Like everyone else, I don’t know where Kristjaan Speakman was or exactly what he was doing on the day that Sunderland sealed Europa League qualification by virtue of our 2-1 home victory over Chelsea.
The romantic in me would like to think he was standing covertly at the back of the South Stand, disguised sufficiently not to be recognised and taking in the game like everyone else, but it’s probably fair to say that even if he wasn’t there in person, he would’ve felt an overwhelming amount of pride
at what we were able to accomplish by seeing off the Blues and results elsewhere falling favourably on the final day of the season.
It’s been just over four years since the first hurdle of Speakman’s ambitious plan for Sunderland — that of achieving promotion back to the Championship — was overcome.
Playoff success over Sheffield Wednesday and Wycombe under the streetwise management of Alex Neil and the birth of ‘Til The End triggered a new dawn on Wearside, encompassing the arrivals of the likes of Dan Ballard, the emergence of Chris Rigg, Amad’s loan spell, the freewheeling style we adopted under Tony Mowbray and all of the drama that followed.
In one sense, it still feels very recent; in another, it feels like a snapshot of a different era and since then, a new version of our great club has been born.
This is an incarnation of Sunderland AFC where exciting young talents can find opportunities, where a clear playing style and identity underpins our efforts on the field, and where you’ll only find players with the right character, work ethic and team-driven mindset. Qualifying for Europe was a seismic achievement but it’s one of the fruits of years of labour and an effort that Speakman was at the very heart of.
He’s no longer here, of course, after departing midway through the 2025/2026 season.
Florent Ghisolfi has been tasked with continuing to oversee the development of the first team, but just as we do with players that play key roles in certain successes and depart with the acclaim of supporters to accompany them, I think it’s right to acknowledge just how big an influence Speakman had and how enormous the scale of the task he embarked upon actually was.
If Sunderland AFC of the mid-to-late 2010s, battered by years of mismanagement, haunted by fan apathy and crippled by horrific spending, was a charred husk of a football club, drifting along with little direction, little hope and no real plan for the future, the 2026 version is something new entirely.
Speakman may no longer be calling the shots but much of the framework that he put into place remains — it’s simply been modified, beefed up to suit the demands of the top flight and given a major injection of inancial firepower in the process.
Others may sneer and denigrate our efforts, and it’s true that we may yet make further big-money sales just as we did in the case of Jobe, but Speakman was shrewd enough to realise that we simply had to do things differently in order to thrive — is the evidence not there for all to see?
Promotion to the Premier League in 2025 opened up countless avenues.
Europa League football will do so to an even greater degree, but this whole process began to take shape and gain momentum in a backwater league with a man whose vision seemed grandiose and who still had to win over vast swathes of the fanbase even after we began to make waves in the second tier.
It’s fair to say that he didn’t get everything right at Sunderland.
He found himself under pressure whenever we hit choppy waters and the sheer volume of dissenting letters we received at Roker Report following a turbulent 2023/2024 season marked by iffy recruitment and poor coaching appointments illustrated the sheer strength of feeling when mistakes were made.
That said, despite the doubts surrounding the club’s supposed level of “ambition” during his tenure, the one thing you could never accuse him of lacking was conviction. Players were backed to flourish, the pathway from the academy to the first team was reborn and we actually started to do things in a manner befitting a club of our stature.
Speakman also stood firm when Alex Neil walked out and left the club in the lurch at the start of 2022/2023. A year later, he took the brickbats when Ross Stewart was sold and he also backed himself to make amends during 2024/2025, with the appointment of Régis Le Bris in the summer of 2024 representing one of his most pivotal calls.
It’s also true that his transfer business often veered between “hit and miss” (that said, when he did hit his targets, he tended to do so emphatically) and he often seemed to spend as much time trying to convince the fans to stick with him as he did when it came to overhauling things on the footballing side, but make no mistake: much of what we see, experience and share in nowadays is descended from his original blueprint and for that, we should be thankful.
The respective paths taken by Sunderland and Speakman during the coming years ought to be intriguing to witness.
One would imagine that most clubs in the Championship would take an interest in hiring him, such was his body of work at the Stadium of Light, and we’ll naturally be targeting even greater progress under Ghisolfi, but the foundations that were laid on Speakman’s watch feel stronger than ever, and that’s surely the most ringing endorsement anyone could offer.
He never said it publicly — not in direct terms, at least — but to my mind, his remit was to help Sunderland become a club where players could thrive, careers could be launched and standards set and maintained, instead of the footballing graveyard it once was.
He succeeded. And now it’s down to Ghisolfi and his team to continue to carry the baton — hopefully into an even more successful era for our club.
