IF you’re a football club chief executive, you’re always going to be on something of a hiding to nothing if you choose to put your head above the parapet when your team is sitting at the bottom of the table.

So after Sunderland CEO Martin Bain spoke candidly in a lengthy in-house interview with his club’s official website on Wednesday, the immediate response from fans on social media was only to be expected. ‘Buy some decent players in January to keep us up then’, was pretty much the gist of it.

That’s understandable, and it’s hardly unfair. Whether he likes it or not, if Sunderland are a Championship club by the end of next May, Bain’s first year at the head of the Stadium of Light boardroom will be deemed to have been a failure. Results, as ever, dictate everything.

Yet after a lengthy period in which the silence emanating from the top of Sunderland’s executive hierarchy has been deafening, the Scotsman still deserves credit for attempting to lay out a blueprint for his reign. And once you examine the main tenets of his discussion closely, it quickly becomes apparent that he wants to take the club in a different direction to the one in which it has been travelling for the majority of Ellis Short’s time as owner.

Bain is a slick boardroom operator, steeped in the politics of running football clubs, and that alone immediately sets him apart from his predecessors. Many of Sunderland’s current problems stem from Short’s previous tendency to promote people to positions they were incapable of adequately filling.

Margaret Byrne? A lawyer who suddenly found herself in charge of the entire day-to-day running of a multi-million pound business. Roberto De Fanti? An agent who was given the keys to the safe and told to sort out the identification and recruitment of players. Short himself? An Irish-American banker who, at the start of his reign at least, appeared to want to play a prominent role in the hiring and firing of managers, and determining the structure of the footballing side of the business.

None had any real experience in football, and that quickly told. Bain, on the other hand, spent 15 years with Rangers, ten of which were on the Scottish club’s board, and also ran Israeli side Maccabi Tel-Aviv for almost two years.

He knows what it takes to run a football club, and after three-and-a-half months in his current position, he has clearly identified some things he doesn’t like.

For me, the most pertinent part of Wednesday’s interview was the section towards the end when he said: “It’s about getting back to the basics. I really want the club to have that identity that I think it’s lost a little bit.

“We have a wonderful fanbase – let’s engage with them and talk to them in a way they will relate to. We’re not one of the super-clubs in the world, we’re not the most commercially-prominent club in the world, so let’s not go down that route. Let’s take the revenue we can, but let’s get back to basics and start talking football.”

For the last four or five years, Sunderland haven’t had a clue what they wanted to be. Lip service was paid to repairing the bond between the club and its supporters, a process that was started so successfully by Niall Quinn when he embarked on his tour of working-men’s clubs and supporters’ associations, but the message was lost amid a senseless scramble to try to establish the Black Cats as a ‘world force’.

So we’ve had the tie-up with Invest to Africa and rolling advertising boards at the Stadium of Light urging fans to ‘Visit Tanzania’. We’ve had press releases trumpeting a loose relationship with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and proudly announcing a tie-up with Acacia Mining, not to mention official club visits to a host of countries in Africa. And we’ve had pre-season trips to South Korea and the United States in an attempt to ‘develop the brand’.

Meanwhile, the team on the pitch has continued to struggle and the fans who actually attend the games at the Stadium of Light have grown increasingly disillusioned with their club’s apparent disinterest when it comes to listening to their grievances.

It nothing else, Bain wants to recalibrate that approach, and that can only be applauded. He has already attended a number of events in the local community in an attempt to gauge supporters’ feelings, and accepts Sunderland have lost their way markedly when it comes to addressing their business’ key customers, namely the fans.

Money has been frittered away on a host of needless vanity projects, and that will stop. Bain wants Sunderland to be proud to be a North-East football club rather than ashamed of its regional roots, as appears to have been the case on a number of occasions recently.

He also accepts the current player trading model is broken, and while no supporter wants to hear talk of “players being sold on for a greater value”, it is refreshing to hear someone in a position of real authority at Sunderland openly admitting that things cannot go on as they are.

For far too long now, the Black Cats have bought players in a panic at an exorbitant fee, only to have to sell them at a loss a few years later or give them away for nothing as their contracts expired. That is why the club’s debts have ballooned to more than £140m, and is the single biggest explanation for the squad’s current position at the foot of the table.

Bain wants a much more strategic approach to recruitment, and acknowledges that the seemingly endless churn of players that has characterised Sunderland’s transfer business in the last few years is, to a large extent, a direct result of the club’s tendency to constantly chop and change its manager.

Hence, the very public and heartfelt backing for David Moyes, even though the current boss is still to claim his first Premier League victory since taking over from Sam Allardyce.

At some point, Sunderland are going to have put their faith in a manager and stick with him come what may. Listening to Bain, both in his interview on Wednesday and in the private discussions I have had with him since his appointment, it seems pretty clear that point has arrived.