Perfect Start Has Sunderland Dreaming of Premier League Return Under Régis Le Bris

With four wins from as many games, Sunderland have made their best start to a league season in 99 years under Régis Le Bris. Can the Black Cats continue that form and win promotion back to the Premier League?

Beating the league champions 3-0 at home must be great. You’d think so, at least. But not for Sunderland.

A three-goal victory at home to Wolves on 6 May 2018 brought down the curtain on an utterly miserable season. Despite that win – their first at home in nearly four months – Sunderland finished bottom of the Championship and were relegated to the third tier for the first time since 1987-88.

The misery wasn’t just season-long, either. It followed a 20th-place finish in the Premier League in 2016-17 and meant Sunderland became just the third side in English Football League history to finish bottom of the top flight and the second tier in consecutive seasons after Fulham in 1968-69 and Wolves in 1984-85.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the misery was documented in excruciating detail for the Sunderland ‘Til I Die series on Netflix, and viewers across the world could experience the downfall with behind-the-scenes footage.

A little over a week after their relegation was confirmed, Sunderland fans received the news that owner Ellis Short had sold the club to a group led by Stewart Donald and including Juan Sartori.

While the purpose of this article isn’t to delve into the ownership of the club, it’s an important footnote as this change in owners adjusted the direction of the club towards a more positive future. Further steps were made when Kyril Louis-Dreyfus became the youngest majority owner in English professional football in February 2021 after taking over from Donald.

The first season under the Louis-Dreyfus ownership saw promotion from League One after three previous attempts had ended in failure. Their first season back in the Championship nearly ended the same way, and while 2023-24 was arguably the grimmest since their previous Championship relegation in 2018, 2024-25 has got fans dreaming of Premier League football once again.

The hiring of Frenchman Régis Le Bris as head coach in June came as a bit of a curveball appointment, with replies to their announcement ranging from “who?” to “this is a desperation appointment as nobody in England fancies the job.” Most Sunderland supporters were just happy to see the end to a lengthy search for a new permanent coach after Micheal Beale was dismissed on 19 February, only two months after being given the job.

While many English football supporters were unsure on Le Bris’ credentials to take over at the Stadium of Light, those who followed Lorient across his two seasons in charge knew it could prove to be a shrewd appointment by Sunderland.

After nearly a decade of involvement in Lorient’s youth setup, Le Bris was handed the reins to the first team in 2022. Despite having one of the smallest budgets in Ligue 1, Le Bris made a strong start as head coach.

A 10th-place finish in 2022-23 was very respectable, but after winning eight and losing just one of their opening 10 games to that campaign, their form dipped. They struggled to correct that last season, not helped by the departure of key players, and Lorient were relegated on the final day of 2023-24 following a joint-club record seven-game losing streak between March and May. Le Bris subsequently departed.

He hardly had a difficult act to follow at Sunderland, though. A dismal 12-game spell in charge for Beale saw him dismissed after four wins and an FA Cup defeat at home to rivals Newcastle. His exit suggested Sunderland’s owners had written off the season as a failure, allowing them to take their time in appointing a permanent successor in an attempt to come back stronger for 2024-25 – it’s a strategy that now seems to be paying dividends.

But while Sunderland decision-makers worked carefully, Mike Dodds led the team for the remaining 13 games of 2023-24 and results got even worse. From Beale’s first game in charge – a terrible 3-0 home defeat to Coventry City on 23 December – to the end of the season, Sunderland amassed just 23 points in 24 games. Only Blackburn Rovers (22) and a dreadful Rotherham side (14) earned fewer points in this period, while the Millers (16) were the only team to lose more games than the Black Cats (13).

Beale was largely unpopular with Sunderland fans, unlike his predecessor. Tony Mowbray was the manager to guide them to a sixth-place Championship finish in 2022-23 in what was their first season back in the second tier, only losing in the play-off semi-finals to eventual winners Luton Town. He managed to do that with by far the youngest team in the Championship that term, with their starting XI having an average age of just 24 years and 164 days.

In the end, their youthfulness was rumoured to be the reason for Mowbray’s departure, as he was apparently unhappy about being unable to bring in more experience to help push Sunderland on to Premier League promotion. The owners were supposedly unwilling to stray too far from their ethos of bringing through young talent and the high potential transfer earnings that could bring them in the future. It was also said to be an explanation for Beale falling out with the board, which further strengthened their belief that 12 games was enough before needing to make a change.

Overall last season, Sunderland again had the youngest average starting XI age in the Championship (22 years, 250 days), and Le Bris is working wonders with another young squad in 2024-25, with the Black Cats’ starting XI having an average age of just 23 years, 86 days (again, the youngest). They also have two of the youngest players to start a Championship game this season in 17-year-old Chris Rigg and 18-year-old Jobe Bellingham.

The 48-year-old is no stranger to working with young squads. During his first season in charge of Lorient, his team had the fourth-youngest average starting XI in Ligue 1 (25 years, 244 days) and last term it was even younger (25 years, 67 days), behind only Toulouse and Strasbourg in the French top flight.

