Editorial: Surgery required after a pretty shambolic season for Sunderland

The final whistle on Saturday couldn’t come soon enough, and I can’t ever recall a season that’s been written off to such a massive extent, with everyone seemingly counting down the seconds until it would end.

While we were never in any serious danger of relegation, we ended up just six points clear of Birmingham City – who would have stayed up had we beaten Sheffield Wednesday.

We lost 22 of 46 games (just one fewer than we lost when we got relegated in 2017), and picked up just nine points from the last 45 available.

We’ve lost 11 at home all season – the worst record in the league. Our ‘strikers’ have scored just three goals between them all season, and we’ve only scored four in our last nine games, one of which was a penalty, and at least one was from a set piece.

We publicly wrote the season off in February after sacking Michael Beale, despite sitting 10th and being just four points off the play offs. (We finished 17 points off sixth-placed Norwich.) With just two wins and three draws (nine points) from 13 games, Mike Dodds is statistically one of the worst managers in our history, with a 15% win rate, and if the season still had four to five games to go, I reckon we would have been relegated.

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From the free-flowing, exciting football we saw last season – football that was some of the most exciting and entertaining I’ve seen us play in four decades – to the turgid drudgery that’s been inflicted on us for the past four or five months, it’s been a seismic and negative change, and has only succeeded in sending us into a major downward spiral.

After a couple of seasons of good progress, we’ve regressed this season and for the first real time since Kyril Louis-Dreyfus took control of the club, he’s facing serious questions about his ambitions for Sunderland AFC, its direction, and the personnel he’s employing.

So, where has it gone wrong and what needs to be addressed in the summer?

Firstly, Kristjaan Speakman’s role, his managerial decisions and the transfer and recruitment policy need to be seriously scrutinised.

This run of form is the consequence of poor succession planning regarding the head coach, and three poor transfer windows – because, let’s be completely honest here, the players we’ve brought in since January 2023 simply haven’t (yet) improved the first team.

Of the (by my reckoning) 16 players who’ve been signed in the past 18 months (Joe Gelhardt, Pierre Ekwah, Jobe, Nectar Triantis, Hemir, Jenson Seelt, Bradley Dack, Eliezer Mayenda, Nathan Bishop, Mason Burstow, Naz Rusyn, Timothée Pembélé, Adil Aouchiche, Leo Hjelde, Romain Mundle and Callum Styles) only three of them – Gelhardt, Ekwah and Bellingham – have been anything approaching regulars in the team after signing (OK, Styles at a push), and you can argue the merits of all three (or four).

It’s difficult to make a case for any of them improving the team, and whichever way you want to spin it, that’s not good enough. Our signings need to improve the side, and they simply haven’t.

Take a look at the squad that took on Wycombe in the playoff final – it is streets ahead of what we currently have. (Patterson, Gooch, Wright, Batth, Cirkin, Roberts, O’Nien, Evans, Embleton, Pritchard, Stewart, Clarke, Broadhead, Doyle, for those playing along at home.)

It begs the question, how much progress have we really made?

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While signing ‘players for the future’ is fine in theory, it can only work if they’re either good enough to come into the first team and improve it immediately or their arrivals are complemented by players who are good enough to make a difference in the first team.

Our signings haven’t been good enough and, to be honest, I struggle to see too many of them being good enough to be regulars in the top half of the Championship anytime soon. I feel sorry for a lot of them – they’re being asked to do jobs they’re not yet equipped to do – and they need some quality and experience around them to guide them along.

We need to see an evolution in our transfer approach for next season. I don’t buy the view that we’re a couple of players short – for me, we’re five or six immediate first-team starters short of a promotion challenge (and that’s if we keep the current squad together – more on that to follow).

It’s likely that we’ll see nine or ten incomings this summer – which then, for the balance of the squad, means we need to move nine or ten players out.

Chances are they’ll mostly move out on loan – which, given they’ve mainly been signed for their future development, isn’t a bad thing at all – but we need to be ruthless this summer, and it’s essential we drastically improve the first team.

While we have had good players out through injury for large spells this season, I’d argue only Dennis Cirkin would have been a guaranteed starter; Corry Evans possibly, although without his injury, he may not even have got another year last summer.

Of course, the appointment of a new manager is going to be massive in all of this – I don’t think we can underestimate the impact a quality manager can have – and the club has had enough time to get this right.

While Speakman has spoken a lot about a consistent playing identity and style, it’s quite clear the head coach/manager is influencing this an awful lot. We’ve seen massive shifts in playing style from Lee Johnson to Alex Neil, from Neil to Tony Mowbray, and then from Mowbray to Michael Beale to Dodds.

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The football under Dodds has been bad. We’ve been so negative and defensive, and the polar opposite of what we saw under Tony Mowbray.

