Back to square one for Sunderland... again

Sacking Michael Beale after twelve league games in charge indicates that the manager may have been a symptom of the club's biggest problem rather than its cause.

There seems to be something about this season which is lending itself to extremely short managerial tenures. Perhaps football clubs are just more panicky than they used to be. Or perhaps they’re just making more bad decisions which need to be rectified. At Sunderland, it’s difficult to tell which of these it might have been.

This month has seen the launch of the third season of the acclaimed Sunderland ‘Til I Die on Netflix. At the outset of the recording of the first series, the club’s manager was Simon Grayson. Following the sacking Michael Beale after just twelve game in charge of the team, whoever ends up as his replacement will be the eighth they’ve had since then. For the record, that first series was recorded over the course of the 2017/18 season.

Of course, at that time, Sunderland were still in the process of their slow-motion implosion, which had already been in process for several years. That season ended in relegation from the Championship, the second successive year they’d finished bottom of a league table following relegation from the Premier League a year earlier, and it took the club four years to get promoted back to that level.

But if there’s one thing that Sunderland haven’t been over the last couple of seasons, it’s a ‘crisis club’. Promotion back to the Championship was eventually sealed in 2022 after they beat Sheffield Wednesday in the play-offs, and their first season back saw them finish in an impressive sixth place in the table, losing in the semi-finals of the play-offs to Luton Town.

And this season, although form has been patchier, hasn’t been disastrous. Beale’s departure came with Sunderland in tenth, four points off the play-offs and, with 47 points having already been accrued, already all-but a mathematical impossibility. When you take into account the huge systemic disadvantage pushed upon all Championship clubs by parachute payments, even this doesn’t look like a particularly bad return.

The club’s sporting director, Kristjaan Speakman, had this much to say on the matter:

We are disappointed that Michael is leaving Sunderland AFC. Our desire is to improve and unfortunately that hasn’t been evident, as such we take full accountability and feel that acting decisively is in the best interests of the club.

This has been a difficult few months for Michael, who leaves with our best wishes for the future. Our focus is now on the players and supporting Mike Dodds in the remaining games to ensure we achieve the highest possible league finish. We will be updating our supporters further as and when significant developments are made.

So effectively he said nothing, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary at such a time. But there is something oddly fatalistic about talking of “the remaining games to ensure we achieve the highest possible league finish”, as though their season is already over and there’s nothing left to play for. It remains the case, however, distant it might all feel right now, that this season could yet end with the club returning to the Premier League.

But at the point that the club is starting a search for their fifth manager in just over two years, it starts to feel as though the manager who lasted twelve weeks may have been a symptom of the club’s problems rather than a cause. Remember: these two years have not been a ‘bad’ two years for the club.

They contained promotion, another shot at the play-offs, and the team is still in the chase for another go this time around. And at such a point, it seems reasonable to ask the question of whether the problem over this particular matter might rest slightly higher up the club’s internal food chain. With, say… the sporting director, perhaps?

Why did he go now? Well, the pressure had been building for a little while—it should go without saying that, at a club with this managerial turnover, what constitutes ‘a little while’ is definitely relative—and losing to Birmingham City, who are managed by Tony Mowbray, the man Sunderland sacked earlier this season in order to bring Beale in (yes yes, Will Still, I know), is unlikely to have helped, for symbolic reasons if nothing else.

It’s certainly fair to say that he underperformed. With six defeats in those twelve league matches and a win ratio of just 33.333%, he departs the Stadium of P45 with the lowest win ratio for a Sunderland manager since Chris Coleman, and as much as you need to know about his managerial reign is that it made up the lion’s share of the first series of Sunderland ‘Til I Die.

But if the common denominator over all of this is Speakman, will he be held accountable for it? Mowbray’s departure came after criticism of the club’s transfer policies. Beale had made similar noises, which has been reported as having added to tension behind the scenes. None of this, when added to the complaints from either previous manager, says much about the club’s processes for bringing in new personnel.

Under such circumstances, a manager needs all the support he can get, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case with the Sunderland supporters, many of whom considered his appointment to demonstrate a lack of ambition on the part of the club. You can argue among yourselves about whether this actually did or not, but that’s not really the point. The point is that, if there was a falling-out with the club hierarchy, Beale needed the results and/or the support of the fans themselves. A failure to achieve either of these left him exposed from all angles to what turned out to be a terminal degree.

It remains the case that Sunderland remain an opportunity, for the right manager. This is a club still capable of attracting 40,000+ crowds under the right circumstances, a club which considers its rightful place to be in the Premier League. The manager who can unlock this opportunity would have many of the building blocks to make go of such a return. The problem is that there is little to suggest that the club’s recruitment will pick the right person for the job. After all, they didn’t with Beale, did they?