On the Saturday they went up. On the Monday they rode through the Potteries on an open-top bus. On the Thursday, five days after a 2–0 win over Brentford in the Second Division play-off final, Stoke City terminated the contract of the manager who had got them there.
Gudjon Thordarson — Guðjón Þórðarson in the Icelandic — was 71. He died on Friday morning, 13 November 2026, having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2023. The confirmation came from the club he still followed, from the Sentinel, and from the BBC. Stoke, announcing the news on the Saturday, called him “our 2000 Auto Windscreen Shield and 2001/02 promotion-winning manager” and sent the condolences of everyone at the club to “former Potters Bjarni and Thordur, and all of Gudjon’s family and friends.” It was a decent notice, and it left out the part everybody in the Potteries already knew: that the promotion-winning manager had been sacked before the flags came down.
That Thursday is the fact around which the rest of the life is arranged. He had spent two and a half years getting Stoke out of the third tier. He had won at the old Wembley in his first season. He had been through two play-off semi-finals that still make people in Staffordshire angry, and a third that still makes people in Cardiff wince. He had, as he put it himself in the dressing room at the Millennium Stadium, completed the job. The board decided that the long-term interests of the club would be best served by somebody else.
The scouting trip that became a takeover
The road to the Britannia Stadium began, as so much of his English story did, with an Icelandic centre-half. As manager of the national team, Thordarson went to look at Lárus Sigurðsson, then playing for Stoke, and, in the Sentinel‘s later phrase, spotted the potential of a sleeping giant. The club was in the third tier, in a new ground it could barely afford, and had been through managers at a rate that made the appointment of another one feel like a local joke. He went back to Reykjavík to find the money.
It was, for a while, on, then off, then on again. In October 1999 news of Icelandic interest broke. A few days later the potential backers retreated, reportedly alarmed by the size of the debts that had followed the move from the Victoria Ground. Bill Bell even approached them about buying Port Vale instead. Then there was a U-turn. On 15 November 1999 — the Sentinel marked the anniversary years afterwards — a consortium of Icelandic businessmen agreed to buy a 66 per cent controlling interest for a little over £3.5 million. The Guardian, the next day, called it complete.
The public face of the group was Gunnar Thor Gislason, head of a fruit and vegetable distribution business, and, the Guardian wrote, the youngest chairman in English football. The Sentinel, reprinting its own coverage, named the other major movers as Ásgeir Sigurvinsson, the former Iceland international then working as the national side’s technical director, and Elfar Aðalsteinsson. Behind them sat a newly created holding company, Stoke Holding. The package, as it was reported at the time, was supposed to include £1 million for new players, £1 million to clear pressing debts, and £450,000 for training facilities. Gislason’s target was the Premier League, with a warning that it would take time, patience and money. “We are here to make Stoke City great again,” he said.
The first managerial decision was the one the consortium had, privately, been circling for weeks. Gary Megson had taken a poor side to the fringes of the play-off places and made himself popular with players and supporters. He was sacked anyway. He admitted to being “gutted.” Thordarson, who had been sitting beside the Icelandic ambassador, Thorsteinn Pálsson, for Megson’s last match — a 1–1 draw with Bristol City — became, the Guardian noted, Stoke’s sixth manager in two years. Martin Spinks, in the Sentinel that week, had already written that the outgoing Iceland national coach had “made no secret of his desire to move to Stoke.”
Thordarson’s first public words were careful. “I am confident I have the experience and knowledge to make Stoke City better and hopefully we will eventually be playing amongst the best.” To the Guardian he was blunter. “I can make the players better. I believe I have the track record and knowledge to improve them but, if they don’t want to work with me, they will soon find out the consequences.”
The fans, who had been begging for investment, met the new directors with Icelandic flags. The Sentinel has a photograph, from those first weeks, of a supporter in a Viking helmet standing in front of a banner that read “Twinned with Reykjavik.” In Thordarson’s first match, a 4–0 win at Wycombe Wanderers on 23 November 1999, they sang, “It’s just like watching Iceland.” Nicky Mohan, the captain, scored the fourth that afternoon. It was a joke, and a welcome, and, in the way these things are, a hostage to fortune.
