If Sunderland are to enjoy a more successful season in the Championship it’s largely considered their summer recruitment will have to improve on what came to fruition 12 months ago.
It’s a simple process when it comes to the summer transfer window; you recruit a number of players who will come into your team and make an impact and hopefully enhance things. At least that’s the idea, anyway. Of course, football and transfers don’t always work out the way things are intended. Players will come and go having excelled at one club and not so much at another, as teams endlessly strive for progression and development.
Last year, Sunderland’s approach to that fell by the wayside as they swapped a sixth place finish and the Championship’s play-off spots for a 16th placed finish and plenty of mediocrity.
Within that, naturally, you need a stoke of good fortune when it comes to injuries and form, something that Sunderland also struggled with throughout large parts of last season – particularly on the injury front. Whether it was Tony Mowbray, Michael Beale or interim head coach Mike Dodds, Sunderland endured a rough year with injuries with as many as eight players you could consider starting candidates missing at least a month of the season.
Jack Clarke was the most notable of those players with the winger forced to sit out six games after suffering ankle ligament damage in February’s defeat to Birmingham City. It was the first time Clarke has been unavailable to Sunderland since turning his loan move from Tottenham Hotspur into a permanent deal in the summer of 2022 having featured in 4,166 minutes of a possible 4,680 in all competitions during the 2022-23 campaign which equates to missing less than six games across what was a 52-game season for Sunderland all told.
Prior to his injury setback last season, Clarke featured in 3,045 minutes of a possible 3,150 across all competitions which shows just how integral he has been in Sunderland’s system over the last two seasons – that without referencing his 39 total goal contributions within that time.
Beyond Clarke’s six-week absence, Patrick Roberts was a player of importance who struggled to feature as regularly last season as he did in 2022-23 having been absent from 13 Championship squads, starting just 21 games in total. Roberts was plagued with a series of hamstring and calf issues before missing the penultimate home game of the season through the birth of his child but there’s no escaping it was a difficult season for the 26-year-old when it comes to both form and fitness.
Full-back’s Dennis Cirkin and Aji Alese both missed the majority of the season, with both making just eight league appearances and only five of those coming as starters through hamstring and knee issues, respectively. Both Cirkin and Alese, it could be argued, would form part of a first choice Sunderland line-up with everybody fit, along with Clarke and Roberts, while club captain Corry Evans was limited to just three substitute appearances in the final weeks of the season having suffered an ACL injury in January 2023.
Pierre Ekwah was sidelined for a month in September with a knee problem while summer signing Nazariy Rusyn, the most experienced of the club’s forward acquisitions, missed the final nine games of the season with a calf injury, and Welsh defender Niall Huggins saw his season cruelly cut short in December with a significant knee injury.
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All of those players, when fit, would have strong claims to make the starting line-up which is why interim head coach Dodds questioned whether ‘even the most experienced manager’ would struggle to alter the club’s momentum in the second half of the season given those injuries.
With that said, Sunderland’s struggles go beyond that of an unfavourable injury list – albeit that will be something they will be hoping won’t hinder them as much next season. Instead, it goes back to last summer and the club’s recruitment.
Sunderland brought in 11 players ahead of last season: Nathan Bishop, Nectarios Triantis, Jenson Seelt, Timothee Pembele, Jobe Bellingham, Adil Aouchiche, Bradley Dack, Eliezer Mayenda, Luis Hemir, Mason Burstow and Rusyn. Of those 11 summer recruits, only Jobe featured in over 3,000 minutes in the Championship, having been named in all 46 squads - a number which compares to 33 full games.
Dutch defender Seelt and French midfielder Aouchiche, of the remaining 10 players brought in, featured in over 1,000 minutes of league football, with the rest of the players signed below the 1,000-minute mark which equates to less than 11 games. Interestingly, January recruits Leo Hjelde and Callum Styles featured more often than seven of Sunderland’s summer signings in half the time from January onwards.
