Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. This is club 71/92. The best way to follow his journey and read all of the previous pieces is by subscribing here
Sunderland trail Preston North End by a goal to nil. The Stadium of Light has just witnessed a goal against the run of play, and an inescapable cloud of angst hangs over the place. When Sunderland don’t have the ball, supporters cluck because they want it back. When Sunderland have the ball, supporters cluck because they want to get it up the pitch quicker.
There are levels to this impatience. Nobody is angry as such, at least not when the immediate frustration of the goal has subsided. They aren’t being deliberately mean to any individual or the team. You might not believe it if this was your first time, but this is love.
Relevant here, for context: Sunderland are the highest-ranked club in the Championship that haven’t been afforded the distinct advantage of parachute payments, sitting in fourth. Sunderland also have the youngest, most inexperienced team in England’s top two divisions.
Nobody in the Stadium of Light has forgotten any of that. They know that this has been a magnificent season, far beyond expectation. It’s just that they’re worried everything is going to fall apart. It’s weird how you can extrapolate so much from a few grumbles and groans.
To explain all this, we must wind back. The last time Sunderland finished above their current league position, everything was figuratively on fire. In 2016-17, Sunderland finished 20th in the Premier League and would have finished 21st if that was possible.
The manager was David Moyes. The club’s only philosophy seemed to be… David Moyes, despite him only arriving in pre-season. Joleon Lescott, Bryan Oviedo, Steven Pienaar, Paddy McNair, Donald Love, Victor Anichebe, Adnan Januzaj, Jack Rodwell – Moyes had managed them all before. A collection of weren’t-any-mores and the never-would-quite-bes.
Then, Sunderland were heading for financial emergency. Matchday income had fallen by 15 per cent in a year, not least because many season ticket holders had stopped coming to every game just to get their heart broken on repeat. The equation was devastatingly simple: overspending on signing players they overpaid and who weren’t good enough. If they cared enough, that wasn’t showing either.
The subsequent Championship season was the worst. That might sound a little melodramatic, given that Sunderland then had four straight seasons in the third tier, but I’m prepared to argue my case. Sunderland won one of their first 18 league games after relegation, sacked two managers and became the first team in English football since 1985 to finish bottom of the first and second tier in consecutive years.
The uncaveated misery has ended at Sunderland; I think that truth will hold now. But take several steps back, to take the last nine years into one wide shot, and you see only upheaval: bottom of their division twice, promoted once, four play-off campaigns, four appearances at Wembley, three different owners, 11 permanent managers.
Sunderland 1-1 Preston North End (Tuesday 11 March)
- Game no.: 77/92
- Miles: 340
- Cumulative miles: 14,372
- Total goals seen: 200
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The worst/best episode of timewasting that I have ever seen, including trying to play with 12 men and spending seven minutes faffing. And then Preston got punished for it – glorious.
Early in 2018, Chris Coleman – who had been appointed the previous November – spoke with brutal honesty about attacking a relegation fight in the Championship with players who were “kittens”. Coleman stressed that Sunderland – literally and metaphorically – needed “a thorough cleansing”. Coleman was sacked in April 2018 after 29 games in charge.
From then to now, those who work at this club tell you that everything has shifted for the better. That’s spectacularly self-evident anyway: Sunderland would have got worse if that environment had persisted, not better. You rarely get to fudge your way up football leagues.
In December 2020, Kristjaan Speakman was appointed as the club’s new sporting director with the remit to overhaul the sporting operation: scouting, recruitment, coaching, performance. Two months later, Kyle Louis-Dreyfus became the youngest person to ever own an English football club (26 years old) when he bought a significant stake from Stewart Donald. In May 2023, Louis-Dreyfus bought Donald’s remaining stake and thus had a controlling share.
The general aim is sustainable improvement and improved sustainability. The latter is mighty difficult in the Championship, particularly when you’re looking upward, and Sunderland lost just under £9m in their last accounts. Still, they are fourth and over half of Championship clubs lose £20m a year or more.
It is no exaggeration to say that a revolution has taken place within Sunderland’s squad. In 2020-21 in League One, the average age of their starting team (27.3) was the highest in the division. Two years later, Sunderland were in the Championship with the youngest squad in the country and finished sixth. It felt like magic.
There were three distinct strands to this revolution. The first depended upon work that had pre-existed before Louis-Dreyfus and Speakman’s time: the development of academy talent. They created the pathway.
Only five Championship clubs have given more appearances to former academy players than Sunderland this season: Chris Rigg, Tommy Watson, Anthony Patterson, Dan Neil. All were born within 15 miles of the ground, all are vital and all have increased their value significantly.
On top of that, Sunderland implemented a policy of exclusively spending transfer fee budgets on young players who, if successful, would increase their asset value so that when a sale came the money would reduce potential losses and allow for further reinvestment in the playing squad.
In 2022-23, Sunderland signed 14 players and only two of them were older than 21 at the time of purchase. Those gnarled veterans: Daniel Ballard, a 22-year-old defender from Arsenal’s Under-21 squad and 24-year-old goalkeeper Alex Bass from Portsmouth, who was to be the backup to Patterson. The following summer, nine players aged between 17 and 21 were signed. The youngest was Jobe Bellingham, now a first-team fixture at 19.
Prodigious young players are high in demand and limited in supply, and thus tend to be expensive. The only way to mitigate that, as a Championship club, is to increase your scouting network and thus deepen your pool of potential signings. The best place to seek value is often the furthest from your door.
In 2021-22, Sunderland signed players on permanent deals from the following clubs: Linfield, Rangers, Manchester City, Huddersfield Town, Blackburn Rovers, Tottenham Hotspur, Leeds United, Fleetwood Town, Stoke City. And then, between 2022 and 2024, they signed players from clubs in France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Ukraine, Netherlands, Australia and Costa Rica. It was a complete shift in policy.
