“When we got promoted we were the bookies favourites to go straight back down. If you’d offered us 10 years in the Premier League then I think all of us – myself, Peter Coates, John Coates – we’d have bitten your hand off!”
Tony Scholes, Stoke City CEO
Since 2007, Stoke City has become a mainstay in the Premier League, first under Tony Pulis and most recently with Mark Hughes at the helm. There seems a relative air of stability at the Staffordshire club which has brought considerable economic and social benefits to the region.
In partnership with financial services group EY, business leaders and local dignitaries from Stoke and the wider Staffordshire gathered at the bet365 Stadium for the launch of the first Economic and Social Impact Assessment in September.
The report, the first of its kind for the club, found the economic contribution to the local area during the 2015/16 season totalled £132m and supported 2,200 jobs.
“We’ve always known we’ve had a big impact in the area both socially and economically and I’m delighted for the first time we’ve been able to deliver a number on that,” said Tony Scholes who was clearly delighted with the findings of the report.
And he’s good reason to be cheerful. Since the club achieved promotion in 2007, revenues have steadily grown from £11m during their final year in the Championship to £119m in 2015/16, which saw them finish 9th in the league.
In 2015, EY also produced a report which found the Premier League and its member clubs made a contribution of £3.4bn to GDP and supported over 100,000 jobs nationally during the 2013/14 season.
For Stoke City, promotion to the Premier League provided a vital boost to the area which would suffer badly during the global economic crash of 2008. In their first year, the club’s revenues grew by around 480% and enabled them to further invest in supporting local supply chains, club infrastructure spending and expand its community work.
Of this investment, a focus on expansion into the community had been a particularly pleasing element of the club’s tenure in the Premier League with the Stoke City Community Trust (SCCT) seeing considerable growth and spending £1.3m on a broad range of programmes across the region. But significantly, the report also found that there was an £11.50 return on every pound spent.
“For every pound we spend in the local community there’s an £11.50 return and I think that is the number that makes people stop and think,” enthused Tony. “Knowing that when we run a project, we run it well, shows great commitment and that you’re going to get an £11.50 payback on that will make people think about us.”
In 2015/16, SCCT, which is self-funded and financially independent of the club, attracted 10,900 participants to it community projects with 256 people delivering over 10,200 volunteering hours. Significantly, the report showed that over £14m of benefit was derived from its programmes with 81% (£11.6m) resulting from physical and mental health benefits alone.
“The work we do in the community is fundamental to who we are as a club,” Tony added. “Everybody who works here is very proud of what we’ve done out there. It’s not something that is going to come and go, it’s just who we are, it’s what we do.
“There’s a business angle to it, of course. Things like the schools visits and the pricing for younger people, that’s about ensuring we fill this stadium week in week out for many years to come. But there’s also a big element about doing the right thing and being a responsible community partner.”
That business angle is a fundamental part of the economic assessment and the impact a decade in the Premier League has had on the club and wider Staffordshire area’s businesses makes for impressive reading.
The headline figure presented in the report suggests Stoke City’s total economic output being £175m, of which there is a Gross Value Added (GVA) contribution of £132m, tax contributions of £67m and supports 2,200 jobs, of which 301 are direct club employees.
The club’s operations have grown in-line with their stature in the Premier League and as broadcasting revenues continue their upward trend, so too has Stoke’s earnings. However, earnings from match day, commercial and other sources is significantly dwarfed by the monies derived from the central distribution model of the Premier League’s broadcasting revenues which netted the club £79.5m in 2015/16.
Those broadcast revenues have helped propel Stoke into the top 30 richest clubs in Europe. But as a club, they are relatively modest in size with their bet365 Stadium having just completed an expansion programme which took the capacity to just over 30,000 at the start of the 2017/18 season. This is still below the majority of clubs in the Premier League and ranks below teams in the Championship such as Sheffield United’s Bramall Lane and Derby County’s Pride Park stadium.
In spite of this, the broad appeal of the Premier League and success on the pitch sees Stoke’s stadium utilisation run at 99% attracting over 2,300 international and 119,000+ domestic visits, spending a cumulative £7m for the period of the assessment.
In addition, the club has continuously developed its infrastructure and invested £7m in developing the training ground for the 2012/13 season with a further £6m spent upgrading the site, whilst £4m was also invested in its academy.
That spending on infrastructure has enabled the club to compete on the pitch with the likes of Manchester and London’s big clubs, all of whom have a far larger pool of resources to dip into.
“The Premier League gets stronger and stronger,” added Tony, “it’s got some of the very best clubs in the world in it. It’s a really tough environment but it’s a fantastic league to be a part of. Each time the Premier League’s executive, Richard Scudamore and his team go to market they manage to increase broadcasting revenues which has enabled us to do what we’ve done.
“Yes player wages have gone up in line with those revenues, and so they should, but it’s also enabled us as a club to do the things we’ve talked about today from stadium development and development of the training ground to a lot of the good community work that we do.”
Tony was, however, realistic to the challenge of securing their Premier League status in the face of such fierce competition on the pitch but maintains a pragmatic approach had benefitted the club in the long-term.
“We believe stability engenders success in the long term,” he said. “Each year we look to improve – there’s no two ways about that. We look to improve across the whole football club.
“We look to improve in all aspects of the football department but also through all aspects off-the-pitch, whether that be commercially, in our community work, our ticketing function or retail – every year we look to improve.
“But we try to do things here in a sensible way, we don’t try and be something we’re not but we do aim to do what we can. But let’s also recognise that the Coates family, our owners, have invested a lot of money in the club and they’ve done it because of their love of football and for their love of this area.”