The A to Z of Sunderland's demise

Chief Sports Writer Scott Wilson has compiled an A to Z guide to the club’s demise

ADAM JOHNSON

Of all the scandals to have tainted Sunderland in the last few years, the club’s handling of Adam Johnson’s conviction for sexual activity with a child was the most shocking.

Despite Johnson admitting to Sunderland’s then chief executive, Margaret Byrne, that he had kissed a 15-year-old schoolgirl and sent her explicit text messages, he was still allowed to represent the club in the Premier League.

Byrne’s refusal to take immediate action smacked of a complete lack of strong boardroom leadership, and Sunderland were left badly embarrassed when Johnson, a player they had steadfastly supported, was subsequently jailed for six years.

BIG SAM

It might feel like the last decade has been unremittingly miserable, but there was a brief period when Sunderland were under the control of Sam Allardyce when it felt as though a corner had been turned.

Results improved, the squad was successfully strengthened, and as the Black Cats began to turn their attention towards the 2016-17 season, talk of a possible top-ten finish did not feel too fanciful.

A couple of weeks later, though, England came calling, and Allardyce left. Perhaps he would have gone anyway given he was frustrated at Ellis Short’s reluctance to back him in the transfer market, but either way, a possible route to a brighter future was lost.

CHRIS COLEMAN

Should Sunderland’s current manager be blamed for the drop to League One? The die had already been cast when Simon Grayson left in November, with the Black Cats rooted to the foot of the table, but Coleman will still be bitterly disappointed at his failure to engineer any kind of improvement.

Nothing has changed under the former Wales boss, and his record of five wins from 27 league games means he has to feature on any list of those bearing responsibility for Sunderland’s demise. He inherited a mess, but the clean-up operation never got going.

Should he be offered the chance to rebuild in League One? Results on the pitch do not provide a compelling argument for retaining him, but he clearly cares deeply about Sunderland’s fate and would head into next season with his eyes wide open.

DIRECTORS OF FOOTBALL

When Martin O’Neill left Wearside in 2013, Ellis Short decided it was time for a shake-up behind the scenes. Roberto De Fanti, an Italian football agent, was appointed as director of football, and given carte blanche to draw up Sunderland’s transfer policy. The move was a complete disaster.

De Fanti signed more than a dozen players in his first summer in charge, and none was subsequently sold for a profit. Mention the likes of Cabral, Modibo Diakite, Ignacio Scocco and Jozy Altidore, and a shiver will run down the spine of most Sunderland fans.

De Fanti was eventually replaced by Lee Congerton, who operated under the title of sporting director, and he oversaw another procession of failed signings. Two key Short appointments; two powerful decision-makers completely out of their depth.

ELLIS SHORT

Ultimately, the buck has to stop with the man at the top, and while Sunderland’s owner has poured plenty of money into the club since taking over from the Drumaville Consortium in 2008, he has made a series of horrendous decisions that have left the club on its knees.

He devolved far too much power into the hands of people who were incapable of carrying out the roles they had been assigned, and swung violently from one extreme to the other when it came to sacking and appointing managers, and drawing up anything that resembled a long-term plan.

By the time Sunderland were relegated from the Premier League, he had decided it was time to turn off the taps, and his complete disinterest during the current campaign represents a wholesale dereliction of duty. The sooner he sells up, the better.

FINANCIAL MELTDOWN

Things have been catastrophic on the pitch in the last few years, but that’s nothing compared to what has been happening to Sunderland away from the field of play. The club’s finances are in a horrendous state, and administration remains a real possibility this summer.

A new set of accounts are due to be published in the next couple of weeks, but the most recent figures, which were released last April, showed a debt of £110m, around half of which is owed to Ellis Short, with the other half being owed to the banks.

Sunderland will receive a parachute payment of £35m next season, but their income from playing in League One will drop to around £1.4m. Their wage bill in their last accounts was £83.8m. Quite simply, the sums do not add up.

GREAT ESCAPES

How Sunderland celebrated when they kept on avoiding relegation from the Premier League by the skin of their teeth. Paolo Di Canio, Gus Poyet, Dick Advocaat, Sam Allardyce – all four oversaw their own version of the ‘Great Escape’.

In hindsight, though, Sunderland’s annual acts of escapology were merely papering over the cracks. Instead of addressing the root cause of the problems at the club, those in a position of power were encouraged to puff out their cheeks and revel in a narrow let-off.

