Stoke City Sacked Their Manager Mid-Season and Still Posted One of the Championship's Bigger Losses

In the 2024-25 season covered by these accounts, Stoke City finished 18th in the Championship, a difficult campaign that saw Steven Schumacher sacked before the season's end as the club drifted toward the bottom half of the table.

Turnover rose by around 10% to close to £35m, but a pre-tax loss of around £28m, one of the larger deficits in the division that year, shows the cost of a squad still built for higher ambitions than an 18th-place finish delivered.

Net assets remain deeply in deficit at around £160m, among the largest in the Championship, a legacy of years of heavy investment under Bet365 ownership that has yet to be matched by results on the pitch.

Staff costs of around £30m against turnover of £35m are more contained than the scale of the overall loss might suggest, pointing to other costs, including the amortisation of previous transfer activity, weighing heavily on the bottom line.

A mid-season managerial change is rarely a sign of a club performing to expectations, and Stoke's accounts confirm a campaign that fell well short of what the resources behind it should have delivered.