Local lads, forgetting Netflix and being accosted in Ikea – inside Sunderland’s revival

Telegraph Sport goes behind the scenes to speak with the key people leading the charge back towards the Premier League

Sunderland have experienced plenty of trauma since their relegation from the Premier League after a decade in the top flight, back in 2018. But there is renewed hope among fans who have endured more than their fair share of pain and suffering.
Sunderland is a club reborn under owner Kyril Dreyfus and sporting director Kristjaan Speakman, with a vibrant young team sitting top of the Championship under an intriguing new head coach, the Frenchman Regis Le Bris.
Telegraph Sport was granted unprecedented access to speak to those involved in the rebuild.
Kristjaan Speakman: Sporting director
Speakman admits he was probably naive not to realise how much Sunderland matters to people.
“I can be out in London and a Sunderland fan will come up and speak to you,” he said. “I had one geezer in Ikea, he appeared from behind a wardrobe and marched towards me, and said something about making sure I signed a f—— striker or something, but you can’t do this job and not have questions asked.”
After 15 years at Birmingham City, Speakman was the first major appointment made by Sunderland’s young owner Dreyfus. Four years ago, the club were a mid-table League One outfit and behaved like one on and off the pitch.
“I was very much looking for a different sort of project and opportunity,” said Speakman, from his office on the top floor of the renovated training centre.
“I was curious at the start. I’d seen the [Netflix] documentary series [Sunderland ‘Til I Die] and it was a club that had… well, let’s just say it was an interesting discussion.
“Taking on the challenge here, maybe a little naively, I wasn’t really aware of the scale and reach of this football club. When you get here, that dawns on you.”
There isn’t a single bit of this Sunderland ‘Til I Die s2 clip that isn’t *chef’s kiss* pic.twitter.com/2SxSqCeHsf
Despite seeing the car crash that was the Sunderland ‘Til I Die series, that chronicled the mishaps and embarrassments that came from two failed attempts to win promotion in League One, Speakman would soon discover just how bad things had become.
“My perception of Sunderland was that it was a big club that had hit rock bottom. I was shocked when I came to the training facility, the way people treated and thought of it.
“The whole football club had taken a bit of a kicking. There wasn’t a lot of optimism or enterprise, everyone was on survival mode. Changing that mentality is really, really hard, but that is what we have tried to do.
“This was a state-of-the-art training ground in 2001… look, it had no investment in it to keep pace. We had to make some really bold decisions, early doors. We could have put all the money into players, but then we would have had a stadium and a training ground that was not fit for purpose.”
It has not been plain sailing. Sunderland sacked the hugely popular manager Tony Mowbray in December last year, just a few months after he led the team to the play-off semi-finals. His replacement, Michael Beale, alienated supporters and was sacked after just 12 games.
Both Mowbray and Alex Neil, the manager who won promotion from League One, had publicly criticised Sunderland’s business model that meant they did not have the wage budget to sign experienced Championship players. The plan was to buy young players from across Europe, blend them with a core of Academy graduates, to develop them.
But after Sunderland sold striker Ross Stewart to Championship rivals Southampton in September last year, and in the summer star player Jack Clarke was sold to Ipswich Town, supporters were restless. Their team had just finished 16th in the Championship.
The management held their nerve.
When asked why the club had not spent more on experience, Speakman explains that the club have been bold and creative with their plans. Having gone from mid-table in League One to the top end of the Championship, he added: “We’ve had some criticism, of course. But undoubtedly the club is in a better place now than it was when we arrived. I would argue it is unrecognisable.”
Sunderland appointed Le Bris in June. It was a leftfield appointment, the 48-year-old, who had impressed at Lorient, but his studious nature and tactical acumen has paid an early dividend. Yet, there are still questions about the dedication to signing rough diamonds.
“I think we need to ban the word model,” Speakman said with a laugh. “Maybe that was my fault, I don’t know, we were just trying to describe our strategy.
“The last three years we have been the most youth-orientated team in the Championship, we are the 20th most youth-orientated team out of all 59 European leagues.
“When you talk about experience, how many taps do you need to change to be an experienced plumber? Jobe [Bellingham] is 19 years old but he is approaching 100 first team games. Dan Neil has surpassed that already.”
The mention of Neil, who at the age of 22 was made team captain by Le Bris, brings the conversation neatly on to another foundation of the Sunderland project.
Neil is a Sunderland fan who had come through the club’s academy, but he is just one of a core group of homegrown players in the first team.
These include former England Under 21 international goalkeeper Anthony Patterson as well as one of the most enthralling young prospects in the country, 17-year-old midfielder Chris Rigg.
“We always said the Academy would be core to what we are doing, that really caught Kyril’s imagination. We will always look internally first. That is an easy thing to say, but a harder thing to do.”
Upon reflection, last season’s travails were a price worth paying. But there will be tests to come.
Regis Le Bris: Manager
Le Bris taught himself to speak English fluently in the space of two years and has turned Sunderland into promotion contenders in the Championship in less than six months.
Interestingly for a head coach, he is willing to reveal the secret of his playing model, which is built around an obsession with triangles that would impress a maths teacher.
“I did not worry about the history of this club,” Le Bris says of why the Sunderland job appealed. “I did not worry about the expectations.
“It is easier for me because I’m not from here. I am a new person in the city, in the club. I know the history, but it does not weigh heavily for me. Maybe it did before [for other managers] but I wanted this to be a fresh start for me and for everyone. The past is the past.
