Sunderland: A club rebooted, renewed and one game from a Premier League return

It was heading towards midnight as a packed Tyne & Wear Metro train pulled away from the station at the Stadium of Light. The smiling faces crammed in were soon staring at mobile phone footage of the moment they had all just witnessed live: the stooping header from Dan Ballard in the last seconds of extra-time in the Championship play-off semi-final against Coventry City that takes Sunderland to Wembley on Saturday.

There were fresh roars after each replay of Ballard’s goal, then the comments (plural) that this was the best moment in the 28-year history of the Stadium of Light — even better than Jermain Defoe’s volley against Newcastle United in 2015.

Maybe it was. If so, it will be due to the dramatic lateness of Ballard’s goal, to the potential prize it sets up — a return to the Premier League — but also because of where Sunderland have been these past eight seasons since dropping miserably out of the top tier in 2017 with a point less than Leicester City have this season.

Sunderland suffered another joyless relegation a year later and then spent four seasons — four — in League One. It was unthinkable.

But in December 2020, Kristjaan Speakman was appointed as the club’s sporting director, and a day later Lee Johnson arrived as head coach. This followed the dismissal of Phil Parkinson, who was to find compensation in his next role… at Wrexham.

Something was happening at Sunderland and two months later the club formally announced Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, aged 23, had acquired “a controlling interest” and was to become chairman.

Change was welcomed on Wearside, although the fact that existing directors remained caused some unease. Stewart Donald, whose questionable ownership had been captured on the Netflix series ‘Sunderland ‘Til I Die’, hailed the “vision and desire” of his young successor.

Funnily enough, the Netflix series was being viewed in the United States by Parkinson’s next employer, Rob McElhenney.

“I was watching Sunderland ‘Til I Die and I was falling in love with this team and these people and the story,” McElhenney told the BBC. “In all honesty, it was the first time I had understood the concept of promotion and relegation. … I recognised that if you can get relegated, of course then you can also get promoted … so even though I couldn’t afford to buy say Liverpool, or Sunderland for that matter, or Manchester City, Manchester United, maybe we could afford to buy a lower-league team and have them ascend through the ranks.”

McElhenney looked at Hartlepool United, 20 miles south of Sunderland, but settled on Wrexham and soon brought in Parkinson. Should Sunderland not succeed against Sheffield United, Parkinson will return to the Stadium of Light next season. Wrexham have not played at Sunderland for 46 years.

The Welsh club is transformed. Sunderland do not merit that description — yet. But they are re-formed.

“From the first day I walked in, to now? It’s a different club,” Luke O’Nien, the longest-serving senior player, tells The Athletic. “That’s my personal opinion. To me, it’s chalk and cheese.”

It is a view shared by many supporters.

Sunderland’s trajectory has been upwards, though not without interruptions, dips and controversies. Johnson could not force the team past Lincoln City in a League One play-off semi-final in Covid-affected 2021; his team then lost 6-0 at Bolton Wanderers in February 2022. Alex Neil came in and took Sunderland up via a play-off win at Wembley against Wycombe Wanderers in May 2022, but walked out to Stoke City three months later. Tony Mowbray and Michael Beale followed Neil, with Mike Dodds a four-month caretaker last season.

Regis Le Bris became the fifth manager of the new ownership last summer.

All the while, the club focused on reducing its age profile, buying young and, particularly under Mowbray, developing a playing style that had neutrals’ heads turning. The eight-man move finished by Jack Clarke at Reading in September 2022 epitomised this.

Now, here they are, the youngest squad in the Championship, facing the Blades at Wembley. Sunderland have assets — Chris Rigg (17), Jobe Bellingham (19), Eliezer Mayenda (20), captain Dan Neil (23), and more — not financial burdens as in the 2017 relegation team, the likes of Jack Rodwell and Didier Ndong.

And they are 90 minutes away from a return to the Premier League.

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February 2021: on a Tuesday night at Shrewsbury Town, Sunderland lost 2-1 to fall to seventh in their third season in League One. It was another dire result, a fortnight after drawing at home against Gillingham.

