Key Stoke City figure addresses club’s financial status

Stoke City chairman John Coates has re-confirmed the Potters’ owners commitment to funding the club after the debt levels were significantly reduced last week.

The latest official financial accounts for the Staffordshire outfit showed a loss of nearly £56 million for the year ending June 30, 2021 – mainly due to a season of playing behind closed doors and having parachute payments cut.

This was still less though than the figures for the financial year ending June 2020, where Stoke posted a major loss of £87.2 million.

Stoke’s owners are the bet365 Group, ran by the Coates family, and they purchased the Potters in 2006, with Peter Coates being a former chairman of the club.

City went from strength to strength under the bet365 ownership, reaching the Premier League for the very first time but relegation from the top flight in 2018 saw them left with a hefty wage bill, which has led to major losses in the last three years.

However the Coates family made a major commitment last week by reducing the debt at the club by a mammoth £160 million, with John Coates stating to the club’s media team that his family remain as passionate as ever to keeping Stoke going.

“We’ve been conscious for a while that the level of debt at the club were high and whilst we’d acknowledged that that level of debt was ultimately owed to the owners and ourselves and there was no interest chargeable, however we still felt it was an important thing to address,” Coates said, per Stoke’s official website.

“So, how we addressed that was that we converted £40 million worth of the debt into equity and then waived a further £120 million worth of debt to take the debt down by £160 million, so it’s clearly a very significant improvement to the balance sheet and