On October 4 2015, Sunderland manager Dick Advocat resigned following a winless start to the Premier League season.
Advocaat had been appointed in March of the same year on a temporary basis following the sacking of Gus Poyet.
Initially tasked with staving off relegation during 2014/2015 and contracted until the end of the season, he took over with Sunderland sitting in seventeenth place and only a single point above the drop zone — Poyet having been sacked following a humbling 0-4 defeat at home to Aston
Villa.
The first game of Advocaat’s tenure ended in a 1-0 defeat away at West Ham but the side already looked better defensively. Plans for a more solid structure had gone well until an injury to Wes Brown forced a reshuffle and despite that, Jermain Defoe missed a great opportunity to put us ahead.
The game ended in controversial fashion when a blatant foul on Seb Larsson went unpunished and The Hammers scored from the resulting attack on eighty eight minutes. Advocaat was surprisingly generous towards the referee in his post-match press conference while everyone else was understandably fuming, and opposing manager Sam Allardyce would ironically replace Advocaat later in the year!
Following a two week international break, Sunderland’s next challenge was a home game against The Visitors.
Advocaat was quoted at the time as saying our football wasn’t going to be pretty and that results were the most important thing. He also seemed quite happy that the side wasn’t full of internationals who would spend the two weeks away with their country and that this gave him time to work on the squad for the upcoming games.
On 5 April, Advocaat took charge of his second game and his first at the Stadium of Light, a Wear-Tyne derby that would prove to be the start of our push for safety. A goal that lives long in the memory was the difference on the day — Defoe’s volley that I consider to be one of the best I’ve ever seen on Wearside. Any excuse to rewatch it is taken, so fill your boots!
1-0 win became the seventh game in an unbeaten streak against them up the road stretching back to August 2011 and quite incredibly our fifth win on the bounce. At time of writing this unbeaten run has continued and now stands at eleven matches in the league (No, the FA Cup doesn’t count — I don’t even remember that happening!).
A home defeat to Crystal Palace tempered enthusiasm before a draw away at Stoke and back-to-back wins against Southampton and Everton eased the pressure. Our top flight status was assured following an epic 0-0 draw away at Arsenal with a game to spare and Advocaat had completed the job he was brought in to do.
He retired at the end of the season — supposedly from both Sunderland and football as a whole — and a career that had spanned nearly twenty years and over five hundred games as a player, followed by another thirty five years as a manager, was coming to a close.
That wasn’t the end of the story, however, as Advocaat was persuaded to carry on at Sunderland and signed a one-year contract to oversee the following Premier League campaign.
Unfortunately the fairytale of the previous season couldn’t continue and he resigned having won only four matches in total and with no wins in 2015/2016 apart from a League Cup victory against Exeter.
Once again, that may have proved to be the end but a year later he signed a one-year contract at Fenerbahçe before taking a third spell in charge of the Dutch national team. He eventually became the most successful manager the Oranje have ever had, with thirty seven victories in total, beating a record that had stood for seventy seven years.
Following further spells at Rotterdam, Utrecht, Feyenoord, Iraq and Den Haag, he then took charge of the Curaçao national side. Curacao qualified for the World Cup for the first time in their history and in the summer of 2026 he became the oldest manager ever to send out a side in the competition’s history.
On 9 September 2026, Advocaat signed on for another year with Curaçao, and only time will tell if ‘the little general’ continues past his eightieth birthday.