Megson, watching his own end, had already had a taste of what he was losing. In his last game, when Mohan scored in that 1–1 draw with Bristol City, the players mobbed him on the touchline. “I think they all put two and two together and came up with the right answer about my future,” he said. “I am sorry to be going and it was an emotional occasion for me.” The relationship that replaced his, between Thordarson and Gislason, was never easy. The Sentinel, printing a picture of the two of them years later, captioned it with the line that stuck: “always an uneasy relationship.”
Akranes, and a draw with the world champions
Before the Britannia, and before the flags, there was Akranes. The Icelandic paper DV, writing on the morning the death was confirmed, set out a playing career that had almost all been spent in one place. Thordarson turned out for ÍA from 1972 to 1986, in 392 games, and was a league champion five times — 1974, 1975, 1977, 1983 and 1984 — as well as a cup winner five times. He won a single cap for Iceland in 1985. They remembered him as a defender who was competitive, resourceful and disciplined.
The managerial career began at the same club in 1987. The first big prize came at KA in 1989, when he made the Akureyri side Icelandic champions for the first time in their history. Back at ÍA he won the second tier in 1991, the title in 1992 and 1993, and the cup in 1993. He took KR to the cup in 1994 and 1995, then returned to Akranes and won the double in 1996. By the time the Iceland job came, in 1997, he was already the outstanding domestic coach of his generation.
The national-team spell lasted until 1999. DV recorded 11 wins in 25 matches, and a result that still gets trotted out whenever his name comes up in Reykjavík: a 1–1 draw, in September 1998, with a France side that had just won the World Cup. The French federation’s own report of the night at Laugardalsvöllur has Ríkharður Daðason scoring and Christophe Dugarry equalising. The Guardian, when Thordarson arrived at Stoke a year later, noted that his Iceland had also beaten Russia in Reykjavík, and had finished fourth in their qualifying group. It was not a campaign that took them to the European Championship, but it was enough to make English chairmen take the call.
He would, in time, send a small army of Icelanders to the Potteries. His sons were already footballers. The oldest, Thordur, and Bjarni would both play for him at Stoke; the club, in its tribute this week, named them as former Potters. The youngest, Jóhannes Karl, known as Joey, began at ÍA like the others, spent years in England, and, talking to UEFA in 2012, described a household in which the conversations were “always calm and professional” and in which their mother, born in Akranes, still went to watch whoever was playing. “Of course we have had different opinions over the years,” Joey said, “so we enjoy talking about football.” At Stoke, Bjarni would be rather more than a family anecdote. He would take the free-kick that put them up.
Wembley, and a banner for Matthews
The first season was a rush. Siggi Gíslason, on loan from KR, became the first of Thordarson’s Icelandic players to start a game. Einar Þór Daníelsson scored a solo goal on that opening afternoon at Wycombe and then drifted out of the side. The heavier lifting was still being done by the men Megson and Brian Little had left behind: Gavin Ward in goal, Clive Clarke, Nicky Mohan, Graham Kavanagh, Peter Thorne, James O’Connor. Kavanagh, the Sentinel later liked to note, had already scored Stoke’s last goal at the Victoria Ground and the first at the Britannia. He would add the first of the Icelandic era, and then one at Wembley.
On 16 April 2000, in the last Football League Trophy final at the old stadium, Stoke beat Bristol City 2–1 in front of more than 75,000 people. It was a crowd out of proportion to the competition, and it had a particular reason for being there. Sir Stanley Matthews had died in February, and, as Wembley’s own account of the afternoon has it, the match had already been dedicated to him. Kavanagh burst forward just after the half-hour, rode two challenges and lashed the ball past Billy Mercer. Paul Holland headed Bristol City level from a Brian Tinnion corner with a little over a quarter of an hour to play. The winner, ten minutes from the end, was a quickly taken free-kick from Gudjonsson, more clever work from Kavanagh, and Peter Thorne, in the six-yard box, who “simply could not miss.” Nicky Mohan climbed the steps and lifted the Auto Windscreens Shield. A banner with Matthews’s face was visible a few rows above the players’ heads.
