Stoke City legend Mike Pejic sets out what the club needs to replace Tyrese Campbell with a big ambition of climbing the Championship table

It has been interesting to read Steven Schumacher’s close-season debrief this week and think about what he needs to change at Stoke City to get us up towards the Championship top six.

The statistic that screams out at me is in the win column. Looking at the teams who have finished in the play-offs since Stoke were relegated in 2018, you generally need to win about 20 of your 46 games to be in with a shout. Sunderland, Swansea and Coventry have sneaked in with 18 in that time but 20 is a good ballpark figure.

Stoke won 15 in the season just finished and it probably says a lot that that’s only two below the highest they’ve managed in the past six years. It was 17 under Michael O’Neill in 2021/22, which seemed to fizzle out after Christmas, and as low as 11 in 2018/19 under Gary Rowett and Nathan Jones when you might remember we managed to draw a whopping 22.

The quick leap from there is to our home record. The teams in the top six this season all won at least 15 games on their own turf, which is a significant chunk of their way to the overall target. We got to a pretty dismal eight at the bet365 Stadium, even though the record clearly improved under Schumacher towards the spring. We won four and lost two of our last eight at HQ.

Yet look at that attendance on the final day, with 28,243 in to watch a 4-0 thrashing of Bristol City. That tells us about supporters’ patience, loyalty and, coming on the back of impressive wins over Plymouth and Southampton, just how hungry they are to buy into a team that is going in the right direction.

There is a lot of expectation with getting a lot of people through the gate – but when you get those fans behind you, the whole thing is supercharged. We have been starved of good afternoons at home for far too long and hopefully we have started to see signs that Schumacher can turn that around, not just for a month or two, but for the long-term.

The key to that, as we all know, is getting things right in the transfer market this summer. Everything is so much easier when you have good players in your team.

We’ve got a goalkeeper signed up for starters and it is pretty clear where the manager thinks is the most important position to address. Tyrese Campbell was released because Stoke need a main striker or two who they can really rely on across a 46-match season.

It is the easy part to spot that. The hard part is to find them and bring them in, particularly when your budget is constrained by Financial Fair Play rules. This is where you need your scouting network. The players are out there and it’s their job to spot the ones who could fit precisely into the coach’s plans, probably with a little bit of polishing.

The forwards who are already scoring 20 times a year in the Championship will be out of our budget at the moment but you don’t just look at scoring goals when you’re up in the stands and taking notes of potential targets. You look at team play and attributes and you get references about character and work rate.

We managed to pull one out of the bag when I was working with Lou Macari at Stoke in the mid-1990s, swapping Keith Scott for Mike Sheron at Norwich. Sheron wasn’t fit when he arrived but we knew we could work on that and he’d be willing to train too. In the end we got him fitter than he’d ever been.

His team play was outstanding, his quick and clever link-in play and movement in the area was electric and his one-touch finishing was excellent. You want the striker making runs in behind, off the ball, all the time so it’s a first pass option whenever and wherever on the pitch you win possession. What an impact that has on the opposition and his teammates.

It didn’t just happen for him, he made it happen. He had the hunger, the potential and the creativity that made it possible. He could find space and create space for himself and for others if he was being marked closely, which he was more and more as he scored more and more.

So that’s the type of player you want and you almost always need if you are going to advance in the league table. You need that football awareness, that nous and reliability, that desire to exploit space.

Then you’re looking for a combination, whether that’s another front player or a second striker or attacking midfielder who comes off the front line. Sheron had Simon Sturridge, who was tricky and nippy and played around him, and that’s probably the kind that Schumacher has in mind, having used Luke Cundle over Wesley.

Cundle suited the purpose by being able to find gaps in the final third and, with wide players who can get to the by-line or come inside and leave space for full-backs to overlap and stretch teams, and support from midfield, you can start to get numbers into dangerous areas. Then you realise the importance of having a strong sitting midfield player ready to protect your centre-backs if you lose the ball… and there you go. I start to talk about the ideal striker and end up talking about a holding midfielder. The point is that it all has to fit together. It is all always about good players building partnerships and units so that you are ultimately stronger than the sum of your parts.

Hopefully we can go a long way towards building a better and more balanced squad over the next three months – then we can start ticking off those 20 wins.