Le Bris has had to contend with losing arguably Sunderland’s most-talented player in Jack Clarke recently, too. The 23-year-old forward had been exceptional for the club since signing for a rumoured £750,000 back in July 2022 after spending the previous half-season on loan. Reportedly, Sunderland have earned roughly 20 times that amount with his transfer to Ipswich Town, but there was still a lingering feeling that the Premier League new boys got a bit of a steal.

Clarke was involved in more goals than any other Championship player between his permanent signing in 2022 and his move to Ipswich (42), while no player could match his tally of open-play chances created (160). Losing Clarke was a big blow to Sunderland’s hopes for promotion, but life after their former star player has continued as 2024-25 started, with an excellent win over Burnley before defeating Portsmouth away.

Romaine Mundle scored in both of those wins, and there are high hopes that he – another former Tottenham Hotspur youngster – could have an even higher ceiling than Clarke.

The 21-year-old signed for Sunderland in February from Belgian side Standard Liège. With a lack of first-team opportunities at Spurs, Mundle – born a stone’s throw away from White Hart Lane – decided against signing a new contract in London and instead departed for senior opportunities in Belgium. Unfortunately for Mundle, those hardly materialised, with just six substitute appearances for Standard in the Pro League in the first half of 2023-24.

Joining a disjointed side extremely low on confidence when he did last season was always going to have an impact on Mundle’s output for Sunderland in the final months of the campaign. He could only manage a single goal and just three chances created across 485 minutes of league action. It did, however, provide the foundations for Mundle to acclimatise to Championship football and hit the ground running in the new season.

With Clarke understandably preferred in Sunderland’s opening two matches, Mundle was only handed five minutes of action from the bench. After coming into the starting lineup, his excellent first-half strike from a difficult angle against Burnley won Sunderland all three points, while he put the seal on the win at Portsmouth by finishing off a breakaway led by another of Sunderland’s young stars, Eliezer Mayenda.

Mundle looks like an ideal replacement for Clarke on the left, while Patrick Roberts provides just as much threat on the right. A fine technical player, Roberts was a huge reason for Sunderland’s great campaign in his first Championship season at the club under Mowbray in 2022-23, with only Clarke (70) creating more open-play chances then him (48). He also ranked second in the league for take-ons, both overall (278) and successful (112), as well as total in the opposition’s half (229).

Last season, Roberts’ per-90 averages in all three metrics dropped, and this season there has been a drastic reduction. Admittedly, this is a very small sample size, but in 325 minutes of league action this season, he has averaged 2.2 take-ons per 90 and 1.9 per 90 in the opposition’s half, nearly a quarter of his averages in 2022-23 (8.9 and 7.3). Part of the reason may be that he’s seeing less of the ball, with 55 touches per 90 down from 73 last season and 70 in 2022-23.

Mayenda has led the line well for Sunderland and offered a goal threat from a forward position that Sunderland have struggled to consistently find in their previous two seasons in the Championship. Other than Clarke and Roberts cutting in from wide areas, the general feeling has been that Sunderland have missed a central forward since winning promotion back to the second tier. Mayenda has averaged six touches in the opposition’s box per 90 in 2024-25 – again, it’s a small sample size, but only Clarke last season (8.5 per 90) had a higher seasonal average for the club across the last two full seasons.

Sunderland are the only team in the Championship yet to find themselves in a losing position this season, a statistic that’s helped by having one of the most organised defences in the division. They’ve allowed opponents a non-penalty expected goals total of just 1.90 in their four games, which is beaten only by Leeds United (1.78), while just Leeds (29) and Middlesbrough (27) have faced fewer shots (31).

Much like his Lorient side last season, Le Bris doesn’t seem too bothered about his team controlling possession. Sunderland have the third-lowest average possession figure in the Championship this term (42.9%), ahead of only Millwall and Derby. He does, however, like to stretch the pitch and get the ball into wide areas.

This doesn’t mean Sunderland are a high-frequency crossing side – far from it, with a league-low 28 attempted from open play in 2024-25 – but they have averaged a lower proportion of their touches in the middle third of the attacking half (23.0%) than the Championship average this season (24.6%).

Since Clarke departed, the wins over Burnley and Portsmouth have seen Sunderland build out from the back and use both Mundle and Roberts as constant outlets for their attack.

Looking at the two passing networks for Sunderland from the victories (below), they display how Sunderland like to play with width rather than through the middle in the attacking half of the pitch.

The Le Bris era at Sunderland couldn’t have started much better, with this being their best beginning to a league campaign since 1925-26. A long journey to face Plymouth Argyle on 14 September offers them the chance to win their opening five games of a league season for the first time in their history.

Le Bris has been here before with such an impressive start at Lorient, winning 25 points from his first 10 games in charge to make the third-best start by any manager in Ligue 1 history behind only Lucien Favre and Thomas Tuchel. The wheels then fell off, with just 59 points and 14 wins in his next 62 league games as boss.

The Premier League hasn’t been kind to Sunderland in the past, with the Black Cats losing nearly half (49%) of their 608 games, but the journey to get there is often more enjoyable than the final destination. Based on his start in the north east, maybe Le Bris can be the man to lead them on such an adventure.

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