Fundamental changes were avoided, and the cycle of decline continued. When Sunderland did eventually drop out of the top-flight under David Moyes, they were ill-equipped to deal with the fall-out that ensued.

HOME FORM

Nothing illustrates Sunderland’s ineffectiveness as starkly as their miserable record at the Stadium of Light. Last December, they set a new record when a 3-1 defeat to Reading meant they had gone 21 consecutive matches without claiming a home win.

A 1-0 win over Fulham meant they narrowly avoided going an entire year without winning in their home stadium, but Saturday’s defeat to Burton means they have picked up 13 points from a possible 66 in their home games this season.

That is an abject record, but it follows a trend that was established a long time ago. Sunderland’s home form has been shocking for the best part of a decade, and addressing that failing will have to be a key priority next season.

INVEST IN AFRICA

Sunderland has always been a club proudly rooted in its own community. For a three or four-year spell from around 2012, though, it switched its focus dramatically and embarked on a futile attempt to establish itself in Africa.

A two-year partnership with Invest In Africa was announced in the summer of 2012 – a tie-up that was brokered by oil giant Tullow Oil – with Sunderland’s then vice-chairman, David Miliband, claiming it was a “big opportunity for our region, as well as Africa”.

Who knows what money changed hands, but it felt like Sunderland were taking their eye off the ball. When they should have been addressing key problems close at home, senior officials were swanning around Africa trumpeting their support for the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

JACK RODWELL

Only Sunderland could pay someone more than £70,000-a-week and then claim they were no longer picking him because he ‘did not want to play football’.

Jack Rodwell’s name has become a byword for Sunderland’s failings, and the midfielder should take a long, hard look at the way he has conducted himself in the last 12 months.

That said, however, he wasn’t the one who offered to pay £70,000-a-week to an injury-plagued player and agreed to defer a wage cut in the event of relegation by 12 months. As with so many other areas, Sunderland’s horrendous decision-making has proved their undoing.

KEEPERS

Sunderland currently have three goalkeepers on their books – on the evidence of their performances this season, you could meld all three together and still not have a shot-stopper worthy of the name.

Jason Steele was one of Simon Grayson’s key summer signings, but the former Middlesbrough trainee has made a series of errors this term. Robbin Ruiter replaced him in the autumn, then duly let two Millwall free-kicks slip through his hands on the same afternoon.

Lee Camp arrived in January to help out, but has been plagued by his own problems, and perhaps the situation was best summed up when Sunderland filmed their goalkeepers training on a live Snapchat feed accompanied by the phrase “safe hands”. What happened next? One of the keepers spilled a shot into the net.

LOANS

When they were in the Premier League, one of Sunderland’s key problems was that their best player was often a loanee who had to return to his parent club after impressing at the Stadium of Light.

Danny Welbeck, Marcos Alonso, Ki Sung-Yeung – all did well on Wearside, then left before there was a chance for Sunderland to make the most of them.

In more recent years, the Black Cats have used the loan market to try to flesh out their squad, with generally poor results. The likes of Jake Clarke-Salter, Ovie Ejaria, Jonny Williams and Ashley Fletcher have added next to nothing this season – wouldn’t Sunderland have been better off giving their own youngsters a chance?

MARGARET BYRNE/MARTIN BAIN

Margaret Byrne was an in-house lawyer before she was promoted to the position of chief executive, and her time in the Stadium of Light boardroom featured one mishap after another.

She was forced to resign her position after admitting a “serious error of judgement” in relation to the Adam Johnson scandal, yet still departed with a pay-off of £850,000.

She was replaced by Martin Bain, and Sunderland’s current chief executive cannot escape his share of the blame for events over the last 12 months. His relentless cost-cutting has bared the club to the bone, and he has made a succession of poor managerial appointments that have contributed to the ongoing malaise.

NEGATIVITY

For far too long now, Sunderland’s decline has felt pre-ordained. An air of negativity hangs over the Stadium of Light, and a succession of players and managers have found it impossible to shift.

Niall Quinn talked of the “gremlins” at the club more than a decade ago, but the issue of Sunderland’s self-belief was brought into stark focus at the start of last season when David Moyes conceded his side was set for a relegation battle after just two matches.

It felt horribly self-defeating, and Moyes’ dour negativity set the tone for the remainder of the campaign. The rot has become even more firmly established this season, and it will be a huge challenge to lift the mood over the next few years.

OWN GOALS

Both literally and figuratively, Sunderland have become masters at the art of scoring own goals. On the pitch, surely no other team has put the ball through their own net on more occasions than the Black Cats in the last few years.

