BREAKING NEWS: Stoke City are yet to fully raid transfer kitty as Alex Neil embraces accountability.
News from the bet365 Stadium as Stoke City start new Championship season armed with full team’s worth of new signings
Alex Neil admits he has spent every hour of every waking day this summer working on the major changes at Stoke City but that is not a complaint.
The scale of the project he has been tasked to oversee at the bet365 Stadium is what drew him to the club almost 12 months ago. It means he will start the new season against Rotherham this afternoon with a team’s worth of new signings in his squad – and just over three weeks left to carry on adding.
“The one thing you want as a coach is to be given the opportunity to shape things as you see fit and also have accountability for that,” he said. “There’s not a worse feeling than decisions getting made above you or by whoever and you being held accountable. That’s not a nice position to be in, you can’t start telling people, ‘If it was up to me I wouldn’t have done that…’ Whereas I can’t say that here. Everything we’ve done, I’ve had the final say.”
About a dozen signings had been anticipated when Stoke started the summer but it’s clear now that there is scope for more than that.
Neil said: “Arguably (we’re further along than expected for this stage). My worry was how much of a core squad we’d have for the first game, particularly when you start pre-season with seven or eight senior players. Whether you like it or not, you’re only five or six weeks away. That’s a short time, even if it feels long when you’re spending every minute of every day trying to improve it, speaking to people and being out on the grass and being at the training ground and going away with the lads.
“From where we were to where we are now, I’m happy with what we’ve done. There are still bits to do but I’m happy we’ve given ourselves a good opportunity to start the season well.”
Three of the new signings have been free agents, four have been loans and four have been unveiled with undisclosed transfer fees which are believed to be relatively conservative.
It means that, although there has been a new face coming in on average every three days for the past months, there is room left in the kitty for the final bits of business to be quite exciting.
“We haven’t actually spent that much,” said Neil. “That might not sound realistic when you’ve brought in 11 players but in terms of actual transfer fees we haven’t spent that much so far. We’ve still got some money to spend to try to improve the squad and depending on how we start and how we look and how the dynamics look, that could either go on guys for right now or guys for the future.”
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