Mark Hughes will start the season without one of his most prolific forwards, having seen the Stoke hierarchy reluctantly agree to the club-record £20 million sale of want-away winger Marko Arnautovic to West Ham.
It's a hammer blow (no pun intended) to a manager who has found himself leaning heavily on the maverick talent who cost him under £3m when he signed from Werder Bremen in 2013. Sadly, in the end there was little he could do to change the mind of a player who had firmly signalled his intention to leave with a transfer request, having learned of the club rejecting an initial £15m bid from West Ham for his services.