Ahead of tomorrow night’s friendly at the bet365 Stadium, we thought we’d remind Everton fans of the history of this fixture…
Some matter for what they mean right now. Others matter simply because they’ve been happening for ever.
Everton vs Stoke is closer to the latter.
These two have been meeting, in some form, since September 1888 — part of the same twelve-club ‘experiment’ that founded the Football League and gave England its first proper competitive structure for the game.
Whatever this fixture is now, it was once new. Now it is simply old, in the way only English football can produce
A rivalry as old as the league itself
Stoke, as it happens, got there first. Formed in 1863 as Stoke Ramblers, they predate Everton by fifteen years — Everton’s own story beginning rather more modestly, with a Methodist Sunday school team on Stanley Park in 1878.
Both were present on that opening weekend of the League. Everton beat Accrington 2-1. Stoke lost 2-0 to West Brom. Neither club has gone very long since without the other cropping up somewhere on the fixture list.
The history between them tilts Everton’s way — 65 wins to Stoke’s 35 across more than a century of meetings, with the remainder drawn (obviously).
The more recent picture is starker still. Everton haven’t lost to Stoke since December 2015, a 4-3 game at Goodison that has become, by process of elimination, the last time the Potters got the better of them in any competition.
They haven’t actually met competitively since 2017-18, Stoke’s relegation season, when Everton won 2-1 in what turned out to be one of the last Premier League fixtures the Potters would host for some time.
Two clubs, one fork in the road
That relegation is really where this story forks in the road. Stoke have not been back to the top flight since — eight seasons in the Championship, none of them ending in the top half, and a 17th-place finish last term under Mark Robins that tells you most of what you need to know about where the club currently stands.
It is hard to associate this with the same Premier League team built by Tony Pulis around set pieces, physical battles and Rory Delap chucking in bombs from near the halfway line. The phrase ‘can they cope on a cold, wet Tuesday in the Potteries’ was a phrase for a reason.
Everton’s own decade has hardly been serene, but the comparison still favours them… just.
They remain in the Premier League, and under Moyes there is now a genuine case, after finishing four points outside Europe last season, that the club is edging toward something closer to stability than it has managed in years.
None of that is a reason to get cocky in late July — anyone who follows this club knows how quickly optimism can plummet — but set next to Stoke’s trajectory, it says something about how quickly it can go wrong, regardless of your history.
None of it will register much on Tuesday eveing.
This is pre-season: substitutions aplenty and fitness taking precedence over anything else, both managers using the 90+ minutes to load minutes in legs rather than go all out for the win.
But there is something nostalgic in two of the League’s twelve original members lining up against each other 138 years on — even if, this time, the stakes stretch no further than match fitness and, maybe, the quality of the pies.