Shrewsbury, however, is memorable as it brought a first public sighting of Louis-Dreyfus, sitting in the stands, two months after the young French-Swiss had signalled a takeover.

Louis-Dreyfus has a well-told history in football — his father, Robert, owned French club Marseille until his death in 2009 and mother, Margarita, retains a minority shareholding. Forbes’ most recent estimate of her wealth stood at $5.1billion (£3.8bn), though spending at Sunderland has never been lavish.

Jim Rodwell was Sunderland’s chief executive then and was part of the negotiations. Now at Charlton Athletic, who are at Wembley in the League One play-off on Sunday, Rodwell tells The Athletic: “This was never going to be about a rich family throwing money at a football club. It was always going to be about building something carefully, growing it organically and trying to be better. That was always Kyril’s MO.

“These things (owning a club) are always going to cost you money but this was never anything other than what it’s become. That’s one of Kyril’s greatest traits. He can drown out the noise and he doesn’t panic.”

Either side of Louis-Dreyfus’s formal arrival came the appointment of Speakman, who in turn brought in Stuart Harvey as head of recruitment. Speakman had worked inside Birmingham City’s productive academy and knew the Bellingham family; Harvey had been at Blackburn Rovers for five years as the club gained a reputation for developing young players, sometimes loanees such as Harvey Elliott from Liverpool.

Soon, Sunderland’s recruitment began to shift.

In came players such as Dennis Cirkin, 19, from Tottenham Hotspur, where he had not made the first team, Trai Hume, 19, from Linfield in the Irish League for £150,000, and two young players on loan from Bayern Munich: Leon Dajaku and Thorben Hoffmann. Out went older players such as Max Power and Will Grigg. Sunderland’s squad was being reshaped. Callum Doyle, 17, came from Manchester City. Amad, 20, would join from Manchester United.

Within football, Sunderland were altering perceptions of what the club was. Rather than old and jaded, it was young and vibrant — in the 1-1 FA Cup tie at Fulham in January 2023, Sunderland completed the game with the youngest team in their 143-year history. Earlier that month, Rigg had become the youngest outfield player at the age of 15 years and 202 days.

“The way Kyril has taken the club forward and grown it is exactly the way he described he would before he even had it,” Rodwell says.

‘Bold, creative, industrious’, became club branding, its values. Eyes often roll at corporate language, but O’Nien and others inside the club say it is phrasing they can and do return to.

“To go back to then (Shrewsbury),” says O’Nien, the lone player still at Sunderland from that night, “there’s been a beautiful evolution and credit to the club, to the owner and everyone underneath for — so far — executing a really good game plan. Obviously, there’s a long way to go.

“Football is really hard to plan. I remember having a meeting in this room where it was said ‘Here’s the game plan, here’s what we want you to buy into’. We were then held against that and, for example, when managers came in, the overall plan was always referenced. The values of the club are up all around the training ground, they’re in the gym.

“There’s an identity that the owner and those upstairs put in place.”

In July 2023, Speakman said “to get to where we’ve got so far we’ve had to have a bit of a start-up mentality”, and addressed gripes the club had not spent £3m on a player under the new ownership, as some rivals and parachute-payment clubs spent freely.

“We’re an evolving club, an evolving team, an evolving football operation,” Speakman said.

Largely, the fanbase has been patient. There is an awareness on Wearside and at comparable clubs — Sheffield United, for instance — that in modern, economically-distorted football, achievement may not be measured in trophies but in impact locally and in delivering an identity and, if possible, excitement: the Reading goal, the Ballard header etc.

But an off-field strategy, one which prioritises player trading and forms part of a wider plan “to be run sustainably”, in the words of chief business officer David Bruce (formerly of MLS), has divided opinion. To some, sustainability is a byword for frugality.

For others, the approach is long overdue.