“I had the opportunity after Lorient, a conversation with my agent at the end of May and that is when Sunderland expressed their interest. We had four meetings in total, which was a lot, but it was clear we could work together.
“It was an opportunity to talk about the new project and where the club is now. It was about the pathway to try and get back into the Premier League.”
On the pitch, Sunderland’s young team are a fluid, short-passing side, where attacking angles are created through the use of interchanging triangles that link defence with midfield and midfield with attack. They want to entertain supporters.
“The game model is about triangles, creating triangles all over the pitch, but the players are learning to create something on their own. That came naturally in some areas of the pitch, but the players are learning to be fluid.
“We are creating triangles that move together, starting in the middle of the pitch. The triangles are linking up and that is the basis for everything we do.”
It is also about mentality. Sunderland can be a difficult club to play for. The crowd are passionate but they are also demanding.
“This team keeps trying to play how we want to play no matter the situation,” Le Bris added. “We are trying to create that confidence. We need to be able to play under pressure, that is something we have worked on.
“You cannot play out from the back if you are worried about pressure, it is not easy, but to do it properly, you need cohesion. You also need to have the confidence to lose the ball and know you can win it back quickly. In pre-season we worked on both sides of that tirelessly and the more experience we get, the easier it becomes.
“I think I have found a club to thrive. This club has something unique, something that I have only scratched the surface with so far.”
Defending as a team, attacking as a team 👊 pic.twitter.com/BjqNBbG8As
Dan Neil: Captain
Neil is everything you would want from a captain. He arrives on time, to the second, is polite, engaging and courteous, but carries himself with a sort of calm authority.
He is also extremely passionate about Sunderland. A boyhood fan, he made his first team debut during those dark years in League One before blossoming into a player who has been scouted regularly by Premier League clubs in the Championship.
Still just 22, he has already played more than 150 games for Sunderland and is part of a brilliant and young midfield trio alongside wonderkid Chris Rigg and the 19-year-old Jobe Bellingham.
“Sunderland means a hell of a lot to me,” Neil said while sitting in the canteen inside the Academy of Light. “It has probably been my life since I can remember. A fan growing up, I’ve been at the club since I was very young and it’s a part of me as a person.
“It was an incredible honour to be named captain, to wear the armband on a weekend, but it also feels like a natural progression for myself. To take on more of a leadership role within the group.
“It is very important at a club like Sunderland that the players know what is expected of them. The highs here are very high, the lows are very low. It’s the same with all the north-east clubs but you’ve got to be able to handle the pressure; take that pressure.
“Would you rather be playing for a club where it doesn’t matter… where the fans don’t live and breathe it like they do up here? Probably not. You have to adapt, you have to develop that strong-mindedness when you play for a club as big as this.”
Neil has witnessed the transformation of Sunderland from the inside looking out. When asked to articulate how, he said: “Look at the inside of this building, look at the style of play, look at recruitment and the commitment to bringing young players through.
“Each year there has been a general progression. Last year was a bit of a low, but I think it was a blessing in disguise.
“We did so well in our first year in the Championship, that brought people back to earth a little bit. I don’t think it was a horrendously bad thing for the players because it showed them what the lows feel like.
“Everyone can see this club has changed for the better. There is a unity of purpose here, from top to bottom.”
Neil believes Sunderland can be a Premier League club again because he spent a decade of his formative years watching them there. The first manager he can remember is Ricky Sbragia and went to a few games under Roy Keane. He remembers Steve Bruce, Martin O’Neill then Paolo Di Canio. Then relegation, and when he was in the Under-16s, the club went into League One.
“I remember thinking ‘You know what it is, I’m full-time now, I’m in the senior squad, this is my time to really kick on.’
“I was gutted about the state of the club but personally, it probably gave me the best chance of actually playing for the club I’d always dreamed of playing for. It allowed me to stamp my authority on the first team.
“But this is far more enjoyable. My first season as a regular was the year we got promoted to the Championship, so it feels like we’ve been on an upward trajectory since I’ve been in the team. It has felt like progression every year since.”
Robin Nicholls: Academy manager
Robin Nicholls left Southampton at the end of 2022 to oversee Sunderland’s Academy programme, largely due to the fact he was sold a vision of developing players who would have a clear pathway into the first team.
“I wanted to be at a club that had a real emphasis on youth development,” said Nicholls following a brief interruption from a jovial Speakman.
“I wanted to be part of somewhere, where young players were going to get a real opportunity to play first-team games. Believe it or not, it is a hard thing to find in the academy space to be in a place where young players are actually going to be given an opportunity.
“I think it is particularly important in this part of the country to have that core of homegrown players who are from the local area and understand football and what it means to people in this region. I would go as far as to say it is essential.
“If you look at our under-16 group last year, we took 11 and eight of them were from the north-east, who have been at the academy for a number of years. Historically this has always been a really strong area with the local boys clubs and leagues at grassroots level and, contrary to what people might say, that is still the case.
“We’ve got quite a few in the first team already. At this stage of the season, we are looking at around 24% of the total minutes played in the first team played by academy graduates. That changes from game to game, but with Dan Neil, Rigg, Patterson established, that will be among the highest in the Championship.
“If you look around the country, there are not many who have their goalkeeper, their captain and their key midfielder who are academy graduates. We’ve also got Tommy [Watson] coming on in games too this season and there are a number of other graduates involved in the first-team squad too.”