Wilfried Bony looks back on his pretty disastrous season on loan at Stoke City.
Stoke City flop Wilfried Bony reckons the club was trying to push him to take up a lucrative offer to move to China in order to end a dreadful loan spell.
But it quickly became apparent that he was not in the same shape he had been when he had been scoring regularly in South Wales. He didn’t score in his first eight games before a brace, ironically against Swansea, and wouldn’t score for the club again.
In the meantime, Mark Hughes let it slip that there was a clause in the loan deal that meant Bony could leave in January if a bid came in from the Chinese Super League, where fees and wages were suddenly spiralling.
At the time, Hughes admitted he didn’t think Bony wanted to go – but now the striker, reflecting on a podcast with former Stoke midfielder John Obi Mikel, claims they tried to force him out.
He said: “When I arrived (at Stoke), the first three months, everything was correct apart from when something happened and they wanted to send me to China. Everything changed.
“Ok, I will say what happened. I went to Stoke and when I reached there everything went fine at the beginning. At that time, China was putting in a lot of money, like Saudi Arabia did in the last five years.
“I didn’t know there was interest in me from China. One day, before my birthday, the coach did an interview in which he announced that a club is interested in me so if I am interested they can arrange for me to leave. I didn’t know that.
“I was like, ‘Why did he say that?’ I don’t know nothing about that.
“I went to the training ground and I see Charlie Adam and he says, ‘Oh Bony are you going for big money?’ I said, ‘Guys, I don’t know anything! What are you talking about?’
“They treat me very badly there. I sometimes went to training and sometimes after the warm-up I just shoot on the 18-yards line against the goalkeeper from the second team. All the game.
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“They wanted to push me to go to China but it didn’t work. I decided I wanted to stay.”
Mikel asked Bony if he had any regrets now about adopting that stance.
Bony said: “You see players going to Saudi now? Guys, I would go the next day.”
Back in 2017, Bony said that his agent had told him there was an offer to go to China but he wanted to “stay in the UK to show more – to show that I’m not at the end.”
Bony started his last game for Stoke on November 19, 2016 and made his final appearance as a substitute on December 27. The Ivory Coast international was only even on the bench three more times and left out of the squad entirely for the rest of the campaign, pushed down the pecking order partly because Stoke had bought Saido Berahino in the January window.
He re-signed for Swansea that summer but only scored two league goals the following season, including one in a defeat to Stoke, as both clubs were relegated to the Championship. He went on to have brief spells in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands and Bolivia before hanging up his boots.
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