Jon Walters explains why throwing £10m in transfer market is not fix-all answer for Stoke City
Jon Walters arrived back at Stoke City in March and is now heading into his first summer as sporting director.
Jon Walters arrived back at Stoke City in March and is now heading into his first summer as sporting director. (Image: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)
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Just splashing cash in the transfer market alone will be no golden ticket for Stoke City after six years in the wrong half of the Championship, insists Jon Walters.
Stoke will be busy tweaking Steven Schumacher’s first team squad over the next two or three months and, with fewer constraints in terms of a three-year rolling Financial Fair Play cycle than they have done in recent times, they hope their business can help make a big difference.
But sporting director Walters is looking beyond signing cheques for signings as a one-stop fix for everything. He is also putting the focus on standards and environment, with news this week of a new £10 million training facility an indicator of ambition – and, with it, expectations.
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He said: “From the outside you probably wouldn’t know what we’ve got here. You probably want to shout about it a little bit more. We’ve got to shout about what we’ve got here, the facilities are first class and they’re going to be state of the art.
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“Let’s be honest, it’s been a graveyard for players, a graveyard for managers. We’ve not done well over the past few years, let’s be perfectly honest about it. We’ve underperformed with where we’ve finished over the past seven years. It’s been frustrating from the outside to watch.
“But now I’m inside the building it’s my job to change that, to raise the standards back to where they should be. It should be Premier League standards.
“We’ve got the best owners in the country and they will back it. But we’ve got to build it properly. You can’t just come in and click your fingers. You can’t just throw £10m at a player. That’d be great but what happens if that player gets injured or he goes in a year and you’ve sacrificed investment in other areas for it.
“You’ve got to lay the foundations properly. A cardboard house will fall down. We’ve got to get the right people, and you’ve got to get the hunger from the people who want to drive it. You need the right academy coaches, the right first team coaches, the right players and characters in the building and go from there. When I came in I thought that’s what had been lacking. I had to micromanage some situations and ultimately I don’t want to be doing that.
“I want every position around me to be better than me (in their own jobs) and really learn from them. I have no ego or no qualms about doing that. It won’t just happen overnight and we won’t go from A to B and success straight away. There will be setbacks but as long as we’ve got the right environment and the right people across the club then we will be in a good position.”
Walters insists it is possible to instil Premier League standards into a club which has just finished 17th in the Championship.
He said: “You should have Premier League standards full stop. It doesn’t matter if you’re in League Two. I’ve played through all the divisions and there are some technically gifted players lower down the leagues and the reason they’re not playing in the Premier League is mentality and standards, simply. You need a bit of luck but it’s standards and it’s in your mind too.
“I’m always on about discipline. People sometimes see discipline as a dirty word but I’ll give you the freedom to do whatever you want to do. If you want to learn the guitar, if you practise every day you’re going to be able to play the guitar. You need discipline to do it. It’s the same as a player. You need to do it every day, your standards need to be right.
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