"Horrendous" - Stoke City regret expressed over infamous 2018 transfer blunders | OneFootball

FLW's Stoke City fan pundit looks back at regret at the club's infamous 2018 summer transfer window

This article is part of Football League World's 'Terrace Talk' series, which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…

Stoke City supporters will never forget the club's infamous and ill-fated 2018 summer transfer window, which saw them splash the cash with devastating results in a bid to return to the Premier League at the first time of asking.

The Potters, of course, had been a Premier League staple for many years and were - at the time, of course - rightly instated as a general favourite to make an immediate return after suffering relegation at the end of the 2017/18 season.

Although key players such as Xherdan Shaqiri and Eric-Maxim Chopou-Moting left the Potteries over that summer, Stoke spent significantly in what had appeared a firm statement of intent.

The likes of Benik Afobe, Tom Ince, Sam Vokes and Peter Etebo all joined the club in high-profile moves, with Stoke making use of their parachute payments received following relegation from the top-flight.

However, looking back on it now, they perhaps could not have utilised those funds in a worse way than they did under Gary Rowett, who was handed his marching orders in January as Stoke eventually finished the season in 16th.

Verdict offered on Stoke City's summer 2018 transfer regret

Stoke have made a number of questionable decisions when it comes to recruitment, appointments, sackings and investment since their relegation from the Premier League, and Football League World asked our Potters fan pundit, Sam Harrison, to pick one out.

Unsurprisingly, Sam opted to highlight that summer's expenditure as the worst decision his club have made in recent memory - although the business conducted across the entirety of 2018/19 was a disaster.

"One of the main decisions that I'm still a little bit shocked about is Stoke's first season back in the Championship and how they used the transfer market," Sam told FLW.

"I think when you look at so many clubs right now and teams who have got relegated, they've brought in some really good players and obviously spent the money, but spent it wisely.

"There are obviously managerial choices and decisions that you can say should've happened sooner or as early as they did, but I think the way that the window happened - and maybe it was just how that season went - wasn't right.

"You look at the other teams who get relegated in and around that time and the players they brought in compared to us.

"It's one of them where you wonder what was the idea and decision behind it because it's so easy to look back on it now as we signed experienced Championship players for money, but it's the amount of money on the players we did bring in and how that correlated to the numbers they got for Stoke.

"That comparison between how much we spent on them and how much we actually got from them is something that I'm wondering why that was the decision. It was horrendous in the sense of how that season progressed in the end, it was not a good season at all."

Stoke still live to regret 2018/19 transfer decisions

Stoke's 2018/19 transfer blunders are still worth ruing over to this day, as the club have never recovered from them and they proved incredibly costly in the long-term.

They have not once even remotely challenged for promotion in any of the six full seasons they have spent back in the second-tier, something you would think should really be a certainty considering just how much money has been shelled out.

It is not like they just threw money away that season alone, either; many of those players arrived on big contracts spread out across a number of years, so that regret has continued to come as a reminder.

None of the players Stoke signed for fees in the summer, or even January, came close to justifying their outlay and it is certainly worth looking back and regretting the club's business as that miney could have been used so much better.