Gavin Ward, looking back, put the feeling simply. “People can say what they like about competitions like the Autowindscreens Shield, but you can’t beat winning in front of 80,000 on a sunny day in the last year the old Wembley was open.” The precise attendance has always been a slightly movable feast. The size of the day is not.
Nine men at Priestfield
Promotion, that spring, was supposed to follow. Stoke finished in the play-offs and met Gillingham. They won the first leg at the Britannia 3–2, and even that left a sour taste. Thordarson, years later, was still talking about the first leg as much as the second. Three minutes of added time had been announced. Stoke were 3–1 up. In the 95th minute Andy Hessenthaler scored “a screamer.” “A good goal,” Thordarson told Dave Coxon, “but it was four and a half minutes over the 90 that was announced. I asked the referee about the time but he never explained where he got it from.”
The second leg, at Priestfield on 17 May, is one of those nights Stoke supporters can still do, in order, without being asked. Clive Clarke, already booked, was sent off just before half-time, the BBC recorded, “after throwing the ball — and Stoke’s Wembley hopes — away.” Early in the second half Graham Kavanagh went too, a straight red for an off-the-ball incident. Gillingham won 3–0 after extra time, 5–3 on aggregate, with goals from Barry Ashby, Iffy Onuora and Paul Smith. Rob Styles was the referee. Thordarson’s line at the time has followed him ever since: “The almighty God was looking elsewhere. Even He can’t put consistency into the referees. Only the FA can do that.”
He did not mellow. “When I look back my blood still boils when I think of that second leg,” he said two decades later. He thought Kavanagh had been punched, was bleeding, and had pushed the man who punched him. “Surprise, surprise only one incident was spotted.” Paul Connor, he said, hit both posts before the ball bounced out. Down to nine men they still took the tie to extra time. “I’ve no doubt had we have had 11 players on we would have made it to Wembley for the second time that season.” The Sentinel, on the anniversary, ran a photograph of Thordarson close to tears. Styles, it noted, was widely believed to have been given full marks by the assessor and was given the final, which Gillingham won.
One more year, closely monitored
The second season was heavier with expectation and heavier with Icelanders. Brynjar Gunnarsson arrived as a club-record signing. Ríkharður Daðason, the man who had scored against France, came in too. Bjarni was already there. Arnar Gunnlaugsson would come, leave, and come back on loan; years later Thordarson would watch him become manager of Iceland and allow himself a quiet satisfaction. “I’ve made a lot of coaches, both current and former,” he told RÚV last September. “I follow them closely and I enjoy it.”
It was not a straight line. Dave Proudlove, in his account of those seasons, remembered a horrible fortnight that autumn: dumped out of the FA Cup by non-league Nuneaton Borough, beaten 8–0 at home by Liverpool in the League Cup — so badly, he wrote, that the scoreboard operator briefly had it at 9–0 — and then beaten 3–1 at home by Luton Town. The side recovered, and finished fifth again, but there was already a tension with the board about money and about the squad. In the play-offs they met Walsall. The first leg at the Britannia was 0–0. In the second, at the Bescot Stadium on 16 May 2001, Kavanagh volleyed Stoke in front from a Daðason header, a strike the BBC called unstoppable. Then Gavin Ward palmed a Tom Bennett corner into his own net just before half-time, and Walsall scored three times in a quarter of an hour after the break. Peter Thorne, sent on from the bench, scored late. It finished 4–2, 4–2 on aggregate. Dave Proudlove, writing on this site, remembered the shock in the support when Thorne had started on the bench at all, and the sense that patience with the project was starting to thin.
The board met the next day. Phil Rawlins, who had bought a stake in the club in 2000 and later wrote about the night in his book Defying Expectations, told the Sentinel what happened once Thordarson had left the room. “The chairman called for him to be sacked, and that shocked some of the board because he was their guy. They were like, ‘What the hell is this?'” The board, as Rawlins described it, was three Icelanders, Peter Coates, Keith Humphreys and himself, with Gislason holding the casting vote. The Icelanders argued among themselves. “Some backed him to the hilt, while the other group, which the chairman represented, thought he wasn’t up to the job and should go.” Rawlins argued for consistency. “The board reluctantly agreed to give him one more year, but he’d be closely monitored. He had a reprieve.”
