tackle.”
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.
‘Beaten by a better team’
Steven Schumacher’s reaction. pic.twitter.com/LFK1f9avrM
— Stoke City FC (@stokecity) March 16, 2024
The expectation — or hope — is that a team now led by December appointment Schumacher will eventually have enough to stay above three sides worse than them and avoid the drop but regardless, a malaise has taken hold.
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. Rebuild has followed rebuild, manager after manager — Schumacher is their fifth permanent appointment since relegation. And here they are, 19th in the Championship and anxious.
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“I genuinely believe if (the Coates family) could write down a number and that would guarantee Stoke will be promoted to the Premier League and never be relegated, however much it cost them, they’d do it,” says one former senior member of staff, who like others in this article spoke to The Athletic on grounds of anonymity to protect working relationships.
Those aspirations to be a Premier League club again have never left town, just like the Coates family.
Faith in both, however, is not what it was.
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.
Her father Peter, now 86 years old, has always lived and breathed Stoke City. He owned his boyhood club between 1986 and 1998, a period that saw a relocation from the Victoria Ground to their purpose-built home, before returning for a second, ongoing spell at the helm in 2006 with far greater financial muscle on the back of Bet365’s website launch five years earlier. A decade in the Premier League, those enduring days under the management of Tony Pulis and successor Mark Hughes, duly followed their 2008 promotion.
Coates remains a visible figure, as joint chairman and a regular match-goer, but the running of the club now falls on son John (main photo; left).
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Those to have worked with them both consider Peter to have charisma and charm, while John, 54, is quieter and less comfortable socially. Leadership has not come as naturally to John, a law graduate, but that is not to doubt his own emotional investment. He is known to be engaged — visiting the training ground weekly to eat lunch in the canteen — and, most pertinently, stung by the continued failings he oversees.
Stoke’s slump has come on his watch and, for the first time, it is attracting the criticism of supporters, who grow restless with the nagging sense of underachievement under owners with the funds to travel to away games by helicopter.
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. Stoke are the Championship’s version of top-flight Newcastle United and their majority ownership in Saudi Arabia; bottomless pockets yet with hands tied financially.
“For Stoke fans, it’s as if we’ve been given an amazing sledge but then it hasn’t snowed for six years,” says Nick Hancock, professional comedian, Stoke fan and co-host of The Famous Sloping Pitch podcast. “Part of me wishes we were allowed to spend more — because we’re lucky enough to have rich owners — but it’s a difficult balance.
“I find all the talk about money in football exhausting. I don’t feel like we’re constrained by the rules, because I understand the reason why football has financial fair play. We’ve all seen what happened at Bury, Wigan and Derby.”
That sort of fate will never befall Stoke under the Coateses, but the end of their post-relegation Premier League parachute payments in 2020-21 has made them just another face in the Championship crowd. The wealth of the family who own the club brings a gilded comfort blanket but not a notable competitive advantage.
Stoke’s annual accounts illustrate that they are forced to rein in spending.
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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.
Stoke — and the Coates family — have tried everything to get back there. Operational losses across their five full seasons in the Championship have been £175.8million and the 2019-20 season, interrupted for three months by the Covid-19 pandemic and then completed in empty stadiums, saw them post a divisional record loss of £88m.
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.
“For me, that is wrong,” says Mark Gregory, a Stoke fan and the author of More Than A Game, a book about football governance. “The history of the professional game is full of efforts to balance on and off-field activity.
“I am thinking of the maximum wage, unpaid directors, sharing gate and TV money — and they risk reducing the game’s appeal, which makes a European Super League more likely. We need to debate that balance. Is it right to penalise owners like Stoke City’s or Nottingham Forest’s? OK, I know Forest broke the rules but the charge against them is economically illiterate, as it forces them to act in a way that made them less financially sustainable.
“Similarly, is it right that a Monaco-based tax exile (Sir Jim Ratcliffe) can invest in Manchester United but the UK’s highest tax payers, the Coates, can only invest £13million a season in their local club?”.
If there is a moral quandary over Stoke’s owner and front-of-shirt sponsor being a bookmaker — an industry the Premier League will ban from such sponsorships from the start of the 2026-27 season due to high addiction rates — it is softened by Bet365’s commitment to Stoke as a place and its surrounding areas.
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Around 5,000 people are employed at the company’s vast HQ in Stoke-on-Trent and, unlike the majority of bookmakers that choose to base themselves in tax havens, it has been estimated that the Coateses pay close to £500million in UK taxes each year. No family is said to pay more.
“I think government should be on the side of the poor, not the rich,” Peter told the UK’s Guardian newspaper in 2015.
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. Only the Championship’s bottom two clubs have scored fewer goals than Stoke’s 35 (in 38 games), and another post-relegation overhaul of personnel has only brought regression and the threat of worse.