It suggests an issue with Sunderland’s transfer business beyond that of the go-to data in terms of goals and assists and similar productivity-based stats. That issue being much more basic in that the club have struggled for enough actual output in simply being on the pitch as they need from a new signing to impact the team.
If we take into account Sunderland have eight players who featured in over 3,000 minutes of league football last season, a total which could be considered as a core group of regular starters – all of whom made at least 40 appearances; Ekwah, Clarke, Jobe, Dan Neil, Dan Ballard, Luke O’Nien, Anthony Patterson and Trai Hume – only one of those came from last summer’s transfer business.
To add greater, more alarming context, of Sunderland’s 11 summer signings, only three have played in more than 25 per cent of Championship minutes. That means eight of the club’s summer recruits featured in less than 25 per cent of the minutes played in the Championship last season.
While there is some mitigation within that, again through injury, with Pembele and Mayenda struggling upon their arrival on Wearside, Seelt’s season being cut short in March and Dack being hit with a three-month layoff with hamstring problems, there is also the obvious concern that a number of the club’s recruits did not live up to their billing even when fit.
If we compare Sunderland’s 2023 business to their 2022 summer activity ahead of their return to the Championship where they brought in 10 new players; Alex Bass, Ballard, Alese, Edouard Michut, Leon Dajaku, Abdoullah Ba, Jewison Bennette, Amad Diallo, Clarke and Ellis Simms, six of those 10 went on to feature in over 1,000 minutes in the 2022-23 campaign; Simms, Michut, Alese, Ballard, Amad and Clarke.
Of those six, Simms played only half a season due to being recalled by parent club Everton while Ballard missed over half the campaign with a broken foot and hamstring injuries, yet both still featured more than the majority of signings made by the club last summer. Joe Gelhardt, signed on loan from Leeds United in January 2023, also featured in over 1,000 minutes of Championship action for Sunderland in the second half of the 2022-23 season – a feat neither of the three players brought in during the 2024 January transfer window managed to make.
Six of those 10 signings in 2022 remain with the club in Bass, Ballard, Alese, Ba, Bennette and Clarke but only two of those have completed more league minutes in their second season with Ballard jumping from 1,615 minutes to 3,834 last season and Ba moving from 798 minutes to 1,927 minutes last season. Clarke’s injury, given his usual robustness, meant he dropped from 3,786 league minutes in 2022-23 to 3,496 minutes last season while Alese’s issues meant he was almost 1,000 minutes down from his 2022-23 output of 1,407 minutes to just 462 last season. Costa Rican winger Bennette competed in 250 minutes during his first season but was afforded just nine minutes in the Championship last season, and 70 in the League Cup, before heading out on loan to Greek Super League side Aris in January where he again struggled to feature regularly.
If Sunderland are considering another tilt at the Championship’s play-off or otherwise promotion race next season, it’s worthwhile comparing how those in the top six fared when it comes to the basic output of minutes from their summer signings.
Although the relegated trio of Leicester City, Leeds and Southampton were considered to have stronger squads than Sunderland, all three teams saw over half of their 2023 summer additions contribute more than 1,000 minutes in last season’s Championship.
Title winners Leicester brought in nine new players ahead of their return to the second tier in Harry Winks, Tom Cannon, Conor Coady, Mads Hermansen, Stephy Mavididi, Yunus Akgun, Cesare Casadei, Callum Doyle and Issahaku Fatawu and five of those nine (Winks, Hermansen, Mavididi, Fatawu and Doyle) played over 1,000 minutes.
Leeds also brought in nine new players last summer in Joel Piroe, Ethan Ampadu, Ilia Gruev, Glen Kamara, Djed Spence, Karl Darlow, Sam Byram, Jaidon Anthony and Joe Rodon, with Piroe, Ampadu, Kamara, Byram, Rodon and Gruev all surpassing the 1,000-minute threshold.
