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.