Sunderland spent 10 years in the Premier League and still wound up in grim financial straits. Donald’s arrival in 2018 was laden with promises and it transpired he and his consortium — of which shareholder Juan Sartori was part — had leveraged Sunderland’s second-year parachute payment to buy the club. They then wrote off their obligation to repay £20.5million taken from their coffers.

Louis-Dreyfus stemmed concerns and, though still losing money, Sunderland’s finances are improved. Infrastructure has seen investment after years of neglect. Wages are middling for the Championship. Gate receipts, buoyed by 40,000 crowds, outstrip some Premier League clubs. Debt, once the club’s scourge, is low and mostly owed to the owners, interest-free.

Sustainability is close to impossible in the Championship but Sunderland fare better than most: 16 clubs in the division lost more money than them last season.

Louis-Dreyfus has upset supporters a couple of times: when his “controlling interest” was revealed to be a 41 per cent stake in February 2022 and when Sunderland redecorated a hospitality area in the colours of rivals Newcastle United ahead of an FA Cup third round tie last season. “I regret to have let you down,” he said.

But, says Rodwell, “his motives were undoubted. It’s unavoidable that he comes from a very wealthy dynasty but he loves football. He’s football crazy. He’s been around football all his life.

“He wanted to prove to people that he can turn something around and that he can build something. I also think he wanted to honour his father’s legacy.”

Another ambition stated in the club’s 2023 accounts was to return to the Premier League “within five years of acquiring control”. To accomplish that tomorrow would be ahead of schedule.

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When Le Bris entered the building last summer on Wearside, little was known about the 48-year-old from Brittany — other than he was not Will Still. Still had been shown around the club, under cover, in May, but chose to join Lens in France’s Ligue 1.

Both Still and Le Bris, who left Lorient after their demotion to Ligue 2, must have looked at how Sunderland had finished the 2023-24 season and wondered what could be done without an injection of cash and personnel. Sunderland tumbled from sixth to 16th in their last 15 games, winning only two and scoring only eight goals.

But Le Bris had a past in youth football and had led Lorient to 10th place in 2022-23. Plus, Sunderland were not going to suddenly change a policy based on the recruitment of players under 24, often under 20. Le Bris at least knew the reality.

Nor were Sunderland going to rip up self-imposed prudence, though around £2.5m was committed to the signing of Serbian Milan Aleksic on his 19th birthday last August — and £16m has been committed to sign Enzo Le Fee should Sunderland win promotion.

Aleksic came the week after Clarke departed for Ipswich Town for £17m. Having been recruited from Tottenham for under £1m, the club’s model had some transfer market vindication. Ross Stewart had also been sold to Southampton for £10m and then, recently, an agreement was struck to sell Tommy Watson to Brighton for £10m next month. Watson will be at Wembley.

How Sunderland would cope without Clarke was Wearside’s question. He started the first two games of this Championship season, at Cardiff City and home to Sheffield Wednesday; both were won.

Game three was Burnley at home. Sunderland won it 1-0 with a goal from Clarke’s successor on the left, Romaine Mundle. Another former Spurs player, acquired from Standard Liege for around £1m aged 21, Mundle is an example of shrewd recruitment and thoughtful succession planning.

Victory at home to Oxford United meant that as November began, Sunderland had nine wins from 12 games and were five points clear at the top of the Championship.

The club held an open training session at the stadium. Neil spoke to The Athletic. Neil was 22 when Le Bris arrived and, a few days before the opening fixture at Cardiff, was made captain. A local boy, “obviously I said: ‘Yes!’” Neil explained. He then talked through Le Bris’ coaching style and impact.

“He’s very calm — whether we’re losing, drawing 1-1, winning 3-0, it’s the same character we see, very assured,” Neil said. “He looks at the game in a strategic way, rather than an emotional way. He looks with a bird’s-eye view.

“He was very structured at the start. We didn’t really have a natural No 6 in the squad and I’d played that role before. We did a lot of structure-based practice in pre-season and I think he liked how I was in that role, how vocal I was. I understood how he wanted the team to function. It’s pretty much a 4-3-3, but we used to play with two kind of pivots. Now it’s a single pivot with two 8s in front.

