Well, I wrote my last editorial on 12th October, which you can read here, and I explained my worries about how things were going then. It’s now three weeks down the road, and we’re in big trouble.
Bottom of the Premier League table after a quarter of the season has gone, four points behind Coventry in 16th, with only one side in the league having scored fewer goals (Forest in 19th) and only one having conceded more (Palace in 18th).
Like I said, we’re right in the sh*t.
Our last three games against
Bournemouth, Leeds and Coventry were a chance to turn our season around – and we took one point from a possible nine. Looking at our next five league games, I just don’t know where the points will come from if the Sunderland from last season doesn’t turn up soon.
For too many weeks now, we’ve been saying we expect a reaction in the next game, but time and again, it hasn’t happened. At some point, you simply run out of next games – one way or another.
The reaction of the players and the manager after the goalless draw against Leeds was that we’d turned a corner, but that was all relative when compared to the dross served up in the majority of games in the Premier League so far.
The way I see the season so far is that we turned up in the first half at Brentford, then at home to Arsenal and away at Pep-less City. And that’s it for me. Two-and-a-half games out of nine where I reckon we’ve turned up with the same commitment with which we approached most of last season.
At the moment, we’re in danger of throwing the last two years of progress down the lav, where they end up as one of our many “what if?” moments, rather than a fundamental long-term reset of Sunderland’s place within football’s hierarchy in England and in Europe.
But how the f**k did we get here…? (And feel free to add to it, because there’s bound to be something I’ve missed.)
Recruitment…
Qualifying for the Europa League should have been an opportunity to attract the next level of player to add real quality to the squad. But, in summary, we made two major signings for a combined total of around £60m, and they have started one game between them in the Premier League.
One. Out of a possible total of 18 between them.
What is the situation with Fofana and Methalie?!
Does Le Bris just not fancy them? Did Ghisolfi want us to play a different way and the manager isn’t on the same page? Are they not settling? Are they not fit enough? Or did Le Bris and Ghisolfi agree they’d bring them in but not play them in the Premier League for a while?
If you were Kyril Louis-Dreyfus and someone had spent that amount of money, and got you to make the trip to beg one of them to join the project, with nothing to show for it in the first quarter of the season, then you’d be asking what the money was spent on and whether your manager and director of football were actually talking to each other.
It calls into question the relationship between Le Bris and Ghisolfi when looking at the team selections. Either the manager is expecting different results by repeating the same decisions, or he feels like he hasn’t got the personnel where it would make a difference. The side has been screaming out for freshening up with changes for weeks, but the manager sticks with virtually the same group of players for his starting XIs.
With the others, Thomas Meunier looks a good signing on a free transfer – but he arrived to add numbers rather than be a signing to kick us on, and he was the only new name who played in the first two games of the season.
Danso’s form has been, erm… up and down, and although Ahoka looks a bargain, he hasn’t started a Premier League game. Then there’s a young lad who arrived to be the third striker, who wasn’t used as that when we needed it.
At this point in the proceedings, how can we say anything else other than our summer recruitment has failed?
Where are the players to improve us from last year?
Looking at the impact of the new players so far, we’ve at best stood still, but so many players have regressed this season that we’ve visibly gone backwards. All of those players might leave the club as heroes, but we’re in November and none of them have added anything to what we had last season yet.
Nobody was expecting anything like the summer of 2025, but we thought we might have one or two players who would add real quality, provide something different and, oh… actually play in the Premier League.
Attitude…
My gut tells me that things changed the day after that game against Chelsea. As a club, it felt like we thought we’d made it. Or, in young people’s speak, we’d completed it.
We began to look forward to this season during the summer, and too many conversations were geared towards success in a cup competition. Not enough emphasis, or any at all from the coaching staff, manager and/or players was focused on getting 40 points on the board as quickly as possible to act as the foundation for anything else to follow.
We forgot where we are in the process a little. We had no focus. We had no collective target to act as a rallying call this time around that everyone could get behind. It felt like we all thought our place in the Premier League would just look after itself.
If we’d finished 17th last season and just stayed up, all our focus would have been on repeating the feat. We seemed to skip a step because we’d finished seventh. We’re a long way from consolidating our place in the Premier League.
But it just feels like the players thought results would come easily this season, and Nordi Mukiele pretty much said exactly that publicly. We kicked off the season at Portman Road, and it was like the players had forgotten how much they needed to put into games last season to get every single one of those 54 points we squeezed out of the fixture list last year.
I’m watching Coventry, Hull and Ipswich celebrate getting results, and it reminds me of what we were like twelve months ago. It reminds me of the edge we’ve lost.
What’s now…?
As a little quirk, yesterday was exactly 54 years to the day since Alan Brown was sacked as Sunderland manager in 1972. I was checking all day, fully expecting Régis Le Bris to be added to the list of managers who had left the club on 1st November down the years.
That’s not to say I want it to happen. I’m not sure I do. He’s good at what he does, and this is his first proper sticky patch, but what manager has come back from this sort of situation in the history of our club?
I can’t think of any who have turned it around after getting us into a mess as manager.
I want Régis Le Bris to lead us out of it, but I don’t understand why he thinks repeating the same things will produce different results. Decisions around substitutions have stopped making sense. But with the squad as it is, I struggle to think that changing the manager will change much.
Kyril Louis-Dreyfus has proven himself to be ruthless over the years. Whether it was Lee Johnson, Tony Mowbray, Kristjaan Speakman, Stuart Harvey, David Bruce or Tom Burwell, top people have come and gone, and the club has swiftly moved on.
Le Bris had earned his chance to turn it around, but timing is everything, and with an international break to follow our next game against Chelsea, it feels like it’s last-chance saloon for the manager if he makes it to kick-off.
But whether it’s Le Bris making changes or getting a tune out of his tried and tested players, something needs to give. Otherwise, we’re sleepwalking back to the Championship at this rate.
