Sunderland would be forgiven for wanting to hit the Neil on the head after Stoke defection
It was all going so well for Sunderland, with huge season ticket sales and a decent start to the season. But then they lost their manager.
Oh, Sunderland. Every time they take a step forward, there’s another shock around the corner which seems designed to knock them back a further two. Promotion back to the Championship was a genuine turning point for a club that has had sand kicked in its face repeatedly for longer than most people can remember, but with this particular club there always seems to be a stumble incoming.
The pre-season was marked by the news that the club had sold more than 30,000 season tickets, an astonishing achievement for a club just promoted from the third tier of the English league system to its second. And when the football itself started again, results were okay, with two wins and a draw from their first three games against Coventry City, Bristol City and Queens Park Rangers.
It’s only taken four weeks for a mood of despondency to descend over The Stadium of Light again. When Sunderland travelled to The Bet365 Stadium to play Stoke the weekend before last they won by a goal to nil, another decent result against a team that had been misfiring since the start of the season. But few would likely guess how the two clubs’ paths would come to cross again quite so quickly.
The reason is Alex Neil, the now-former Sunderland manager who jumped ship to go to Stoke shortly before the bank holiday weekend after they sacked Michael O’Neill following a dismal start to the season in the Potteries, from which they’ve yielded just one league win and a Carabao Cup defeat at Morecambe, a win that remains Morecambe’s only win of the season after seven matches.
Presuming that we can quickly dismiss the blandishments of press statements on the matter, the rationale behind Neil’s departure remains something of a mystery. Sunderland were promoted at the end of last season. They sold tens of thousands of season tickets. They brought in a handful of new players, including spending £10m to bring in Jack Clarke from Spurs. The club’s previous ownership issues were resolved in June. Results in the first few games of the season had been decent enough. It’s difficult to see what more Sunderland could have done to retain his services, even if there was some grumbling on Neil’s part pre-season about not having enough players.
But the move proceeded at a dizzying pace. On Thursday morning, Stoke sacked Michael O’Neill. To general bewilderment, the following morning Sunderland had given Neil permission to Stoke. We can reasonably assume that Neil had already made his desire to leave the club very clear.
Considering the time frames that we already know about, this raises some tantalising questions about what, exactly, had been happening over the previous day or two. Did Neil know about O’Neill’s sacking at Stoke before it happened or was publicly announced? Why was O’Neill’s sacking not confirmed until the Thursday after their match against Sunderland? Are we expected to seriously believe that no conversation took place between Neil and Stoke until Sunderland confirmed that they had given him ‘permission to speak’ to them?
By Saturday afternoon, Neil was in the stand at Ewood Park for Stoke’s 1-0 win at Blackburn while Sunderland, their focus perhaps knocked a little off-kilter by the events of the previous 48 hours, were beaten 1-0 at home by Norwich City. The next day, Alex Neil was confirmed as the new manager of Stoke City. Sunderland, according to their statement, were ‘extremely disappointed’.
It’s true to say that the Coates family are fabulously wealthy, that doesn’t necessarily impact upon Stoke City. The EFL has testing profit and sustainability rules in the Championship and, with parachute payments having ended, the club’s income did take a big dip, the effects of which were only compounded by the impact of the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. It was reported earlier this year that Stoke had already sold their ground to Bet365 in May 2020, a month before the EFL outlawed this practice at their AGM.
It doesn’t seem likely that Stoke will be able to buy their way up out of the Championship this season, at least not without crashing through EFL rules. And even if they did muster up a little accounting magic to free up millions of pounds to spend in the transfer market, well, it’s only a couple of days until the window closes until the new year anyway.
It doesn’t seem the ideal position for improvement at a club that hasn’t finished above 14th place in the Championship since they were relegated. Of course, considering that Neil took the Sunderland job a week and a half after the January transfer window closed, he might not consider that to be a big issue anyway. And while Football Twitter exercised itself over which is the ‘bigger’ club in the wake of the news, it seems difficult to believe that a manager would be more influenced by this than practicalities.
So, what’s the reason for all of this? Why is Stoke such a tempting prospect that Neil couldn’t resist their offer? It has been suggested that he might have gone because he was only on a rolling contract, but this has been countered with the suggestion that this was exactly the contract that Neil wanted. Similar comments have been made about the travelling distance but again, this remains unsubstantiated.
To be clear, it’s fine for people who work in football to treat it as a job. There are plenty of examples of professional footballers who didn’t even much like the game including, most famously, the Leeds United and England midfielder David Batty. It was just something they happened to be good at.
And when we make demands of loyalty upon players, we often overlook that – for the vast majority of them – they often have no other qualifications and are working in an extremely lucrative but extremely time-limited profession, on fixed-term contracts with no promise of where the next one is coming from, at risk of it all ending with one injury, and already knowing that there aren’t enough jobs in coaching or the media for all retired footballers.
Similar insecurities also apply to managers. We already know just how precarious a job this can be and how that churn has accelerated in recent years. Furthermore, the average age of managers in England is also coming down. The oldest manager in the entire Premier League and EFL combined is Steve Bruce at West Bromwich Albion and he is 61 years old (and may not be long for that position, if I may be candid for a moment). The second youngest is David Moyes, who is 59.
Alex Neil is 41 years old. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that his managerial career may have 15 to 20 years left, if he doesn’t fall from favour earlier. The pressures and the incredible amount of work required to get anywhere whatsoever near the Premier League or the Championship are such that if someone does think, ‘Damn straight, I’m going to maximise my earning potential’, then it’s difficult to argue against them. Of course, the matter is somewhat muddied when managers and players make pledges of loyalty when it benefits them to do so.
So none of this is – and Sunderland supporters will have to pardon the unintentional pun, here – a black-and-white issue, even though the inner supporter in all of us (unless you happen to be a beneficiary of it, whether directly or indirectly) may make your blood rise when you hear such news. Perhaps the issue is the facade of civility that hangs over it all. The ‘permission to speak’, the ‘seven-day approaches’, all that. It just sets our expectations a little too high.
None of the above means that it doesn’t absolutely suck for Sunderland. Everything seemed to be finding a way of clicking. It wasn’t perfect, but it was an optimistic time to be a supporter of the club for the first time in a very long time. And the upward swing doesn’t have to end here. His replacement hasn’t been named, but decent and competent managers such as Tony Mowbray and Sean Dyche are available.
Something like this happening, especially at this very early point in the season, doesn’t have to make it a write-off after just six matches, and the roar for the team at the Stadium of Light the next time they take to the pitch may just be a little louder than it might have been had Neil stayed. Whoever his replacement ends up being will walk into a club that has already started its journey back, and which has the tools to be able to complete the job.
But with Sunderland, there is always a punchline. At the same time that all of this drama was playing out, the club was welcoming back the cameras of Netflix to record a two-part retrospective following their series Sunderland Til I Die, which so painfully documented the club’s fall from grace in the first place. Timing is everything. If nothing else, and it’s not even entirely intentional, at least Sunderland have retained their sense of drama.