Progress is rarely linear. In August 2023, having finished sixth the previous season in their first season back, there was tangible hope of a concerted Championship promotion campaign here. Sunderland were fourth in mid-October but a run of two wins in nine games saw Tony Mowbray sacked as manager before Christmas. The decision was viewed as harsh and the mood hardly sweetened when Mowbray’s replacement, Michael Beale, managed just 11 league games into a two-and-a-half-year contract.
Speakman came in for significant supporter criticism – that is underselling it. One letter to fanzine website Roker Report accused him of being “a joke or a con artist” and even the editor’s measured response conceded that some fans believed the sporting director was past the point of no return.
Sunderland’s answer? To double down on the project rather than scale it back. Last summer, they only paid a fee for two players; they were aged 19 and 20 and arrived from Serbia and Belgium. The Black Cats also signed Wilson Isidor on loan, a 23-year-old forward who had failed to get regular minutes for two different clubs in Russia.
Their manager search was complicated. Sunderland were reportedly turned down by English coaches Will Still and Liam Rosenior, one of whom chose to stay in French football and the other chose to move into it. Their eventual appointment, Regis Le Bris, had had one senior managerial role (also in France) and been relegated to Ligue 2 at the end of it.
Le Bris had 11 new players, would lose Sunderland’s most creative player (Jack Clarke) two games into the new season and had never coached in England before. It was risky. It was ambitious. It was intriguing. It was courageous. For all parties involved.
It has also worked, by any reasonable measure. Sunderland won nine of their first 12 league games this season and topped the Championship. That sprinting start has been overtaken by parachute payment clubs with deeper, more experienced and more expensively assembled squads on higher wages, because you cannot suspend reality forever and the Championship is a division of inequalities. Until mid-February, Le Bris had suffered only four league defeats. That too has slipped a little, but only because injuries have set in: Ballard, Dennis Cirkin, Enzo Le Fee.
They have wholly committed to the plan, with Le Bris now at its heart. The age of players with more than three league goals so far this season: 17, 19, 19, 21, 24. Sunderland have given 115 league appearances to teenagers in 2024-25. They have only given 119 to all players over the age of 25. To repeat again: they are fourth, 12 points inside the play-off positions.
As I’ve travelled the country this season, and spoken to managers, sporting directors, owners and supporters, the two words that tend to come up most often are “Brighton” and “Brentford”. These clubs are the blueprint for at least a dozen attempts to join them. There’s not much not to like: ambition, sensible recruitment, coaching excellence, repeated promotions and Premier League consolidation.
Sunderland are closer than most; that is undeniable. They have committed to their youth revolution. They have improved as a result. They started the second phase when they sold Clarke for an initial £15m and they know that they must repeat that trick, as Brighton and Brentford did, to refuel the machine.
Which, eventually, brings us back to the Stadium of Light and those groans. They are our right as supporters. If we focus on the wrongs too much and fail to give the rights the same credence, that’s only because we want it so much. Groans are not a sign of mutiny, but an emotional representation of the exact point where care meets fear.
Brighton and Brentford were, are, intrinsically different to Sunderland. With respect to Brighton’s 1983 FA Cup run, neither had a grand history. Neither had ever won a major trophy. Brighton finished 91st in the Football League in 1998. Brentford finished 82nd in 2008.
As such, it didn’t matter too much how long the journey took, only that they got there. Brentford could spend five years in League One and four in the Championship’s midtable, selling star players each summer, without a mighty backlash about perceived stagnation or lack of ambition. Brighton could experience two failed Championship play-off campaigns (one against their fiercest rivals) and then come within six points of relegation back to League One without everybody losing their minds.
Sunderland have a rich history. The league titles around the turn of the century and the run of trophies in the 1930s. The FA Cup win in the 1970s and the domestic finals in the 1980s, 1990s and 2010s. They have played Premier League football in 17 of the last 25 years. They have the eighth biggest club ground in England. That history is an honour and a privilege but it’s also a part of the club’s psyche and thus the psyche of supporters too.
They also have the recent past, all the chaos and the misery and the wasted ambition, effort, time and money. That becomes part of you too. You have to learn that when something goes wrong, it is not necessarily the beginning of the end of everything. But it’s hard. Mistakes and missteps happen because perfection is impossible and even getting near to it is improbable when you haven’t got the most money to spend.
This model only works – or at least can only be at its best – with constant reassurance. It relies upon players succeeding elsewhere and you being happy to see them go as a sign of strength. It relies upon an unshakeable belief in the greater good. How much harder is that when you saw your club fall from near the top, than when it all started near the bottom?
That is the most pertinent question at Sunderland. Not whether this run to the end of the season will dull their intensity before the play-offs, whether Le Bris has rotated enough or whether the club will keep onto both Rigg and Watson this summer; they are the comparative minutiae. Instead: what happens when these two identities – long-term club building and hardwired expectation and impatience – meet?
I hope it can work. I leave Sunderland wishing them well, for themselves and for the game. Brentford and Brighton are admired within football for having the plans that Sunderland are attempting to follow, but this might also be the only answer that works for clubs who want to break through a glass ceiling that is glazed thicker every year.
Football has changed in the 14 years since Sunderland last finished in the Premier League’s top half. Sunderland have changed too, for the much worse and now for the much better. Whereas once they were a statue to short-termism, fighting annual fires to keep their place at the top table, now they rely upon principles that require extended patience: youth development, academy production, worldwide scouting, sell-to-buy, sustainability, gradual improvement. Here’s the thing: can everybody cope with that?
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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