Why Will Still pursuit may signify serious change is happening at Sunderland

When you’ve been a Sunderland fan for any length of time, you always end up looking for signs that things are genuinely changing.

Often, it can be a fruitless, thankless task, tinged by desperation and framed by the accumulation of scars of the past.

It’s not a new thing either. For new fans, the four years in League One quickly became grimly predictable. The Premier League years too… simultaneously somehow managing to both overspend and underspend, optimism, despair, new manager, survive (just), repeat.

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In fact, I can remember my first ever new Sunderland manager. For weeks after Dennis Smith was sacked, the likes of Sir Bobby Robson, Brian Little and Neil Warnock were linked until Malcolm Crosby was appointed from within. Fair enough I suppose. He did get to a cup final as a caretaker.

That seemed reasonable and fine to my young mind. Then again, that mind had yet to be scarred by Sunderland.

“Typical Sunderland,” I remember my parents commenting at the time in conversation with each other. “Always the cheap option.”

When it did end, Crosby was replaced by another ‘cheap’ internal and, according to my parents anyway, wholly unimaginative internal appointment with Terry Butcher being promoted to player-manager. After him, Mick Buxton continued the trend, and my parents’ indignation only grew.

It didn’t really take long before my wide-eyed youthful optimism was worn down too. Peter Reid delayed it. He was an actual external appointment, they first of my Sunderland-supporting life, and the first since Dennis Smith eight years earlier. He was out of work at the time, but had genuinely impressed in the Premier League at Man City.

However, since then, I’ve probably been ground down into the same mindset that my parents showed all those years ago. They saw a huge club, a historically important club, never really acting like one and generally going for the cheap option. That has been my experience too really.

You see all these other clubs who have just a fraction of what Sunderland has going for it and they’re off handpicking other clubs’ managers, paying what is needed, leveraging what they have, flexing far smaller muscles. Sunderland, meanwhile, not so much.

The stats certainly back that up as well. Since I started supporting Sunderland in 1987, just after Smith’s appointment, the club have appointed 23 full-time managers or head coaches. Nearly two dozen in 36 years.

Sunderland manager/head coach appointments since 1990

Just two of them, Steve Bruce and Jack Ross, were employed at other clubs at the time. Two.

Meanwhile, 19 of the 23 were either internal appointments or getting people out of work at the time. That’s 83% of the time. The remaining two were international managers who were already very much on their way out of those jobs.

For a club Sunderland’s size, is that really good enough? I mean, all clubs scour the out-of-work market to an extent, but to that extent?

Source of new Sunderland managers/head coaches since 1990

And that’s why, if you are looking for signs that Sunderland are changing under Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, the pursuit of Will Still is likely going to be a source of genuine excitement.

Still is just 31 with one of the best reputations of all up-and-coming coaches in Europe, and currently at a club playing at a higher level than Sunderland.

He is a man with options having also been sounded out by Lyon, and all the time in the world to wait for and weigh-up his next move. It's a genuinely ambitious pursuit for Sunderland.

It is far from certain that Sunderland will land him, and there is likely to be a bit of a battle over a compensation package even if they can. However, the club even being in for a coach in Still’s current situation is a big departure from ‘typical Sunderland,’ never mind appearing to have a genuine shot at getting him.

For now, we wait to see if they can close the deal and get their man and, if they can’t, what their next move is. 

Ever since Kyril Louis-Dreyfus took over at Sunderland, though, we have asked for signs of ambition. Often the unwillingness to spend big on a striker and the model that sees the club develop and sell players have been used to accuse him of the opposite. 

Perhaps, though, our perceptions of those things and the conclusions we draw from them are just coloured by those 'typical Sunderland' scars of the past. Like an abused partner, maybe we have just had the ability to believe we could ever get better - or even deserve it - beaten out of us over the years. 

Or, perhaps... just perhaps... things are starting to genuinely change at Sunderland. 

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