Ninian Park, and a goal off a backside
The year of the reprieve began with a sale that still stings. Kavanagh and Thorne, the two men who had scored at Wembley, went to Cardiff City, Kavanagh for a reported £1 million. Rawlins was vehemently opposed to letting Thorne go and was out-voted. The replacements, in the side that would actually go up, included Peter Handyside, signed from Grimsby and made captain, and Sergei Shtaniuk, a Belarusian centre-back the Independent would later call excellent. Thordarson, after Handyside’s death in 2024, remembered a captain “cool and calm and committed,” a man who had helped Shtaniuk settle and who “always approached everything with respect.”
Souleymane Oularé arrived in the winter, made a debut from the bench at Northampton, and then almost died. A blood clot on the lungs put him in hospital; Jürgen Vandeurzen, the Sentinel later wrote, interpreted for him. He was all but ruled out for the season. He would play 19 minutes of a play-off semi-final and score the most famous goal of his English career with a part of his body he had not aimed.
Cardiff, by the spring of 2002, had won 10 and drawn three of their previous 13 games, and they had Thorne and Kavanagh in the side. They won the first leg at the Britannia 2–1, Robert Earnshaw and Leo Fortune-West scoring, Deon Burton pulling one back. For the second leg, on 1 May, Stoke were limited to 1,780 tickets, all for season-ticket holders, and travel had to be on official coaches. A little under 800 made the trip. Another 7,000 watched a beam-back at the Britannia. There had been serious trouble when the clubs had met two years earlier, and the night at Ninian Park would not be gentle: missiles on the pitch, a hold-up at a throw-in, and, after the final whistle, police in riot gear and a long wait before the coaches got a safe route out of the city. The football, somehow, was even stranger.
For a long time it looked as if Cardiff would see it out. The stadium announcer, with a few minutes remaining and the aggregate still in the home side’s favour, asked supporters to stay off the pitch so the players could do a lap of honour. Then Clive Clarke ran the left, Bjarni headed the cross back, and James O’Connor, from eight yards, slid the ball past Neil Alexander. Extra time. Stoke were the stronger side in it. With about five minutes left, Spencer Prior was penalised on the edge of his own area, a challenge the BBC thought “innocuous at best.” O’Connor took the free-kick. The ball hit Oularé, on as a substitute for the first time since that night at Northampton, and went in. Prior was then sent off for his protest. It finished 2–0 after extra time, 3–2 on aggregate. Oularé’s backside had sent Stoke through. It was, the BBC noted, their first win in a play-off semi-final at the fifth attempt.
Rawlins, watching, had his own version of the free-kick, which is too good not to leave in the room. “I was thinking, ‘What is he doing? James has never taken a free kick in his life’… But he stepped up and hit the ball. Oulare was running across the box in the opposite direction and the ball hit his backside, was deflected past the goalkeeper, and we won. Off Oulare’s ass. You couldn’t make it up.”
“I would love to stay”
Ten days later they were back in Cardiff, at the Millennium Stadium, against Steve Coppell’s Brentford. The occasion had a small superstition attached to it: 11 previous big matches at the ground had been won by the team in the north dressing room. Stoke were in the south, and, at the end, Deon Burton and Wayne Thomas paraded a banner that read “Dressing room jinx my a***.” The football was less theatrical than Ninian Park and a good deal more controlled. Both goals, as the Independent noted, came from set pieces taken by Icelandic players, “appropriately since the club is owned and funded by businessmen from that country.” In the 16th minute Arnar Gunnlaugsson swung in a corner, Chris Iwelumo flicked on, and Burton, on loan from Derby, scored. Just before half-time Bjarni’s free-kick was deflected in by Ben Burgess. Coppell called them “two terrible goals.” Neil Cutler spent the second half under siege and did not waver. It finished 2–0, in front of 42,523, most of them making a noise about going up.
