Stoke City legend makes claim involving John Obi Mikel

Former Stoke City player Mike Pejic has claimed that the Potters would have made the Championship play-offs this season if they had kept John Obi Mikel at the club.

The Staffordshire side are set to miss out on competing for promotion to the Premier League once again and will next season make it a fourth straight season in a row where they play in the second tier of English football.

Supporters had play-off aspirations at the start of the campaign, but a run of just one victory in 12 matches between the end of January and March put a major dent in Michael O’Neill’s hopes of getting his side into the top six.

One thing that Stoke have perhaps lacked this season is a ball-winner in midfield – they had one last season in the form of Mikel but despite O’Neill wanting the Nigeria international to stay for a second campaign, he ended up departing to join Kuwait Sports Club.

A man who made over 300 league appearances for Stoke in his career, Pejic believes that if Mikel was convinced to stay at the Bet365 Stadium then they would be comfortably in the race for promotion this season – despite the midfielder being 34 years old now.

“I saw enough of John Obi Mikel last season to believe that if he’d still been here, Stoke would have been in the top six,” Pejic wrote for the Stoke Sentinel.

“Stoke have dropped 30 points from winning positions. I am certain that his knowledge and experience in that key role would have prevented at least 10 of those – and it’s easy to pick out games off the top of my head when we could have been managed better or stopped breaks through the closing stages.”

The Verdict

Perhaps a ball-winning midfielder would have helped a lot this season for Stoke – but there’s no guarantee that Mikel would have been