“He (Le Bris) is very big on side triangles — full-back, winger, No 8. I think he likes the No 6 to be the glue in that. It’s all about triangles, triangles all over. He’s made it simple. Slowly, layers are being added, me dropping into a back five, things like that.”

All was positive. Six months on, Neil sits down at the training ground and considers a fourth-place finish, the Coventry play-off games and the run of five losses preceding them.

“When we had that little bad spell at the end of the season,” he says, “we had a meeting. We said we’d stopped doing what had got us to the top of the league. That last-minute goal at Leeds (in mid-February) took the wind out of our sails. We weren’t doing the things we were good at in terms of structure, those triangles. We said we’d get back to doing what we’re good at.”

Coventry away demonstrated renewed commitment to the structure, though it looked unambitious and restrictive at home and Ballard’s goal was unrepresentative of the second leg’s flow.

It gives Sunderland a fifth Wembley appearance in six years. The focus on youth disguises the experience within the squad — Neil has 197 first-team appearances — and continuity of on-pitch relationships. O’Nien, 30, has played in the previous four at Wembley — two play-off finals, two EFL Trophy finals; two won, two lost.

If boiled down to one word, the chalk-and-cheese difference O’Nien has witnessed since Shrewsbury is: “Systems”.

He says: “There are now processes in place: team culture, demands in training, systems, direction and buy-in from everybody. There’s clarity. In training, we know exactly what we want: we don’t do a possession drill for the sake of it, it’s because it’s how we’ll set up at the weekend. We work all week on patterns.

“So we’re always referencing a strategy, systems; there are systems for everything.”

O’Nien took to Le Bris, someone he knew nothing of, after the first week when he went to the new coach to ask where he could improve.

“He (Le Bris) went onto his computer and he had eight games of each of us broken down into clips,” O’Nien says. “He said: ‘Two secs, there’s video footage — I want that, that and that’. Before he came into the building, he had footage of every one of us. I bought into that straightaway.

“He didn’t come in and just take over. He observed, he learned, did his research. He was drip-feeding things into us. We’d review it, and if you didn’t do it, he’d ask: ‘Why not? What’s the problem?’

“That’s the process. We always go back to the team structure. Me, personally, I always used to think: ‘What do I need to do?’ Now I think: ‘What does the team need me to do?’ That’s how it’s affected me. I see that in other people’s game, especially in the play-offs; players making sacrifices, running. When you’ve got 11 people thinking ‘What does the team need?’, that’s a powerful formula.

“You’re in between three, four, five managers and we’ve all got history — he (Le Bris) appreciated that. It’s easy to dismiss the managers before, but they’re just as valuable to where the club is now. Alex Neil was very good, put in clear structures, more detail. Tony Mowbray was an incredible man for this football club. He has this way of empowering people — look what he did to Amad. He went from not playing much, then with eight or nine games under Mr Mowbray, Amad has played some of the best football this club’s ever seen.”

Perhaps the word Le Bris uses most in press conferences — and, it seems, in meetings — is “connection” and O’Nien says “that’s probably the biggest thing about this team — it’s a word we use in team talks. We can only be as strong as our weakest player.

“The beauty is we have one hell of a squad and we’re all connected, but if one person is disconnected, the level of training will fall to that player’s level. So it’s important to have that connection. It’s fine to have off days, but that’s where the connection brings him back in”.

Four years ago, as Louis-Dreyfus took his seat at Shrewsbury, disconnection was Sunderland’s dominant theme. And, of course, Wembley could bring disappointment and, from there, questions.

But the response on the Metro to Ballard’s goal speaks of renewal on and off the pitch. The club is rebooted. Fans like their team.

“I love the players to bits,” O’Nien says, “because they’ve put in the work. The work has cemented the future. Whether that’s the Premier League or the Championship, we’ll turn up to pre-season in July and the work continues.

“You don’t change the strategy, we go bigger and better.”

Additional reporting: Chris Weatherspoon

(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; George Wood, Molly Darlington/Getty Images)

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