Abby Hunt: ‘Stoke has ruined my belief in women’s football’

In some ways, what Abby Hunt has endured over the past 300 days is similar to the many thousands of other patients also waiting anxiously for surgery on the over-worked NHS. The initial hold-up for a scan was almost as agonising as the pain in her knee itself. The swelling has not subsided and it has heavily affected her work. Except, her story has a key difference: she suffered her injury while playing for Stoke City in a match against Derby County last October.

Hunt has an “osteochondral abnormality with a fragment of detached bone”, which means she has a loose piece of bone, roughly the size of a penny, in her right knee. However, she was told that Stoke’s women’s team were not covered by medical insurance and that the club could not fund private surgery for her. They would not even pay for an MRI scan.

Instead, she went to see her GP, waited 22 weeks for a scan, and is finally preparing to go under the knife in the last week of August. During her long wait for surgery, Hunt says she has repeatedly been left in the dark by Stoke and was hurt further when she received her P45 in the post this summer at the end of her contract, without an accompanying farewell call or meeting.

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“Stoke has ruined my belief in women’s football,” Hunt says. “I do want to play again, but I think I’ll just play for fun – I’m not bothered about playing for a semi-pro team when, realistically, you’d get more backing at a Sunday league team, I think.”

The club said: “Stoke City is not able to comment on individual player injuries but can confirm that it does not agree with the allegations being made.”

It was on 11 October 2023, away against Derby, when Hunt came on as a substitute to help her team see out a 2-1 victory, that her right knee first became swollen, and the next day in training it felt even worse. Hunt was examined by the club multiple times but they were unable to give her an exact diagnosis without a scan. Hunt says the women’s team’s head coach, Marie Hourihan, the former Manchester City and Republic of Ireland goalkeeper, initially said the club would “look into getting a scan” for her.

“I was texting, I was getting no reply or I was being told ‘we’re still looking into it’, no reply, and then all of a sudden I got a message saying ‘the women aren’t covered … we’re not covered’,” Hunt says. “[Instead] I saw a GP physio in November and he said it would be a 22-week wait for a scan.

“At that point I told Stoke and I thought: ‘Surely if they know this, they’ll push for a scan.’ But I had [to wait for] my MRI in May on the NHS.”

Midway through that long wait, Hunt recalls a bizarre incident where she says she was told by Stoke to go to Wythenshawe hospital on 9 February, just shy of four months after her injury, under the impression the club had arranged an 8.30am appointment for her to see a knee specialist, only to be told by receptionists that there was no appointment under her name.

Hunt says, when she told the club’s women and girls performance director, Stephanie Wakelin, that there was no record of her appointment, she told her to go to A&E and wait. “I’d booked time off work for that morning,” says Hunt, who works as a supply teacher in Physical Education in the Macclesfield area. “I got no apology. I lost three hours of work for that.”

Hunt’s tale is not the first time in recent months that a Stoke player has described concerns about how the club have dealt with an injured player. In April, they agreed to pay for Kayleigh McDonald to have surgery on an anterior cruciate ligament injury after she had started a GoFundMe page to try to cover the £20,000 costs involved.

McDonald had said she was told by the club that she would have to join an NHS waiting list for treatment. Ian Wright and Jacqui Oatley had been among those to share McDonald’s plea on X and Stoke’s U-turn appeared to come about only following widespread condemnation.

Hunt says she did not feel she could adopt the same public strategy because her job as a teacher means her social media accounts are set to private. When she asked the club if they would pay for her surgery like they had for McDonald’s, she says she was told it was being dealt with “on a case-by-case basis”.

Over the course of this summer, she had felt hurt by a lack of communication. “I got my P45 in the post. I hadn’t had any messages from any of them since I’d been in to see the physio [with the results of my scan]. Then I got a text from Marie [Hourihan] saying: ‘Just to let you know, I’m removing you from the group chat. We’ll still support you with your injury’, and that was it, I don’t play for Stoke any more. Marie’s not reached out to me since.”

Hunt is not sure what the future holds for her football. Ever since she was playing in the boys’ team for her primary school in Macclesfield, where she grew up, her career had seemed promising. She joined the Everton girls centre of excellence at the age of 12, playing in the same age group as future England players Alex Greenwood and Nikita Parris, and recalls four very happy years in the Merseyside club’s youth system before moving up to Everton’s reserves.

She then spent two years with Stoke in her first spell with the club before earning a place at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, to play for their well-respected women’s side while studying for a Masters in human kinetics.

In her freshman year in 2016 she scored seven times from midfield in 14 games, earning her the most valuable player award for the league and she was named a first-team all-star. The following year, she suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury in her left knee but says her experience of being injured, and how her college team treated her knee, was in total contrast to her more recent experience with Stoke. “They [Windsor] organised everything you’d want. I saw someone from the programme every day. They got me a track coach to learn how to run again, they got me working with a strength and conditioning guy. I didn’t have to pay for anything, I didn’t have to organise anything.”

At Stoke, Hunt says it was outlined in her contract last summer that the women’s team were not covered by medical insurance and she says that the whole team were on approximately minimum wage, earning money only for the hours that they trained or played matches. Such wages are a typical reality for many in the women’s game at semi-professional level, but another element that makes Hunt’s story particularly hard to hear is the vast sums detailed in the financial accounts of Bet365, which owned Stoke last season.

The online gambling company’s majority shareholder, Britain’s highest-paid woman, Denise Coates, was paid around £221m during the last financial year and her cumulative salary in the past four years surpasses the £1bn mark. Coates’s brother, John, is the Stoke owner and chairman. The men’s club spent just over £2m on agents’ fees in the year to February 2024, the eighth-highest in the Championship, and the football club’s most recent set of financial accounts shows a £30.1m wage bill.

The club said: “All of Stoke’s women’s team, regardless of injury or contract status, were offered an end-of-season meeting with the head coach and her coaching team. The club’s investment in women’s football has increased year-on-year with the women’s team achieving semi-professional status from the 2023-24 season onwards – the team are paid, fully insured and benefit from investment in, and improvement to, the infrastructure and support available to them. Stoke City supports and is fully committed to the growth of women’s football.”

Stoke play in the Northern Premier Division of the FA Women’s National League, the third tier of the pyramid, and kick off the new season at home at the Bet365 Stadium against Nottingham Forest on Sunday. They finished fifth behind Newcastle, Burnley, Forest and Wolverhampton last season.

The badge on the shirts is familiar to fans of the men’s Premier League but, to women like Hunt, the reality of life at semi-professional level is a world away from the glitz and glamour of the men’s game. She concludes with a plea to Stoke’s board: “If you say you’re going to support the women, you need to give them support, whether it be physical, mental or even monetary, because some of the girls might not be as fortunate as me to have another job. Don’t let people down.”