Sunderland's sad-sack story gets a surprising pivot
The English football team that exposed its grim failures to a worldwide Netflix audience is ... actually good now?
One of the first editions of this newsletter was about Sunderland AFC, or specifically the release of the third season of the Netflix documentary about the travails of the grand old football club in the hardscrabble northeast of England.
Sunderland ‘Til I Die was first released on the streaming service in 2018, and was a forerunner for the trend of clubs and/or streaming services producing behind-the-scenes programs that promise the kind of access that the media just doesn’t get.
Unfortunately, STID became something of an outlier in that it was pretty much unvarnished, documenting a couple of truly disastrous seasons in which Sunderland was relegated to the third tier of English football and then, with new owners in place, managed to make an even bigger mess of it. It is one of the legacies of the series that the owners spent £3-million to bring in striker Will Grigg in an attempt to reverse a slide, as they were plainly motivated to be seen by the ever-present cameras to be doing something. That amount stood as a record fee for a League One signing until this past summer. Grigg would score just five goals for Sunderland. The owners would have been much better served doing nothing.
Things eventually got better, long after the documentary ceased production, most likely because the owners became tired of looking like idiots. Sunderland won promotion back to the second-tier Championship in 2022, under the stewardship of another new owner, a French-Swiss billionaire who took over about five years ago and is still not yet 30 years old. (Seriously.) That promotion season ended up a brief coda to STID, with three episodes released last winter celebrating the fact that something finally went right for the club and its loyal, suffering fans.
But then things around Sunderland ended up going, well, Sunderland-y. Even as the club moved back into the Championship it had started to focus more on signing young players who could be developed and sold for a profit rather than recruit veterans who might be more likely to help the team win promotion to the Premier League. This is essentially the conundrum for any club that isn’t in the top flight: do you go after the costly players who might help you get there, or accept your fate and hope to win some games in the meantime? From a distance, it’s unclear if Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, the majority owner, is the driving force behind the youth movement, or if he’s just the money man who lets a football staff make football decisions. Either way, a club that once desperately wanted to get back to the Premier League now seems determined primarily to not lose buckets of money in the pursuit.
With the club comfortably in the top half of the division last season, manager Tony Mowbray groused after a poor result that it would be tough to do much better since the roster was shot through with kids. He was summarily dismissed. The owners brought in Michael Beale, who had been an assistant coach at a number of Premier League clubs, and he lasted all of 12 games. And then Sunderland downed tools. They brought in an unheralded interim manager, told everyone they would only make a permanent replacement in the summer, and scuffled through the rest of the season. They were far enough from the relegation spots to be safe, but it was a weird way to manage a young squad: Good luck, lads. Hopefully you don’t get tonked too badly.
The new manager did come in the summer, in the form of Frenchman Régis Le Bris. Truly a spectacular French name. His credentials? Less spectacular. His only senior managerial experience was with French club Lorient, where he spent two-plus seasons that ended with a relegation out of the top flight. Whoops.
But! RLB, as he’s known, has his young Sunderland club purring in this still-early football season. They came into the weekend at the top of the Championship, ahead of even the clubs like Sheffield United and Burnley that had been relegated from the Premier League last season. These are heady heights. Will they last? Probably not. The thing about Sunderland’s current philosophy is that a youth-oriented team will usually be pipped at the end by older, deeper, costlier squads. The big question will come in January, if the club is still around the top of the Championship table. Will ownership break the model and bring in reinforcements in the transfer window to help a promotion push? Or stick with the kids and see what happens?
Their weekend game, at home to Leeds United, went some way to showing the unpredictability of it all. Sunderland went ahead, then Leeds, a team that definitely expects to go back up to the Premier League this season, turned it around to go up 2-1. Leeds was dominant, and was set to jump Sunderland atop the division.
And then, this:
Yep, that’s Leeds goalkeeper Ilan Meslier absolutely whiffing on a harmless ball, in the 96th minute, to allow Sunderland to rescue a draw.
It would have made a great scene in a documentary.
Weekend reading (or thereabouts)
If there's a better example of a top-down directive to change a team that blew up this spectacularly, it does not leap to mind. The Blue Jays scored 671 runs in 2024, their lowest mark in a full season since 1997, when Roger Clemens was the staff ace and Cito Gaston was fired from his second managerial tour with the club.
I wrote at theScore about the wrap-up to a dismal Blue Jays season, which somehow didn’t include any changes at or near the top.
The big-money changes to college football
The NCAA, where once players could be essentially banned if they so much as accepted a free coffee from a local supporter, has become something of the Wild West in terms of sponsorship deals now that such things are allowed. The disappointing thing about all this, as I wrote at theScore, is how the recent changes are only correcting generational wrongs.
Ottawa and public spending. What could go wrong?
Recently announced plans for the Ottawa Senators to (finally) move from suburban Kanata to a downtown home have left one big question unanswered: Who will pay for it? Over at the Globe and Mail, I offered one piece of advice: Not the public, please.
Municipal officials often incorrectly see a new arena as a shiny new toy and moneymaker for a city, bringing promises of concerts and festivals alongside the hockey games. History suggests that if an NHL ownership group holds out long enough, eventually public money comes to the table, making the project that much more of a winner for the hockey club. It’s one of the great scandals of modern sports, repeated in countless cities.
The suburbs: Not that bad, actually
My editor at the Toronto Star had an unusual request. There was piece running about the soul-destroying banality of the suburbs. (I’m paraphrasing here.) Would I be interested in writing some sort of counterpoint? Sure, I said. The result can be found here.