SUNDERLAND’S new owners are determined to maintain the club’s category one academy status, and are keen to offer Kevin Ball a more prominent role in the coaching set-up.

However, Martin Bain’s involvement with the Black Cats has come to an end, with the Scotsman having left his position as chief executive. The majority of Bain’s duties will be taken over by incoming director Charlie Methven, who sat alongside new owner Stewart Donald at his introductory press conference on Monday.

Having completed his takeover at the weekend, Donald has spent the last 48 hours pursuing the appointment of a new manager, with Jack Ross and Michael Appleton still featuring prominently on his wanted list.

Chris Wilder is no longer an option after signing a new contract with Sheffield United, and Bolton chairman Ken Anderson has warned Sunderland not to consider a formal approach for Phil Parkinson, but Donald remains confident of having a new manager in place by the start of next week.

As well as considering his managerial options, the insurance specialist has also been getting to grips with some of the issues he has inherited from former owner Ellis Short, with the future of Sunderland’s academy featuring prominently in his thoughts.

When the Football Association and Premier League restructured English football’s academy system in 2012 with the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Plan, Sunderland fought hard to achieve category one status.

They have maintained their tier-one ranking despite the drop to League One, with ten different factors including productivity rates, training facilities, coaching standards and welfare provisions being assessed as part of the grading process.

Having a category one academy brings a number of benefits when it comes to the recruitment and retention of players, and also means Sunderland would be due a higher level of compensation if any of their youngsters were to leave.

However, it also comes at a considerable cost as it is estimated that a club has to spend between £4-5m a year to operate an academy at category one level.

With Donald and Methven having admitted there is a need to cut costs this summer, it had been feared that the academy set-up could be ripped apart.

However, there is a strong desire to retain the current levels of investment in Sunderland’s youth system, and a determination to ensure the academy is not downgraded.

“We want to keep it as a category one academy,” said Donald. “It is expensive to run, and I think we have to evaluate that, but we don’t want to become a category two academy.

“Category one was not passed off first time as I understand it. It took work to keep category one before, so we have to get in there and understand why it didn’t just sail through. But I want to keep category one status, and I think we will.”

Sunderland’s youth set-up is run by academy manager Jimmy Sinclair, with Elliott Dickman currently in charge of the Under-23s and Mark Atkinson the lead coach for the Under-18s.

Ball was appointed to the role of senior professional development coach under Martin O’Neill in July 2012, and was integral to the development of Jordan Pickford and Jordan Henderson, both of whom were named in the England squad for this summer’s World Cup finals.

However, in recent years, the former Sunderland skipper has performed more of an ambassadorial role, attending club functions and dinners, something Donald and Methven feel is a waste of his talents.

“I don’t knock everything that the current management have done, but I don’t understand the Kevin Ball situation,” said Methven. “A man in the prime of his career, who has achieved phenomenal things – an England captain and goalkeeper coming through his youth team – wandering around doing club dinners at the age of 51 or 52, that’s just not right.

“That guy is absolutely in the prime of his coaching career, but we’ll be sitting down with Kevin and discussing a more proactive role because we’ve had meetings with him already and we like what we see.”

While there is a determination to ring-fence spending on the academy, there is an acceptance that costs will have to be cut in other areas, and Donald has been unable to rule out potential redundancies in some back-office roles.

“I hope not (that there will be job losses), but the reality is that the footballers have put the general employees in jeopardy by not winning enough games,” said Donald. “In football, there are a lot of fixed costs. The stadium isn’t cheap to run, and that has put pressure on staff, and you can sense that when you walk around.

“When the club got relegated before, there were redundancies. All we can promise is that we will review everything. If we decide that is the right thing to do, we will do it and do it quickly, and that will be that.

“We will look to other alternatives, but the culture of the club has not realised it is not Premier League any more. From staffing levels to the way everything is looked after, the club hasn’t got those revenues.

“There might be something that has to be done. I can’t promise there won’t be (job losses), but I can promise that the people who live and breathe the club, we will fight hard to keep them.”

Bain became the first high-profile casualty of the new regime when his departure was rubber-stamped yesterday.

Having joined Sunderland in 2016 to replace Margaret Byrne, who left in the wake of the Adam Johnson scandal, he was involved in the unsuccessful appointments of David Moyes, Simon Grayson and Chris Coleman, and presided over back-to-back relegations.

However, he still pocketed an annual salary of £1.2m in the Premier League relegation season, making him the highest-paid chief executive in Sunderland’s history.