Dropping hints

Stoke's season began with optimism but ended with relegation, as Penny Davies explains

On Saturday August 30th 1997, 23,859 people sat down in Stoke City’s new home, the Britannia Stadium, to watch the first League match there. Earlier, Sir Stanley Matthews had officially opened the ground. The idea was that he would roll back the years by scoring in front of admiring fans. This didn’t go to plan. The 82-year-old couldn’t get enough power behind his shot and the ball stopped well short of the goal. The more prescient among the crowd knew that this cock-up was a taste of the season ahead.

Talks about the new ground started between the football club and Stoke-on-Trent City Council in 1994. The council agreed to financial involvement in the stadium development because there were also proposals to provide facilities for community use. The only non-football event to take place there so far this year has been a Festival of Erotica.

A £20 million package was put together with the help of the Stoke-on-Trent Regeneration Company Limited. This consists of the council and St Modwen plc (a development company run by Stan Clarke, who bought a majority shareholding in the club last season). Part of the money was raised by sponsorship. Locally based building society Britannia paid an unspecified amount in a deal that saved Stoke’s directors having to think of a name for the ground.

The Football Trust contributed £3.25 million. The board, showing as much financial acumen as a meat pie, believed they would receive this money as one lump sum. When they realised that it would be paid in instalments, they were left with a huge deficit in their short-term calculations.

Fortunately for them, striker Mike Sheron had just been sold for a club record of £2.5 million. After the player’s former team Norwich had received a share, the rest of this money went into the club’s general finances and wasn’t made available to the manager. With disregard for public relations, the directors kept quiet about this until March – eight months after the event.

Seven days before the official opening, Stoke won 1-0 at Middlesbrough. Supporters were optimistic. However even then there was a core of people who refused to buy season tickets. “I’m not going to, not while Coates is still in charge,” said the person next to me at the League Cup tie that inaugurated the new stadium. He was referring to Peter Coates, the man who appointed Alan Ball and watched as the team was relegated to the old Third Division.

Ball’s successor, Lou Macari, went on to become one of the club’s most successful managers. I’m not sure if you can count trips to Wigan, Plymouth and Chester as halcyon days, but 1991-92 did see us win a Wembley final (the Autoglass) and the next year we won promotion. Unfortunately the club didn’t build on this success. Macari recently spoke of his frustration at Stoke’s willingness to let good players leave. After just a few games, it became apparent that Chic Bates would also be facing this problem.

The start of 1998 saw a 0-7 thrashing by Birmingham. It was our worst ever home result. Four days before this, nine players had been put on the transfer list and only found out via the local media. Conspiracy theorists among the fans suggested the players deliberately engineered the defeat as a protest. Many supporters planned to boycott the first 15 minutes of the next home match.

Two weeks later Bates was removed to allow Chris Kamara to become the new manager. Again, one of the Stoke players said that he and the rest of the team first heard the news on the radio. Kamara called the club “a sleeping monster”. His first match saw him drop our most promising player, 18-year-old left back Andrew Griffin, who was sold to Newcastle two days later for £1.5 million, plus more after a certain number of appearances. Griffin later revealed he was earning just £300 per week at Stoke.

Before the change of manager, Coates and vice-chairman Keith Humphreys stated they were willing to sell their shares. Six weeks after stepping aside, however, Coates still seemed to be doing the chairman’s job. In frustration, the Stoke City Independent Supporters Association called a meeting. About 2,000 people heard Lou Macari talk of his time at Stoke. Macari said that he would have liked a backroom role, possibly scouting. But “on the day I said I would go, there were people at the club coming up to me with their diaries asking when I would be leaving. That sickened me.” Perhaps they just wanted to know how long they had to organise his leaving gift.

Everything Macari said confirmed fans’ fears about how the club is run. After he’d spoken, supporters discussed ways in which they could make changes. A vote of no confidence in Coates was passed. Ways to show this lack of faith were put forward. Most of the audience voted to stop buying pies at the Britannia Stadium, since Coates’s business, Lindley Catering, provides them. ln addition, supporters of other clubs would be encouraged to stop using both Lindley Catering and Provincial Racing bookmakers, another company belonging to Coates.

In April we had another change of coach. Blast-from-the-past Alan Durban took charge. Fatalistically Stoke and Manchester City met on the last day of the season. You know the rest: the Britannia’s first capacity crowd saw the home side thrashed and both teams relegated. Now we have yet another manager. Coates and Humphreys are still in charge. The club has estimated relegation will cost them around £1 million. Bet they wish they hadn’t campaigned for more of the Sky money to go to the First Division sides

From WSC 137 July 1998. What was happening this month