Leeds missed out on an immediate return to the Premier League in the play-off final against Southampton who saw five of their eight new additions feature for over 1,000 minutes in Shea Charles, Ryan Manning, Taylor Harwood-Bellis, Flynn Downs and Ryan Fraser. Of the three players who did not make that number, one was a back-up goalkeeper in Joe Lumley while Ross Stewart, brought in from Sunderland, spent the season in the treatment room with Everton defender Mason Holgate the anomaly having made just five appearances in what turned out to be an unsuccessful loan spell.
And there was a similar story at Norwich City who saw five of their 10 summer signings (Christian Fassnacht, Ashley Barnes, Borja Sainz, Jack Stacey and Shane Duffy) surpass the 1,000-minute milestone.
The outliers came in West Bromwich Albion and, more noticeably, Ipswich Town. Carlos Corberan made just three additions last summer in Josh Maja, Pipa and Jeremy Sarmiento on loan from Brighton & Hove Albion. Sarmiento was on track to break the 1,000-minute barrier before being recalled from his loan spell and sent to Ipswich for the second half of the season while Maja missed the majority of the second half of the campaign after picking up a significant injury in the defeat to Sunderland at the Stadium of Light. Tom Fellows, one of the club’s academy prospects, did breach the 1,000-minute mark, however.
As for Kieran McKenna’s side, who clinched the second automatic promotion spot in the Championship, only three of the seven players to arrive at Portman Road surpassed that total in Axel Tuanzebe, Omari Hutchinson and George Hirst – although key January signing Kieffer Moore also went beyond the 1,000-minute mark.
In the main, however, it suggests that the impact of players recruited over a summer transfer window can, or should, play a recognised part in a season – something which didn’t happen for Sunderland last year.
As the season laboured towards its climax for Sunderland, interim head coach Dodds stressed the importance of both players and staff undergoing a period of refection as to where things went so awry for the club last season, and one of those reflection points should be the lack of output from their recruitment policy, given the percentage of game time produced from the majority of signings.
“The players have to reflect because the reality is some of the players haven’t performed to the level that they did do previously,” Dodds explained. “I’ve got to do some reflection. I’m not going to shoulder the responsibility of the full season but at the same time, there’s a reflection of me and what could I have done and what do I need to do in the future to get better?
“Then there’s also a reflection from the football club in terms of there being a number of decisions this year where some have gone right, and some haven’t gone right. So I do think there are three stages of reflection; myself, the players and the football club. I do feel this season will be a huge foundation and caveat to go forward. But if we don’t reflect and don’t improve for next year then it’s not going to be a happy place.”
Dodds added: “We want to be a certain type of team and I feel this year we’ve seen too many fluctuations of a Sunderland team and I found that really difficult to wrestle that back, if I’m honest. I found it really, really difficult to get some momentum and wrestle that back.
“We’re one of the youngest teams, if not the youngest team, in the EFL – something we are all on board with. But when you lose three or four players through injury or suspension, and at times it was more than three or four, and you’re relying on under-18s and under-21s to sit on the bench, you’re getting even younger.
“I think there’s a core of the group the club should be really excited about. Unfortunately, when was the last time this club has had Jack Clarke and Patrick Roberts out at the same time? It hasn’t happened. Unfortunately, the week I take the team Jack Clarke goes out. I’m Tony’s [Mowbray] biggest fan, and I worked really well with Mick [Beale], but neither of them had to deal with that situation where you’ve got Jack and Pat out at the same time.
“On the flipside of that, I’m sure if the next head coach doesn’t have the level of injuries we’ve had, people won’t be talking about depth because if you look at the injury room you can pick a really strong team.”
Sunderland’s injury issues haven’t quite stopped with the end of the season either, with both Seelt and Huggins likely to be unavailable until 2025 while Neil is also dealing with an ankle injury that could run into the pre-season schedule.
Whether Dodds, or indeed ‘the most experienced head coach’ could have dealt differently with Sunderland’s injury list last season remains open for debate. What’s clear is come the beginning of the new season in August, Sunderland need more of their players, new recruits or otherwise, to be of full fitness, while those who they do bring in between now and the close of the transfer window need to be able to stake their claim for much more regular game time than we have seen over the last 12 months.
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