Some of those we 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.
“At Stoke, it’s nothing like that. It’s soulless. There’s no oomph about it. There’s never any suggestion of getting people together, ‘Let’s win the title; one club, one team’. None of that.”
And the advantages of having wealthy owners? “It’s a funny organisation,” the same person adds. “There was no real desire to save money or hit budget. It was always just wiped out by the family.”
It is a workplace, we were told, that has a tendency to feel disjointed. Some staff are employed by the football club, others by Bet365. Stadium and training ground personnel, including groundstaff, fall into the latter and report to Richard Smith, who is managing director and husband of Denise Coates, a reclusive figure forced to rely on heavy security when out in public.
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The club’s modern training ground is overseen by Bet365 staff and does not open until 7am each day. Football staff, including physios and analysts, have been known to wait outside to be let in and begin work. It has not always felt like a club with everyone on the same page. One former player described the situation as “ridiculous”.
John is largely well-liked by staff on and off the pitch but there are doubts over his suitability to running Stoke. Managers consider him supportive but to others he’s almost too supportive. “The mistakes they’ve made is putting trust in the wrong people and letting them have their own way,” says one former senior member of staff. “I don’t think any manager who’s been at Stoke could say they haven’t been given a fair crack of the whip. If you needed something, you could make a case for it and they’d probably find the money.”
A further source shares those views, yet described an impatience that undermines what were designed as long-term projects. “John falls in love with his managers, gives them everything they want, and stays in love with them until one day he wakes up and sacks them, and then he has to start all over again,” they say.
Alex Neil was the latest manager he dismissed, in December as a 15-month reign ended with four straight losses. Neil’s predecessor Michael O’Neill, the former Northern Ireland national-team manager and a trained accountant, had two seasons that offered signs of progress on a trimmed budget yet was sacked only five games into the 2021-22 Championship campaign.
Neither Gary Rowett nor replacement Nathan Jones, who were both backed to the hilt, lasted a year before that — four managers who arrived with their stock high, yet not one could inspire even a top-half finish, let alone a play-offs place or promotion.
Schumacher, who led Plymouth Argyle to the League One title last season, is the latest man tasked with cracking the code.
“Different managers have brought different styles,” says one former staff member. “What’s the Stoke way of playing? Until someone finds the Stoke riddle and unwraps it, it’ll just perpetuate it all.”
To appreciate the level of change seen at Stoke in the past six years is to revisit the side that introduced itself back to the Championship on August 5, 2018.
Jack Butland, Joe Allen, Ryan Shawcross, James McClean and Benik Afobe were in the starting XI blown away by Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds United in that 3-1 defeat. Peter Crouch came off the bench on that sobering Sunday afternoon at Elland Road, along with Darren Fletcher and Bojan Krkic.
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Rowett’s Stoke were favourites for promotion before that game, but the Championship has gradually consumed them. Their gamble on an immediate return backfired and began a churn of personnel that shows little sign of abating.
“I always saw Stoke as a bit of an oil tanker that did need stopping and turning around,” Rowett has said. “The toughest job I had by a mile.”
According to Transfermarkt, the dedicated football transfer website, Stoke have signed 89 players in the six years since relegation — a rough average of 15 per season.
This campaign topped the lot as what was supposed to be the grand reset under Neil, with 23 players signed in the summer. In their defence, pre-season had begun with just 11 senior players on the books after a clear-out of high-earners including Aden Flint and Nick Powell. The exit of Sam Clucas, signed for £6million from Swansea City in summer 2018 as part of that plan for instant promotion, was thought to represent a saving of over £30,000 a week in wages.
Others who left before him were on more. Like Butland on £60,000, Afobe on £48,000 and Allen on £40,000. Even now, with Premier League budgets long gone, there is an expectation from players and agents that Stoke will pay you more than the going rate.
The latest — and biggest — rebuild of the Championship years was orchestrated by technical director Ricky Martin and Neil, a pair who worked together at Norwich as they won Premier League promotion in 2015, but both became casualties of another underwhelming campaign. Neil was sacked in December, Martin followed last month, with John Coates personally delivering the news to both.
It has been left to former forward Jon Walters — one of Pulis’ dogs of war from the club’s Premier League heyday, when they got to the 2010-11 FA Cup final, got to the knockout phase of the Europa League the following year and finished ninth three seasons running from 2013-14 — to serve as interim technical director until the summer. Ex-central defender and long-time captain Shawcross is also back, returning as an academy coach last summer.
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Recruitment, though, has again been found wanting. The players signed have meant an overhaul of the squad, yet delivered no discernible success.
