Huge Stoke City loss puts Derby County in the shade amid staggering £676k-a-week reveal
Derby County's Championship rivals Stoke City have posted a huge £30m loss for the last financial year after publishing their latest set of accounts.
Stoke brought in 24 senior players in 2023/24 after emerging from the most challenging years of a financial fair play cycle, boosted by the £15m sale of Harry Souttar to Leicester in January 2023 plus Jacob Brown's departure for up to £4m to Luton Town that August.
The money was reinvested in the squad with £18.2m spent on player registrations, including seven-figure deals for Wouter Burger, Ryan Mmaee, Bae Junho, Million Manhoef, Junior Tchamadeu, Mehdi Leris, Nikola Jojic and Lynden Gooch. The scale of the rebuild is put in context by the fact Stoke had only spent £3.1m in 2022/23.
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The project did not go as planned, however, and Alex Neil was sacked as manager in December 2023 when Stoke were struggling at the wrong end of the Championship. Technical director Ricky Martin followed him out of the club in February - and 13 of those signings are no longer at Stoke, although Mmaee and Jojic are only out on loan.
The extraordinary figures show the levels of spending in the Championship with Derby's same set of accounts for the last financial year, in which they won promotion to the second tier from League One, being an operating loss of £14.2m.
Under owner David Clowes, Derby have committed to a sustainable and financially prudent approach with their transfer outlay of £2.7m in the summer being funded by sell-on clauses such as deals including Omari Kellyman's move from Aston Villa to Chelsea.
Football finance expert Kieran Maguire told the BBC that since Stoke were relegated from the Premier League in 2018, their attempts to return to the top flight have cost them an extraordinary amount of money.
“I think there is a big difference between spending money and spending it well. Nobody can doubt the degree of support that the Coates family have given Stoke City Football Club in terms of funding to improve for players, improve facilities for fans and also, from a fans’ perspective most of all, to put money into the playing budget to, in theory, make them competitive. And they should be far better higher up the Championship over the course of the last six or seven seasons than what has manifested.
“Stoke fans must have a bittersweet humour. ‘What are we aiming for this season? Fifteenth, oh the same as last season.’ And again and again, keep changing the manager, keep changing the squad and it keeps being repeated again and again despite these losses.
“I’ve calculated that since Stoke City were relegated, on average they have lost £676,000 a week. That’s from 2018 onwards, which is an incredible amount of money and I think a lot has been wasted."
He added in an interview for Radio Stoke: “I don’t know enough about the club but I would imagine they have had to shift people off the payroll and looking to move players on because it’s difficult to see how the club can be in a comfortable position from a PSR perspective.
“They did sell the football ground a few seasons ago, which helped, and they’ve had huge write-offs of debt from bet365. It’s difficult to work out how that will be treated. But these losses are spectacular. To lose more than £30m when you’ve only got £23m or £24m coming into the club – in any other business you’d say let’s call the whole thing off.”
