Prolific, fit again and exiled – The 13 strikers since relegation who couldn’t end Stoke’s long search for regular scorer
Stoke City have got through more than a dozen strikers over the last six years as they try to find a player to score 20 goals for the first time since Peter Thorne
Stoke City have proven at times over the last 20-odd years that you don’t always need a prolific scorer to be successful. They went up in 2002 with Chris Iwelumo top scorer with 10 league goals while Ricardo Fuller scored 15 on the way to booking a place in the Premier League in 2008.
A player has generally managed to reach double figures most years but none has scored 20 since Peter Thorne got 30 in all competitions in 1999/2000. No player has scored more than nine in the last couple of years and Jacob Brown, in 2021/22, is the only forward to score 10 or more since Peter Crouch in 2016/17.
So we have looked back at the forwards who have come and gone since slipping out of the top flight in 2018 and where they are now.
Benik Afobe, now aged 31, was considered to be one of the hottest properties in the Championship when he swung into Stoke as the marquee signing of the summer of 2018.
He had just scored half-a-dozen in seven starts and nine sub outings for Wolves in the second half of the season on loan as they wrapped up promotion to the Premier League. That was his second spell at the club, having got 23 in 48 games between 2015 and 2016 – on the back of 19 in 30 on loan at League One MK Dons – to earn a £10m move to Bournemouth.
He couldn’t find the net so regularly in the Premier League – 10 in 63 games – but it was widely hoped and believed that he didn’t muck about in the lower leagues.
It never really came to pass. Eight league goals was enough for him to be top scorer in 2018/19 but it was still only eight goals. He only made one more league appearance – the first game of the next season under Nathan Jones, who had banged the drum for the forward in pre-season – and spent the rest of his time on Stoke’s books on loan to Bristol City, Trabzonspor and Millwall.
Stoke had to come to an agreement for him to join Millwall on a permanent deal in 2022 when there was still a year left on his contract and he has gone to spend the latter days of his career in the UAE second division with Hatta and Al Dhafra.