This is concerning and really puzzling, given that Dodds is supposed to be integral in delivering this free-flowing, attacking, exciting football philosophy that’s ‘part of the club’ not just a manager’s ideal.

Dodds has been negative, devoid of ideas, and completely unwilling to give younger players a chance. Giving Tommy Watson five minutes on Saturday was just laughable. It’s been dire, and it just adds weight to the thought that we need a completely clean sweep behind the scenes.

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I certainly believe that the new manager needs to be allowed to bring in his own coaching staff, and I have to say I wouldn’t be sorry if Dodds and Michael Proctor left the club. We need fresh ideas, fresh voices, and I think Dodds has probably burned a lot of bridges with the players with some of his public comments.

Regardless of anything else that happened, I think we made a mistake with Beale in not allowing him to bring in any of his own people – a new manager needs his own people, his own confidants, a trusted set of eyes and ears around the place – and whoever we bring in has got to have at least a couple of his own men with him.

As for Speakman, rumours of him going to Lyon could end up being be well timed.

He’s going to be under enormous pressure to get everything right this summer. Everything decision is going to be under immense scrutiny, and after having a decent amount of credit in the bank a year ago, his credit’s now running low.

Rightly or wrongly, he’s become a divisive figure at the club, and maybe it’s time for a change there for everyone’s benefit. If not, every time something doesn’t go right, Speakman’s going to be under fire and I just don’t think it’s healthy for the club. We saw the division that came with Beale’s appointment, and I fear Speakman’s continued presence could become similarly dividing.

We need a positive, unified summer. We need to forget about the past six months and look ahead with some positivity. In many respects, we need a fresh start, and it could be that that includes the Sporting Director.

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Of course, Speakman is operating on the instructions of Kyril Louis-Dreyfus and Juan Sartori, and this summer needs to see the owners make some decisions about what they want to do with the club. Are we seriously trying to get promoted? That’s got to be the aim, but we’re so far off that right now.

Jack Clarke, Dan Neil, Trai Hume, Anthony Patterson, and Dan Ballard will be in demand this summer, and it’s important that we keep our best players wherever possible. We need to convince those five particularly that this is the place for them to progress even further. We need to convince them we have the ambition to match theirs. And we’ll probably need to give a few of them improved contracts.

People will argue about wage structures and finances, and in the week the club accounts showed that we were £9 million in the red last season, some will use that as the rationale for not bowing to any contract demands that exceed our wage structure. But to me, that’s a false economy.

We made the same mistake with Ross Stewart. His second injury didn’t make the decision to sell him the right one, and he should’ve been given the contract he so clearly deserved. In fact, his injuries have probably done Speakman a favour – if Stewart had scored 20 and fired Southampton to promotion, he’d have faced even greater criticism.

If we don’t change our approach to retaining players, we’re going to quickly lose anyone decent, and it’s going to be difficult to build a successful side.

If we want to progress, we need to invest smartly; however, for all the messages of prudency and clever investment, we’ve spent money on transfer fees and wages for 13 players who aren’t close to being first-team regulars. Is that really a good use of limited resources?

Take Leo Hjelde (although you could take a number of players here, but Hjelde’s one that, when everyone is fit, wouldn’t make the bench). I’d much rather do without him and give the money we paid in a transfer fee and wages to the likes of Clarke or Stewart. Wage structures are fine in theory, but they need to be realistic if we want to go up. And we’re not going to go up if we can’t keep our better players.

I’m not advocating ripping the whole thing up and starting again here. In principle, I agree with lots of what the club are trying to do – don’t overspend on wages, don’t sign players with no possible resale value for big money, do sign players who can grow and improve with us, and whose value will increase as we go along, and do give opportunities to players coming through the academy. It’s all logical, commonsense stuff – however, the execution of how we’re going about it will naturally evolve. It needs to.

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Off the field, the season was pretty disastrous, particularly the handling of the Newcastle game, which will always taint KLD’s time here, whatever he goes on to achieve.

He’s been conspicuous by his absence for much of this year, too, adding to the sense of directionlessness.

While it’s understandable that he wants to spend time at home given the arrival of his kid, running Sunderland can’t be an afterthought, and we can’t have another absent owner.

We saw the rudderless impact that Ellis Short had towards the end and to be honest, the past few months have felt like Short’s final few months. Drifting aimlessly along. Louis-Dreyfus needs to be more visible, more communicative and more present.

Credit where it’s due, however, as the new kit deal and relationship with Fanatics looks positive, as do changes to the club shop. However, that can only be the start, as the stadium’s in need of upgrading and maintenance, and we need to get these things right, too.

Ultimately, it’s on the field that matters, and this summer needs to produce some major statements of intent.

We need to make ambitious, long-term decisions over the coming weeks and months. Because, if we continue along the same path we’ve trodden since December, I’m fearful of what next season could hold.