“It has taken two-and-a-half years to get into the First Division — but we have completed the job,” Thordarson said. He also, in the same breath, sounded like a man who already knew the ground was moving. His contract was up at the end of June. He was about to take a five-week holiday. He had heard nothing from the owners. “I would love to stay,” he told the Independent. “But I have no meeting planned with the owners. But I do have meetings with other people. If I got a contract in front of me tomorrow, I would sign it.” Ronald Atkin, writing that Sunday, wondered whether the afternoon might “save the job” of the manager. It did not.
The untenable relationship
On Thursday 16 May the club issued a statement. The board recognised his contribution to promotion. It felt that the long-term interests of the club would be best served by a new manager. “The working relationship between the board and the current manager is untenable.” He had “not always appreciated the financial constraints within which he has had to work,” and the board did not think that would improve, “especially given the uncertainty regarding future income from television rights.” They thanked him “for initially bringing the Icelandic investors together.” Gislason called the relationship untenable; the BBC and the Guardian both led on the word.
Thordarson’s reply was short and, in its way, final. “This isn’t a football decision and I don’t believe all the board have been involved in my departure.”
Rawlins, looking back, said the fans were shocked. “The year had been fractious behind the scenes and Thordarson was fiery … but no one expected he’d be fired after he had won us promotion. The consortium was clearly split, but the chairman had the casting vote and Gudjon was out. My view was he had proven himself. It was difficult, but I would have kept him as manager.” The Sentinel has a photograph of supporters protesting outside the Britannia. Steve Cotterill, who had just taken Cheltenham into the Football League, was appointed in his place and was gone by November. The Icelandic project would limp on until 2006, when Peter Coates bought the club back. The Premier League, Gislason’s “main target,” arrived later, under different ownership and a different manager.
Thordarson was, the Sentinel wrote this week, gutted. He took the club to heart and kept following it, through good times and bad. He even suggested, with his tongue in his cheek, that he might come back and do the sort of job John Rudge had once done for him. It was a nice line, and it was not the job he was offered.
After the Potteries
The rest of the managerial life was a long coda, and it was not a straight one either. He had a spell at Start in Norway, then, in England, Barnsley in 2003-04, Notts County in 2005-06 and Crewe Alexandra in 2008-09. At Crewe, where he was only the third manager in a quarter of a century, the chairman, John Bowler, told BBC Radio Stoke that he had “all the attributes we were looking for” and that Dario Gradi had played a big part in the appointment. He coached, among others, Alex Neil and Steven Schumacher, a fact he enjoyed reminding the Sentinel about when those two men later found themselves in dugouts of their own. There were further jobs at home and in the Faroe Islands: Grindavík, NSÍ Runavík, and, last of all, Víkingur Ólafsvík, where, Mannlíf recorded, he finished in 2022.
He had always been a father in the game as well as a coach. Bjarni’s free-kick in the final is the family moment English football will keep. Thordur’s years at the club are in the official tribute. Joey’s career ran through Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and a string of English sides, and then back to ÍA, with the old man, on at least one afternoon, standing on the touchline at Grindavík and shouting “Go Yellows” in the colours that were also ÍA’s. The discussions at dinner, Joey insisted, stayed calm.
In 2023 came the diagnosis. He had been open, in Icelandic interviews, about how far the illness had gone. He had been using a wheelchair, the Sentinel reported, and was still hoping to get fit enough to play golf. In September, on RÚV, he said he hoped he could “shake up my body a bit so I can get out and enjoy the good days.” He died on a Friday morning in November, aged 71.
Stoke’s message was the one that will be quoted in the Potteries. The BBC remembered the four English clubs and the Parkinson’s. DV called him one of the most successful and influential coaches in the history of the Icelandic game, and set out the titles at KA, ÍA and KR so that nobody at home would be left with only the English chapter. The English chapter is still the one that feels unfinished. He brought the money to the door, put a side on the pitch that could win at Wembley, survived two play-off defeats that would have finished a lesser manager, and, on a Saturday in Cardiff, did what he had been hired to do. On the Thursday they thanked him for bringing the investors together, and they let him go.
He would probably have argued about that for the rest of the afternoon, and then, because he did not stop following the club, he would have asked what the score was.
