In almost any other circumstances, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus might have had to restrain himself, just a little. A couple of weeks ago, Sunderland’s chairman and principal owner was standing in the familiar surrounds of the Stade Velodrome, watching the team he has supported since he was a child: Olympique Marseille.
For most owners, this might have presented a problem. All fans indulge in a willing suspension of disbelief: we tell ourselves that the tycoons, scions and faceless private equity funds who own our clubs love them like we do. On Wearside, Louis-Dreyfus attending another team’s game in a private capacity would hardly have been welcome. Wildly celebrating a winning goal would have been downright unacceptable.
Louis-Dreyfus, though, is currently experiencing one of those blissful, golden periods in which he can do no wrong. Rather than undermine his relationship with Sunderland’s fans, the images of his trip to Marseille served to reinforce it. They did not care that he was exulting in a Marseille goal. If anything, he seemed to encapsulate their feelings: it had been scored against Newcastle.
His popularity is not hard to explain. It is not simply that the 28-year-old can take at least some credit for the fact that, after a hiatus of almost a decade, the Tyne-Wear derby returns to the Premier League schedule today; it was on his watch, that Sunderland ended its eight-year exile from the top flight. Possibly more importantly, he is also responsible for the fact that Sunderland will go into the game a point ahead of their hated rivals.
In the four years since he bought a 64% stake in the club, Louis-Dreyfus has kept quite a low profile. His father, Robert Louis-Dreyfus, was the majority shareholder at Marseille for 13 years, between 1996 and his death from leukaemia in 2009. His son would have seen, first hand, the stresses that came with such a public-facing role.
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That has started to change, just a little, in recent weeks, evidence perhaps that Sunderland’s exceptional start to the season – Régis Le Bris’s side sits just three points off a place in the Champions League, having held Arsenal and Liverpool to draws and beaten Chelsea – has made him feel comfortable enough to allow himself to be caught in the spotlight.
He has not just been seen at Marseille, sitting next to the club’s current owner, Frank McCourt; he travelled to Buenos Aires, too, posting an Instagram story from the superclásico, the game between Boca Juniors and River Plate that stands as almost every football fan’s ultimate bucket-list item.
Last month, he agreed to an interview with The Athletic, spoke with the French broadcaster Canal+, and even appeared live on Sky Sports before his side’s 1-1 draw with Everton at the start of November, using those few minutes as a chance to explain Sunderland’s strategy, and the rationale behind it, after winning promotion through the playoffs.
“The stats showed us that unless you do something extraordinary, you’re likely going to go back to the Championship,” he said. “For us, we didn’t really set ourselves a budget in terms of the money we want to spend. We had an ambition to try and bring in the players we wanted, and fortunately a lot of the deals we wanted to do, we were able to conclude. As a result of that the spend in the end was big, but most importantly we got the players.”
Louis-Dreyfus’s role in that was more pronounced than simply signing the cheques. The club appointed Florent Ghisolfi, formerly an executive at Roma and Nice, as Director of Football in the summer; he worked closely with both Kristjaan Speakman, Sunderland’s sporting director, and Le Bris himself on the 15 incoming transfers the club completed.
They drafted in Louis-Dreyfus occasionally, though, as something close to a trump card. It was his late night phone-call to Granit Xhaka that kickstarted the veteran midfielder’s move from Bayer Leverkusen; Dreyfus had sourced his number from mutual acquaintances in Swiss football. (Xhaka, in line with incontrovertible football tradition, obviously assumed the call from someone identifying themselves as the “owner of Sunderland” was a joke, and had to be told that it was serious by his agent.)
The temptation, of course, is that Louis-Dreyfus’s evident talent for owning a football team is in some way hereditary. One longstanding football executive, who knew Robert Louis-Dreyfus and has met Kyril on a handful of occasions, noted that there is a resemblance between the two: both are fearsomely smart, intensely driven, and innately introverted.
More likely, though, is that the younger Louis-Dreyfus has worked at his profession. He had, it would appear, always wanted to own a football team. When his mother, Margarita, sold Marseille to McCourt, she requested at the last minute that she retain a small stake in the club. The understanding was that it would be held for her son. (It has since been diluted and now amounts to just a fraction, but it is still there.)
But he evidently did not want to be seen as a nepo baby. Much has been made of the fact that he is, by all accounts, an avid player of Football Manager, a detail that is often deployed to suggest that he is a rich kid playing out his fantasy; rather more important is that he spent two years at the Richmond International Academic and Soccer Academy, based in Leeds, not only playing the game but studying the industry that surrounds it.
He did not complete the course, but that he took it at all can be read as evidence of both his ambition and his awareness. Louis-Dreyfus would have known, from his father, just how exacting running a football club can be. His mother, too, would have left him in no doubt how hard it would be. Louis-Dreyfus wanted to make sure he would be good at it. His effort, it would seem, has paid off.
Photograph by George Wood/Getty Images