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The year is 2011. On a cold rainy night in Barcelona, after celebrating winning the Champions league budding starlets Affelay and Bojan stumble into a fortune teller. She shrieks in dismay as she visions a frightening image of Sven-Goran Eriksson wearing a black cloak hovering above them with distant eerie music playing in the background.
Quickly scrambling across her tarot cards she reads what the dreadful future holds in store for these sensations. The Grim Reaper (Sven), the sign of a rapid footballing career death! She explains how their footballing home would soon be at a city in England called Staffordshire.
A club whose name as stated in Wikipedia means “add coal or other solid fuel to”. The two prodigies immediately shrug it off, accusing this delirious witch of being anti-Catalonia and claiming her hatred is caused by her preference of Cristiano Ronaldo over Messi.
Dream signings
Back to the Present: Stoke City announces the signing of Xherdan Shaqiri! A young sensation with 13 career winners medals in his CV to add to their array of former Champions League winners such as Bojan (Barcelona), Ibrahim Afellay (Barcelona), Marc Muniesa (Barcelona), and Marko Arnautovic (Inter Milan).
A team consisting of the most Champions League winners in the Premier League. Quite impressive for a team that just 3 seasons back boasted of having players who won the Premier League and Champions League the same number of times as I have.
3 years is quite a long time in footballing terms, yet it is quite astonishing how the “long ball bullies” Stoke City could manage to get these stars. A team that finished a lowly ninth in the league and have as good a chance of qualifying for Champions’ League this season as Liverpool have of winning it.
Large Investment in the Premier League
A major part of this revolution can be attributed to the fact that teams in the EPL hold all the aces with their abundance of financing over other teams in Europe. According to a recent research report from Deloitte of the 30 highest-earning clubs in Europe in 2013-14, 14 of them were English teams.
A new television contract for an astounding $2.6 billion per year doesn’t do any harm, allowing the teams that finishes bottom of the league to take home a whopping 160 million in television revenue alone.
Hughes v Pulis
Another major contributor to the “Galácticos” era for Stoke is Mark Hughes; the “Che Guevera” of managers as far as Stoke fans are concerned, taking charge after the ever- popular Tony Pulis. Under the decade-long reign of manager Tony Pulis, Stoke City reached a point they had not imagined, stability in the league, visited Wembley twice and had a brief stint in Europe.
People seem to have forgotten that Stoke are a recently promoted side. The bullish Tony Pulis transformed the Britannia into a fortress. With an airtight defence and excellent organisation they never seemed to face the dreaded relegation battle even during their Premier League infancy.
Claiming huge scalps such as United and Arsenal did them no harm in steadying their contention in the Premier League. Stoke City was a club to be reckoned with and was here to stay in the top division.
However, with the team just not able to cross over to the top half of the table and the abysmal quality of football getting to the fans, they soon realised the team was getting stagnant under Tony Pulis. It seemed as though he took the team as far as he could. Stoke City needed to progress and did just that by appointing Mark Hughes as the manager in 2014.
Hughes improvement for Stoke
He has radically changed things from where Pulis left off. The sceptics were strongly against the appointment of Hughes. However now he has undeniably silenced the critics with his style of play and the quality of players he is bringing in.
He has transformed Stoke City, the AFC Wimbledon of present to a team with much more dynamic game-play. The passing game is at the forefront of his ideology. Unlike in the case of another manager’s philosophy, the players and the team as a whole truly seem to thrive and improve on Hughes’ philosophy.
The crop of players who were under Tony Pulis now appear to have flourished under Hughes, and more importantly Hughes has improved his squad from a position of strength. People are claiming Barcelona to be a feeder club to Stoke City!
He also finds time to convert Stoke City’s financial losses to profits. Is there anything this man cannot do? Will this be the year that Stoke City enters Europa League contention? Is the new trend of transfers for EPL teams’ terrifying the rest of Europe? Could Hughes sign Messi next year? We would have to wait and see, the possibilities seem endless!
