If Dan Neil is about to depart the club when the January transfer window opens, it will mark the end of a tumultuous period in the club’s history in which he has played a significant role.
There is a photograph
of a young Dan Neil in the Wembley crowd on the day Sunderland took on Manchester City in the 2014 League Cup Final. He was already on the club’s books and the South Shields-born youngster was living every supporter’s dream.
Fast forward to May 2025 and he reached the pinnacle – captaining his boyhood team to victory in the Championship Play-off Final. Leading Sunderland out onto the lush Wembley turf and back to the Premier League must have been an amazing experience for a young player who had to battle back from injury just to make it as a professional footballer.
As an under-14 scholar who had already represented England, Neil was struck down with a potentially career-ending knee injury. Surgery followed in London and so too did a lengthy 18-month spell on the sidelines, with a career in football looking unlikely. It was his determination to fight his way back to fitness that hugely impressed the Academy coaching staff and marked him out as one to watch.
As Neil worked tirelessly to overcome the injury, Sunderland’s fortunes took a huge turn for the worse, as the club were relegated from the Premier League, plummeted straight through the Championship, and landed unceremoniously in League One. It was a series of events that would grant the local lad an opportunity that could scarcely have been foreseen just a couple of years earlier.
After a failure to return to the Championship at the first three attempts and with little money in the kitty, the club began to move away from signing journeymen from the lower leagues and took a different direction. The likes of Alex Pritchard and Patrick Roberts, whose promising trajectories had stalled, arrived alongside young prospects such as Dennis Cirkin and Ross Stewart. They were supplemented by young loan players – the promising Callum Doyle, an already physically imposing 17-year-old, arrived from Manchester City together with the talented Nathan Broadhead.
The playing squad was still painfully thin and, along with fellow Academy graduate Anthony Patterson, Neil joined Elliott Embleton and Lynden Gooch as a home-grown regular in the squad. But an injury to Corry Evans quickly thrust him into a more prominent role.
With no natural replacement for the Irishman, Neil, a natural number eight, was tasked with anchoring the midfield. It was a steep learning curve and there were inevitably instances of poor judgement and mistakes from a young player adapting to a role he wasn’t instinctively suited to. Like Doyle, he was criminally overplayed by Lee Johnson at times and was the subject of the abuse that a section of the fanbase seem to reserve especially for local lads in the team.
But he stuck at it, learned, and held the position until Evans regained fitness. By that point Alex Neil had replaced the sometimes bewildering Johnson, and Neil found himself on the bench at Wembley alongside Doyle for the League One Play-off Final.
The following season in the Championship, Dan Neil was restored to his more natural advanced midfield position. He flourished under the tutelage of Tony Mowbray, who was the ideal coach for such a young, formative team. Neil played a pivotal role in “that goal” against Reading and got himself on the scoresheet as he and Jack Clarke ran Vincent Kompany’s Burnley ragged in the first half, only for Sunderland to succumb to defeat in the second.
But a season-ending injury for Corry Evans saw Neil again required to play in the deeper role. It was a position he matured into and really began to make his own as the side headed towards an unlikely play-off spot in their first season back in the Championship. Sadly a makeshift defence was unable to hold out against a robust Luton team. Mowbray departed and the enigmatic Régis Le Bris arrived. Together with Anthony Patterson, Neil was linked with moves to Premier League sides and there was allegedly interest from abroad – but both stayed on Wearside.
Neil was appointed team captain and was virtually ever-present, alongside Jobe and Chris Rigg in a youthful, energetic midfield, as Le Bris’ side made the play-offs for a second successive season. As the first home-grown skipper to lift a trophy at Wembley since Raich Carter, Neil has earned his place in the club’s folklore. But it appears that he may become another victim of that success.
Some of the Championship stalwarts – Dan Ballard, Trai Hume, Wilson Isidor, Eliezer Mayenda, Enzo Le Fée, and to some extent Chris Rigg – have all made an impact in the Premier League. Romaine Mundle already has more minutes in the Premier League than Neil after only just returning to fitness.
Jobe joined Tommy Watson in moving on to further their careers, and Patrick Roberts has departed in search of game time.
Meanwhile Anthony Patterson, Luke O’Nien, and Neil have all been consigned to the bench, with Neil being given just a couple of minutes across 13 Premier League fixtures.
With his contract running down, rumours of links to Roma have resurfaced while, at the same time, Sunderland are being linked with the likes of Matteo Guendouzi, Fisayo Dele-Bashiru, and Conor Gallagher.
There may be a scenario where Neil signs a new deal and is then loaned out for the rest of the season – a young player of his quality and promotion-winning experience would undoubtedly attract interest from clubs in the top half of the Championship and Europe.
He has now had six months training alongside Granit Xhaka and the other high-quality additions Sunderland have made. There can be no better mentor to teach him leadership and the midfield role than the Swiss international. A loan would be a great opportunity for Neil to demonstrate that he has learned and developed and is capable of taking his game to the next level.
The more likely outcome appears to be that he will leave when the transfer window opens, and that in itself is a measure of how quickly the squad has been transformed since May.
But there should be no doubting the contribution that the Wembley-winning skipper has made in restoring his home-town club to the top level of English football. However things pan out, as fans we should all be proud of the fact that Dan Neil is one of our own.