Among the newcomers to disappoint has been Ryan Mmaee, a now 26-year-old Morocco international forward signed from Hungarian champions Ferencvaros for a reported £3.4million. Mmaee was banished to the under-21s last month for disciplinary reasons. “I won’t go into the details, but there were a few things that weren’t the behaviour we expect from one of our players,” Schumacher said.
Stoke’s decision to recruit from overseas, bringing in players including Wouter Burger (a Dutchman signed from Swiss club Basel), Mehdi Leris (Algerian; Italy’s Sampdoria) and Bae Jun-ho (from Daejeon Hana Citizen in his native South Korea), sought value in the transfer market against the backdrop of FFP restrictions.
Money came in for Jacob Brown, sold to Premier League-bound Luton Town, and Josh Tymon, offloaded to fellow Championship side Swansea, yet there has been frustration over the imbalance Schumacher inherited.
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. One well-positioned source has noted a “retirement-home vibe”.
Veteran striker Dwight Gayle, who had played in the Premier League for Crystal Palace and Newcastle United as recently as 2022, scored just three goals in 50 Stoke appearances before, now aged 34, being allowed to join League One club Derby County in January. He was added to a long list of high-profile names to disappoint.
The Championship seasons and strategies collide to depict a confused, inconsistent club.
The brief stability delivered by O’Neill, who began picking apart a financially disastrous squad during his two years, was uprooted with a shift to Neil and Martin, who were given control of recruitment under John Coates. There have been more misses than hits in a squad short on assets. There is nobody along the lines of Harry Souttar, the centre-back they sold to Leicester City, then of the Premier League, for an initial £15million 14 months ago, shortly after he played for Australia in the most recent World Cup.
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Schumacher has privately found disappointment in the squad he has inherited. Physical outputs have been lower than expected, with an absence of intensity. Too many are viewed as comfortable with their lot.
“The feel of the football club was just never quite right,” one former player tells The Athletic. “It’s hard to explain. Football clubs are businesses, obviously, but they’re an entity to themselves with how they operate. Stoke felt almost clinical, as though it just wasn’t the right environment. It never felt like there was much of a relationship between the team and the fans anymore.”
Stoke are drifting.
Just five wins have come from their past 24 league games and the Easter Monday visit of Huddersfield Town, the club in 22nd place — the highest of the three relegation positions — promises to shape the mood of the season’s final weeks. There are spikes of anger amid the anxiety. There is also the threat of apathy, despite the club confirming the cost of season tickets had been frozen for a 17th consecutive year this week.
The club’s owners have insulated fans from rising costs and continue to cover the price of all away travel. Free coaches are put on for every supporter who wishes to watch Stoke on the road. It helped ensure that there were 3,000 travelling fans at Preston North End to see a precious 2-1 victory in their most recent away match on March 9.
“It has been a pretty grim season from start to finish,” says fan David Cowlishaw, from podcast The Wizards Of Drivel. “In the summer we made a load of signings and essentially bought a new team. We showed early promise but then it started to go haywire, Alex Neil got sacked and then the technical director got sacked too.
“So it became a thing of, ‘Who is actually in charge?’. Who is running the show? Is it the manager? The technical director? John Coates? It’s been really mismanaged, the football side of things. Every new manager bought a new squad and inevitably it didn’t work out, so you’re just in that cycle without any through line or succession planning. We’re lurching from one thing to another.
“Getting relegated would be a disaster.”
Stoke’s greatest challenge, beyond the threat of another relegation to the third division of English football, is that they are caught in a cycle that cannot break. A clear plan is hard to picture and the huge recruitment of last summer will leave little scope for another overhaul for next season. One seismic reset cannot be followed by another. A new technical director, be it Walters or a fresh face, is needed to support Schumacher.
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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.
The Good Friday trip to Hull City pits Stoke against a club they trailed by one place in last season’s final Championship table. Today, there are a dozen places between them — and emphatically contrasting moods. Stoke will find opponents with reignited ambition of returning to the Premier League themselves, the type they used to hold.
“I understand why people ask the question (what’s gone wrong at Stoke?) and, for me, it can be bad luck, bad appointments or just forgetting what made you good in the first place,” says fan Hancock.
“Whenever I hear fans of some Premier League clubs talk about a lack of ambition, I worry. The genesis of our fall was thinking that finishing ninth in the Premier League wasn’t good enough.
“Pulis used to talk about players who would be good on the pitch and in the dressing room. If you think about players like Shawcross, (Robert) Huth, (Glenn) Whelan and Walters, they would run through brick walls and would inspire others to run through them, too. That was who we were. When our slide started, we found it very hard to stop.”
Stoke are still left to wonder when that day will come.
Additional reporting: Steve Madeley, Nancy Froston, Michael Bailey, Greg O’Keeffe, Adam Leventhal.
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)