The audit: Sunderland

On-pitch performance

It’s not called football any more. It’s called recruitment. And in that bear pit, Sunderland’s summer was expensive and successful. Fourth in the Championship last season (they were play-off final winners), the club were fourth as well after 10 games of this Premier League campaign before ­facing Arsenal on Saturday. It was the best start by a promoted side in the division since Hull City in 2008-09.

The marvel is that they are an almost entirely new team who play like they’ve been together since school. Dreadful for half an hour against Everton on Monday night, they then snapped out of it and dominated the game, exuding spirit.

While losing a Bellingham – Jobe, to Borussia Dortmund – Sunderland racked up a £115m net spend, with 33-year-old Granit Xhaka a transformational signing. A quasi player-coach, Xhaka and his midfield partner Noah Sadiki, who cost a combined £28m, became the first two players in the league to pass 100km in distance run this season.

Manager Régis Le Bris, 49, is a textbook post-Pep pragmatist who will go high press, low block, long, wide or through the middle, where Xhaka alternates between No 6 and No 8 roles, depending on how he sees the game. “He sets the standards every day,” Le Bris says. “He’s like a second coach on the pitch.”

With a core of 6ft-ers, they are strong in the air, and defensively solid. Robin Roefs, who has taken Anthony Patterson’s place in goal, was one of 14 summer buys including loans who are still at the club (Marc Guiu was recalled by Chelsea less than a month after joining Sunderland.) The majority have settled quickly.

Manager

The Black Cats had finished 16th in the 2023-24 Championship when Le Bris was hired. His impressive start at Lorient had faded. They were relegated from Ligue 1 in 2024. But Sunderland chose him after examining candidates for three months. Le Bris was left-field, bordering on obscure, but highly rated in France.

A proud Breton who says he feels an affinity with Sunderland’s working-class roots, he has a doctorate in sport physiology and biomechanics and made his name in academy and youth development work. He says: “As a coach you do not want to be the main man. That is not my purpose. I want to give knowledge, power and responsibility to the squad. We have players on the pitch to manage micro-situations.”

Money

This week the club’s 27-year-old owner, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, explained the financial rationale: “I think the stats showed to us that unless you do something extraordinary, you’re likely going to go back to the Championship.”

Documents published by Companies House last month showed that the club had taken out a loan with Macquarie bank to give them early access to guaranteed Premier League TV revenue. It’s not an unusual tactic but it suggested that Louis-Dreyfus will be careful with his family’s money. Commercial income is rising fast.

Fan satisfaction

Since the 1973 FA Cup win – and more recently Peter Reid’s reign – following Sunderland had been a trail of tears, with a new beginning unimaginable. All that changed with May’s Championship play-off final victory. If the fans have reservations about the new globalised club model, they’re not showing it.

Products and prospects

Sunderland’s squad has the third-youngest average age in the Premier League. “[Building a young team] has become a little bit of our DNA in the last four and a half years,” says Louis-Dreyfus.

The starting XI against Everton, however, contained no English players (Dan Ballard and Trai Hume play for Northern Ireland.) Mozambique, DR Congo and Burkina Faso were among the nationalities. That suggests a tough path for academy graduates.

But the Sunderland Echo reported seeing Xhaka, Le Bris, sporting director Kristjaan Speakman and other senior staff at a recent U21 game “on a cold Wednesday night”. The Academy of Light that produced Jordan Henderson and Jordan Pickford has been upgraded. This season’s Premier League target is a top-10 finish.

Ownership

Louis-Dreyfus calls himself KLD, but he’s hardly one of the lads. He’s the heir to a Swiss commodities fortune and his father Robert owned Marseille from 1996 until his death in 2009, when it transferred to his widow, Margarita (Kyril’s mother).

KLD is the youngest owner in English football. When he took full control in May 2023, Vincent Labrune, the former Marseille president, said of him: “He has absolute passion. He takes up the torch [from his father]; there is ambition, pride. He has a good memory, he will feed on past mistakes. He will not flare up: it is not in his nature, and his mother, anyway, would not let him.”

Women’s team

Known as “The Lasses”, they’re in the Women’s Super League 2, the second tier, and play at the Eppleton Colliery Welfare Ground in Hetton-le-Hole.

They are seventh out of 12, which is where they finished last year. Their 2009 FA Cup final squad contained future Lionesses Lucy Bronze, Lucy Staniforth, Jordan Nobbs and Demi Stokes. They also developed Beth Mead and Steph Houghton.

Head coach Melanie Reay, who has had the job since 2017, is Alan Shearer’s cousin. Her squad contains six homegrown players. Last year, the team set a then English women’s second-tier attendance record of 15,387 for the derby with Newcastle at the Stadium of Light.

History

To be six-times English champions is a proud claim. But with the most recent of those victories coming in 1936, it was easy to diagnose obsolescence. The most recent of their two FA Cup wins was in 1973, when Bob Stokoe’s Division Two underdogs beat Don Revie’s top-flight Leeds United. According to one Sunderland writer, this year’s promotion gave the “1973 generation” a “new way to love their club”.

Club facilities

One of those grounds that’s much bigger inside than it looks from the street, the 49,000-seat Stadium of Light was a forerunner in 1997 of today’s arena-building boom. A large Davy lamp monument honours the north-east’s coal-mining past and the closest pub is The Colliery Tavern. The £31m Keel Crossing (a footbridge) now links the stadium to the city.

Atmosphere

Sung en masse, the first line of Sunderland’s anthem, Wise Men Say, is instantly moving. It slides into the rest of Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling in Love, which supporters are said to have adopted at Wembley in 1973.

“Wise men say/Only fools rush in/But I can’t help falling in love with you.” It’s beautifully appropriate.

Photograph by Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images