Liverpool, Arsenal, Aston Villa. Form an orderly queue, lads, and then turn yourselves around, because the Frenchman is staying put. He’s the most gifted footballer ever to wear the red and white, and the rest of the league can like it or lump it.
I know what you’re thinking. “Big claim”. What about Shack? Baxter? Schwarz? Arca?“ Bear with me a minute.
Len Shackleton was the ‘Clown Prince of Football’, and rightly so. Slick dribbling, jewelled passes and ninety-seven goals in the First Division back
when football boots had nails sticking out the bottom. Jim Baxter rocked up after his Rangers peak and gave us a glimpse of Scottish swagger before disappearing into the pubs of Glasgow.
Stefan Schwarz quietly drove Peter Reid’s seventh-place sides with that “sweep-it-around-the-pitch” Swedish midfielder thing. And Julio Arca, of course. A wand of a left foot and a cult hero to this day. None of those names are getting binned tonight but none — with the greatest of respect to every single one of them — are Enzo Le Fée.
What we have in this lad is a proper, modern, ‘top six of the Premier League’ number ten masquerading as a Sunderland player. The first touch. The body shape. The way he can drop a shoulder inside a phone box and have two men chasing thin air. He sees three passes ahead while half the league are still working out where their own feet are.
Four goals, five assists, thirty one Premier League appearances, and a match rating that puts him among the better attacking midfielders in the division. And the numbers undersell him, because they can’t show you the bit where he turns away from pressure under his own goalpost and starts a counter-attack inside two touches.
Régis Le Bris has built a side that’s beaten Chelsea, beaten the Mags, and taken points off Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool. None of that happens without Le Fée as the brain in the middle of it. He’s the metronome; the release valve, the lad who slows things down when they need to be slowed down and speeds it up when there’s a throat to grab.
Watching him in full flow at the Stadium of Light, you forget for a moment that we were in the Championship a year ago.
So no, we’re not selling him to Liverpool for £35 million.
We’re not selling him to Arsenal, and we’re absolutely not selling him to Aston Villa — a week before a Europa League final against Freiburg, and still wandering up to the North East with their cap out, hoping to quietly hoover up the lad pulling our strings.
Have a word with yourselves, because this is the bit where boardrooms across the country need to listen carefully. We aren’t a feeder club. Not any more.
We aren’t Brighton and we aren’t Brentford — two lovely little outfits to be admired and pillaged every summer. We have an owner with money, a director of football who seems to know what he’s doing, a manager that’s built something properly special and a fanbase that would sell out the Stadium of Light if we played Atlético Madrid in a friendly.
We don’t need to sell our best player to balance any books. We need to build around him.
There’s a contract running until 2029. There’s European football to qualify for. There’s a squad still on the up, with a Moroccan winger half the continent wants, a Dutch striker in Brian Brobbey who’s barely scratched the surface and a goalkeeper in Robin Roefs that half the top six already have marked on their Christmas lists.
Why on earth would we tear the heart out of all that for money we don’t need?
Hands off our Enzo.
He’s the most technically gifted footballer ever to pull on a Sunderland shirt. He’s ours; he’s staying, and the Premier League will have to come at us in a different way.
