Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here
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.
Everything you see now is an extended hangover from a ludicrous 18 months when Stoke let life slip through their fingers. They kept faith in Mark Hughes for too long despite a run of seven wins in 33 matches that never looked like being addressed, then replaced him with Paul Lambert. Lambert won his first league game and his last and nothing in between. Stoke City went down.
That didn’t have to mean calamity, as silly as that may now seem. Stoke had parachute payments, had one of the wealthiest and most generous local family owners that any club could wish for and had the chance to reset in the second tier and recapture their identity.
Instead, CEO Tony Scholes oversaw the appointment of Gary Rowett as the club’s new manager, the spending of almost £60m on new players on long contracts to meet Rowett’s desires and the retention of existing players on Premier League wages – Ryan Shawcross, Jack Butland, Mame Biram Diouf.
Rowett was sacked after eight months, to be replaced by Nathan Jones, a coach who had worked within a specific system at Luton Town. Jones lasted 38 matches, nine more than Rowett. He won six matches in all competitions.
The consistency of Stoke City in the Championship is a thing of wonder, although nobody is applauding. Since coming down in 2018, they have finished 16th, 15th, 14th, 14th, 16th and 17th. Last season was at least a little different, but only because things threatened to get worse. Stoke were in the bottom three in early March but lost only two of their last nine matches to pull clear of trouble. You won’t believe this: the good mood didn’t last.
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.
O’Neill is still remembered fairly fondly, but is that even a compliment when only wretched mismanagement and a series of missteps that had led to Stoke City giving him three years to not really work it out. If that sounds as depressing as it gets, Stoke sacked O’Neill a few games into a new season, burned through Alex Neil in 16 months and then also sacked Steve Schumacher in early season. It doesn’t scream effective long-term planning.
A return to the regular hiring and firing of managers has provoked a similar return to high player turnover, aided by several quiet windows under O’Neill and the sale of Harry Souttar and Nathan Collins in consecutive seasons for around £30m.
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.
There has been a deliberate attempt to overhaul the age of the squad, which does at least make sense (the front four for the Bristol City draw were all 22 or younger and the average age this season is 24.1). But that creates two issues: young players thrive in stable working environments and the best of them tend to be loanees from Premier League clubs who stay for a season and then leave.
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.
Stoke City 2-2 Bristol City (Tuesday 22 October)
- Game no.: 29/92
- Miles: 102
- Cumulative miles: 4,483
- Total goals seen: 92
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: Lewis Koumas’ over-the-shoulder volley after less than two minutes. I’ll see fewer better goals this season.
“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.
And how do you focus on the future when the present never seems to change. Stoke have already sacked one 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.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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