Who really owns Stoke City? It was transferred from bet365 with modest fanfare to John Coates in the summer of 2024 and he hasn't asked for a whipround during subsequent transfer windows or building the new training complex.
The football club is controlled by Stoke City Holdings Ltd, which itself is owned by Coates. He has virtually all the shares and, with brother-in-law Richard Smith as vice-chairman and dad Peter Coates as director, it's as close to family run as any in the Football League.
But buried deep in a filing cabinet at Companies House is a story from another era showing that, alongside the Coates, still sit hundreds of names, some who own just one or two shares. Some are living, some are deceased, some are institutions - including us at The Sentinel.
Today, the controlling entity is Stoke City Holdings Ltd, which holds nearly every class of ordinary share - the kind that carries voting rights and genuine ownership. These are listed in several forms, including 'I', 'W' and 'S' shares which were created during various reorganisations.
Between them, Stoke City Holdings and Peter Coates hold more than 99.9 per cent of all voting shares. The family's stake is absolute. The decisions, the funding, the risk, the praise and the stick are all theirs.
So what about these other names? Many of them hold 'preference shares', which is a throwback to when football clubs would raise small amounts of money from supporters or local businesses. Preference shares usually don't come with voting rights.
You will see 152 preference shares for David Eabry, 130 for Vera Holden and 100 for The Sentinel. These holdings are pretty much historical curiosities, unlikely to be worth much now but still legally part of the club's share register.
It's a living museum of football finance and a time when owning a bit of the club meant buying a £10 share certificate rather than a billion-dollar takeover. It also made sure that you could attend the club's AGM if you wanted to ask questions or, perhaps, report what was being said.
Before the Coates family fortune transformed Stoke's finances, the club went through decades of ups and downs behind the scenes.
The club was declared bankrupt, for example, in 1908 while in the 1920s they were bankrolled by Bolton Wanderers player-turned-mega rich mine owner John Slater.
Slater was dubbed 'football's first millionaire' but he had to apply to the FA for permission to join the board because, at that time, ex-players were barred from becoming directors. He funded the signing of star players like the Broad brothers, Jimmy and Tommy, toyed with merging Stoke and Vale and won promotion to the top flight.
He reportedly lost £2m when his investment company went south during the depression and he left Stoke - but his catalogue of other businesses carried on doing well and he later served as a Conservative MP for Eastbourne.
Lifelong fan and entrepreneur Peter Coates joined the board in 1985 and he was elected chairman, aged 46, in August 1986.
He told The Sentinel at the time: "It is not a rational decision to put money into a financially struggling club, but I have a feel for Stoke City and I want to see us prosper.
"My greatest claim to fame as a player was to represent the Stoke-on-Trent youth team as a wing-half. I actually signed for Stoke as an amateur, but plainly I was not good enough.
"I did the rounds (for Goldenhill Wanderers, Kidsgrove, Sandyford and Tunstall RC) but my playing career met an early end due to business. I worked for a company in Oxford and was called upon to turn out on Saturdays. As there was no organised Sunday soccer in those days I hung up my boots at 23."
The club was sold to a consortium of Icelandic businessmen in 1999 but Coates stayed on as director - also supporting his son John and daughter Denise in turning regional bookmaker Provincial Racing into global online goliath bet365.
The Coates family's wealth had been transformed by the time they bought the club back, under the bet365 umbrella, in 2006. John became joint-chairman in 2020 and sole chairman in 2024.
But, yes, while the Coates as good as own 35,829,526 of 35,842,486 shares in the club, below are the Stoke through-and-through people and businesses who own the rest. Just don't ask us or Nick Hancock to chip in for a 25-goal striker in January.
Stoke City Holdings Limited: 93 preference B shares
Staffordshire Sentinel Newspapers: 100 preference shares
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