UK Edition
From long throws to Champions League winners - how Stoke City shed their old identity
On Saturday evening, Stoke City play Arsenal. It marks the 10th season of Premier League football at the bet365 Stadium, formerly the Britannia, and over that decade these two clubs have developed a very modern sort of enmity: one grounded in culture, ideology, and some ferocious tussles on the pitch.
The Stoke that first arrived in the Premier League in 2008 under Tony Pulis delighted in putting noses out of joint. Widely tipped to go straight back down ahead of the season - one bookmaker even paid out on their relegation after a single game - they cruised to a 12th-placed finish on the back of an unrelenting work ethic, uncompromising direct football and an unapologetically physical style. They have not looked back since.
These days, however, Stoke is a very different sort of club. One by one, the stalwarts of the Pulis era are being sold off. Kenwyne Jones went in 2014. Matthew Etherington and Cameron Jerome went the following season. Then Robert Huth and Andy Wilkinson, and then Marc Wilson in 2016. Finally, Jon Walters and Glenn Whelan went this summer. Of that classic 2008-10 side, only captain Ryan Shawcross remains, and he is being linked with a move to Burnley before the transfer window shuts.
In their place, a very different sort of player has arrived: technically gifted, comfortable with the ball, some of them even under 6ft. There are three ex-Barcelona players in the squad and an ex-Barcelona player in Mark Hughes as manager. The signing of Jese Rodriguez, formerly of Real Madrid, means they now have more Champions League winners than any other team in the Premier League.
Stoke eat at the big table now. “Four or five years ago, we wouldn’t even get in the room with the advisers of this level of player,” says Hughes. “That’s changed. We’re a viable option for these players. They do their homework. They look at our group and think: ‘He’s a good player, he’s a good player, wouldn’t mind playing with him.’ So it’s no surprise.”
On the pitch, it has been some years since Stoke lived up to their classic long-ball, 4-4-2 stereotype. They play fewer long balls, score fewer goals from set pieces, fewer goals from headers. Their front three of Xherdan Shaqiri, Bojan and Jese is one of the strongest outside the top six. Like a good deal of Premier League clubs, they even play 3-4-3 now. They have never been in serious relegation trouble. And yet, all this quality, sophistication and apparent security, has failed to make Stoke fans happy.
There is a theory that Stoke, a club without a genuine local derby or natural rival, has always needed an enemy to kick out against. For much of its stay in the Premier League, that enemy has been football’s braying elite: the urbane, metropolitan condescension that Arsenal epitomised perhaps better than anyone else. But now Stoke play pretty much like any other club, and are appreciated accordingly, that righteous anger has been turned inwards: on the board for their reluctance to spend, on the players for underperforming, and most notably on the manager.
Hughes is only the second manager Stoke have had in the last 11 years, and a poor start to the season will see him come under immense pressure. For his part, Hughes is not deaf to the criticism. “There is that negativity around for whatever reason,” he says. “When that happens, we circle the wagons and show people what we’re about. Arsenal coming to town maybe helps that.”
One of the main criticisms of Stoke under Hughes is that it lacks an identity, that the club has lost something of what made it one of the Premier League’s most distinctive and disliked clubs. Pulis’s Stoke worked as a concept because it chimed with Stoke as a place: cold, unsentimental, unashamedly blue-collar. Nobody wanted to go to Stoke, because nobody ever wants to go to Stoke.
“There’s sometimes talk about a Stoke DNA,” Hughes says. “In recent times, people have come to the conclusion that the DNA is about long balls and fighting challenges and so on. And for a long time, that’s what it was. But if you look further back than that, Stoke's DNA was Sir Stanley Matthews and flair players like Alan Hudson. So maybe we’re trying to get back to that, rather than what people have seen in recent times.”
You could argue that what made Stoke so distinctive was also what made them so effective. And so perhaps there is a wider issue at stake here. In an age when elite clubs look largely alike, is it feasible for any club to maintain a distinct identity? What happens when a club essentially discards the blueprint that made it great? And do Stoke really want to be just another club? The next few months, you feel, will offer us some answers.