IIn some ways, what Abby Hunt has endured over the past 300 days is similar to that of many thousands of other patients who are also impatiently waiting for surgery in the overstretched NHS. The initial delay for a scan was almost as agonising as the pain in her knee itself. The swelling has not gone down and has severely affected her work. However, her story has one crucial difference: she sustained the injury while playing for Stoke City in a match against Derby County last October.

Hunt suffers from an “osteochondral anomaly with a detached bone fragment,” meaning she has a loose piece of bone in her right knee about the size of a penny. However, she was told that Stoke’s women’s team did not have health 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 her GP, waited 22 weeks for an ultrasound and is now preparing to finally go under the knife in the last week of August. During her long wait for the operation, Hunt says she was repeatedly left in the dark by Stoke and it hurt even more when she received her P45 in the mail at the end of her contract this summer, with no farewell call or meeting.

“Stoke destroyed my faith in women’s football,” says Hunt. “I do want to play again but I think I’ll just play for fun – I’ve got no interest in playing for a semi-pro team when realistically you get more support in a Sunday league team I think.”

The club said: “Stoke City cannot comment on the injuries sustained by individual players but can confirm that it does not agree with the allegations made.”

It was on October 11, 2023, when Hunt came on as a substitute away against Derby to help her team secure a 2-1 win. Her right knee first swelled up and the next day at training it felt even worse. Hunt has been examined by the club on multiple occasions but without a scan they were unable to give her an accurate diagnosis. 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 “consider a scan for her”.

“I texted but got no response or was told ‘we’re still looking into it’, no response and then suddenly I got a message saying ‘the women aren’t insured… we’re not insured’,” Hunt says. “(Instead) I went to see a GP in November and he said I would have to wait 22 weeks for an ultrasound.

“At that point I told Stoke and thought, ‘If they know, I’m sure they’ll push for a scan.’ But I had to wait for my MRI in May, which was paid for by the NHS.”

In the middle of that long wait, Hunt recalls a bizarre incident: On February 9, almost four months after her injury, Stoke told her to go to Wythenshawe Hospital. It was thought the club had arranged an appointment for her to see a knee specialist at 8.30am. However, the receptionists told her there was no appointment available in her name.

Hunt says when she told Stephanie Wakelin, the manager of the Women’s and Girls’ Club, that there was no record of her appointment, she was told to go to the emergency room and wait. “I had taken the morning off,” says Hunt, who works as a substitute PE teacher in the Macclesfield area. “I didn’t get an excuse. I lost three hours of work because of that.”

Hunt’s story is not the first time in recent months that a Stoke player has raised concerns about how the club has handled an injured player. In April, they agreed to pay for Kayleigh McDonald’s operation on an anterior cruciate ligament injury after she started a GoFundMe page to try to cover the £20,000 associated costs.

McDonald had said she had been told by the club that she would have to get on an NHS waiting list to receive treatment. Ian Wright and Jacqui Oatley were among those who shared McDonald’s appeal for X, and Stoke’s U-turn appeared to have come only after widespread condemnation.

Hunt says she didn’t feel she could pursue the same public strategy because her social media accounts were set to private due to her work as a teacher. When she asked the club if they would pay for her surgery like they had at McDonald’s, she was told it would be handled 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 mail. Since I’ve been to the physio (with the results of my scan) I hadn’t had a message from any of them. Then I got a text from Marie (Hourihan) saying ‘Just to let you know, I’m removing you from the group chat. We will continue to support you with your injury’ and that was it, I’m not playing for Stoke anymore. Marie hasn’t been in touch since.”

Hunt is unsure what the future holds for her. Ever since she played for the boys’ team at her primary school in Macclesfield, where she grew up, her career seemed promising. At 12, she joined Everton’s girls’ academy, playing in the same age group as future England players Alex Greenwood and Nikita Parris. She remembers four very happy years in the Merseyside club’s youth system before moving up to Everton’s reserves.

She then spent her first two years at Stoke before gaining a place at the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada, where she played for the highly regarded women’s team while completing a Masters in human kinetics.

In her freshman year in 2016, she scored seven goals from midfield in 14 games, earning her the league’s Most Valuable Player award and earning her first-team All-Star accolades. The following year, she suffered an anterior cruciate ligament injury in her left knee, but says her experience with the injury and the way her college team treated her knee was a complete contrast to her recent experience with Stoke. “They (Windsor) organized everything you could want. I saw someone from the program every day. They got me a running coach so I could learn to run again, and they got me a strength and conditioning coach. I didn’t have to pay for anything, I didn’t have to organize anything.”

Hunt says her contract with Stoke last summer stipulated that the women’s team would not have health insurance, and she says the whole team was paid around minimum wage, earning money only for the hours they spent training or playing matches. Such salaries are a typical reality for many in the women’s game at a semi-professional level, but another aspect that makes Hunt’s story particularly difficult to hear is the huge sums listed in the financial accounts of Bet365, which owned Stoke last season.

The online gambling company’s majority owner, Britain’s highest-paid woman Denise Coates, received around £221 million in the last financial year and her total salary over the past four years tops the £1 billion mark. Coates’ brother John is the owner and chairman of Stoke. The men’s club spent just over £2 million on agent fees in the year to February 2024, the eighth-highest amounts in the Championship, and the football club’s most recent accounts show a wage bill of £30.1 million.

The club said: “All members of the Stoke Women’s team, regardless of injury or contract status, have been 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 – the team is paid, fully insured and benefits from investment in and improvements to the infrastructure and support available to them. Stoke City is fully supportive and committed to the growth of the women’s game.”

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

Premier League fans will recognise the badge on the shirts but for 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 the Stoke board: “When you say you support the women, you have to give them support too, whether it’s physically, mentally or even financially because some of the girls may not be as lucky as me to have another job. Don’t let people down.”