Stoke City’s exhausting battle with financial fair play constraints won’t go on forever, insists Jon Walters, as preparations pick up in the background for another major – yet challenging – summer transfer window.
Stoke’s rocket-fuelled spree in the summer of 2023 under Alex Neil and Ricky Martin has meant two subsequent years of restraint and cut-backs to stay on the right side of the EFL’s rulebook, which only allows clubs to lose up about £13m each season and is monitored over a rolling three-year cycle.
Neil’s player “trolley dash” had been largely funded by the £15m sale of Harry Souttar to Leicester City the previous January. But while the Souttar cash was to balance the books for 2023/24 and 2024/25, it drops out of the FFP calculations for 2025/26.
That issue coming over the horizon was why Stoke scaled back incoming business to about £3m in total last summer and have had to rely on loan signings as well as free agents – and clubs have voted to keep the same rules in place for at least next season, albeit with a small rise in allowance losses to cover the rise in living costs.
It has felt like a message that has been on repeat, but sporting director Walters, when he went to meet a new supporters’ club set up in Stone, was still asked why Stoke didn’t sign Tom Cannon permanently in January rather than let him be recalled by Leicester and then sold on to promotion-chasing Sheffield United.
“We couldn’t have brought in Tom Cannon for £10m,” he said. “It’s as simple as that. We just couldn’t have done it. Would we have wanted to? Someone who’s going to score 15 or 20 goals? Of course we would. It would have been the first time in a long time that we would have had a striker hit those kinds of figures.
“There are difficulties but a lot of clubs will face them too. It’s knowing where you’re at and it’s probably been explained a few times in different ways. John Coates is certainly well versed in it.
“It’s not going to last forever and there’s talk of rule changes. League One work under a different set of rules, the Premier League work under a different set of rules and we know we have to be clever, bringing in the right type of player.
“It’s not as easy as going out and signing whoever you want – Sheffield United have spent a lot of money this season and brought in top performing Championship players – but we have to find the right players for us. If we have to use the loan market, we have to use it wisely.
“We have to find the players that Mark Robins wants for the team too. It’s not just myself, Ian (Torrance, head of recruitment) and Gareth (Owen, academy technical director), Mark has a big say in it as well. If you get the right things in place in the background, which the club is getting to while always trying to improve, we can get to a really good place.”
Robins has admitted it was a huge blow to lose 11-goal top scorer Cannon at the same time as he was arriving and his biggest problem to fix was to get the team scoring more.
In the end, they turned to Ali Al-Hamadi on loan from Ipswich Town and – with left-backs Enda Stevens and Eric Bocat both in the treatment room – Manchester City’s Josh Wilson-Esbrand.
Walters said: “With some clubs in January you were looking at their business wondering where they were getting the money from and thinking they were going to be in trouble come the summer. I think you’ll find that next season there will be a few in trouble.
“We’ve got to be clever and agile in how we do it. We couldn’t do a lot in January but we brought Ali in to replace Tom and Josh, who then got injured. We couldn’t have done a lot more.
“Moving into the summer, we’ve got to be clever with what we’re doing. We’ll be restricted in what we can do and I won’t give away too much, but I think there will be a lot of other clubs who will be in a similar position.”
Stoke signed six players on permanent deals last summer as well as four on loan, plus those two more on loan in January after losing Cannon. Eight players will be out of contract at the end of the season and loanees will head back to their parent clubs.
There have been key changes in the recruitment department and dug out along the way too, but Walters is confident they can get through this time of flux and find more stability in the long-term.
He said: “You can look back to last summer’s window and we knew what we had to spend for this season and there are figures that were reported that don’t ring true to what we actually did. We’ve brought in 12 players for around the £3m mark (this season) and if you compare that to any team in the league or even some in the division below, where Birmingham signed a player for £15m, it’s always going to be difficult. You’re relying on the help from loans and players you’ve already got in the squad.”
He added: “Now we feel that we’ve got a top manager in place. We’ve got huge projects in the background and what we do is measure data. Mark has been one of the top managers in the Championship for a number of years and this season before he left Coventry he was in the top four.
“As a manager he hasn’t just got that on his CV in terms of how he plays and how his teams perform but he’s built clubs. He’s been in places where training grounds and stadiums have been condemned but he’s come here with everything you’d ever want and I’m pretty sure if you asked him he’d say it’s a job he’s probably wanted for a long time.
“I think we’ve got the right man in place to move the club forward but knows where we’re at too. It’s about how we’re going to get there and he knows it doesn’t happen overnight.”
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