By the start of November in the 2013-14 season, Sunderland had already scored three own goals, more than the other 19 Premier League teams combined. By the same stage of the following campaign, they had scored more own goals in the course of a year than any of their players had scored as individuals at the right end.

The club have also scored some notable own goals in terms of their PR, with perhaps the most jarring seeing David Moyes’ squad jet off for a break in New York a matter of days before more than 80 job losses were announced.

PLAYER POWER

While a host of players have come and gone in the last few years, there is a core of the Sunderland squad that has remained intact. John O’Shea and Lee Cattermole in particular have been involved in a host of relegation battles. Are they a key part of the problems at the club?

Paolo Di Canio tried to take on Sunderland’s players, but his attempts to clamp down on what he perceived to be a culture of indiscipline led to a breakdown in his relationship with his squad.

Di Canio was quickly dismissed, but was the Italian on to something? Have Sunderland’s senior players been allowed to assume too much responsibility? Have their attitudes permeated through to the rest of the squad?

QUESTIONABLE PRIORITIES

A football club’s first focus should always relate to performances on the pitch. For too long, though, Sunderland have been obsessed with things that should have been of secondary importance to developing a winning team.

For a spell of three or four years, it was hard to tell whether the Stadium of Light was a football ground or a concert venue, such was the zeal with which Sunderland pursued leading artists and trumpeted their success in staging summer gigs. Never mind that it often ruined their team’s pre-season schedule.

Instead of focusing on their core support base, Sunderland’s senior management jetted off around the world, trying to drum up interest in Africa, South Korea and the United States. As Martin Bain put it at the start of this season, ‘We should stop trying to think we can be the next Man United’.

RICARDO ALVAREZ

If one saga could be said to sum up the complete shambles that has been Sunderland in the last few years, it is surely the signing, non-signing, and then signing again of Ricardo Alvarez.

When Sunderland signed Alvarez on loan from Inter Milan, they agreed to a clause that committed them to a €10.5m permanent deal at the end of the season if they avoided relegation. They duly stayed up, but decided a long-standing knee injury meant they wanted to try to get out of the Alvarez deal.

Unsurprisingly, Inter dug in their heels, and a lengthy court battle that ended up in the Court of Arbitration for Sport resulted in Sunderland being forced to pay around £9m for a player who had already left them more than two years earlier.

SIMON GRAYSON

Having jettisoned David Moyes in the wake of their relegation from the Premier League, Sunderland went into last summer desperately needing a manager to spearhead their recovery in the Championship.

They settled on Simon Grayson, who had led three different clubs to promotion from League One, but the appointment did not go as planned. By November, Grayson was sacked with Sunderland at the bottom of the table.

Grayson’s hands were tied last summer when it came to being able to spend in the transfer market, but he still made some dreadful signings and some equally poor tactical decisions. He wasn’t there to see relegation confirmed, but was unquestionably a key part of the process that resulted in the drop.

TAKEOVER TALK

For a fleeting moment last summer, it looked as though Sunderland were set for a change of ownership. Ellis Short was in talks with a German consortium, and had already confirmed his desire to sell.

The talks broke down when Short decided a sale was “not in Sunderland’s best interest”, though, and the financier returned to his native United States to bury his head in the sand.

There have been rumours of alternative interest since then, with former chairman Niall Quinn mooted as a potential saviour and a number of North-East and Irish businessmen linked with a possible deal. As things stand, though, Short remains in charge and there is no sign of a formal offer being tabled.

UNDERINVESTMENT

For the first half of his spell in charge of Sunderland, the one thing Ellis Short could not be accused of was a lack of investment. He poured money into the club, but the vast majority of it disappeared on transfer fees and wages. Over a three-year period, Sunderland signed 45 different players, and went on to make money on just three.

In the last couple of seasons, though, Short has kept his financial input to an absolute minimum. He has put in enough money to keep the club out of the hands of the administrators, but his spending on transfers has been practically non-existent.

Simon Grayson’s entire summer transfer budget was around £1.25m, and Chris Coleman was unable to spend a penny in January despite the obvious holes in his squad.

VITO MANNONE

Vito Mannone might not be the most high-profile player to have left Sunderland in the last 12 months, but his departure last summer was arguably the most damaging.

Sunderland sold Mannone to Reading for £2m, with Martin Bain trumpeting the Italian’s departure as proof that the club were entering a new era of financial prudence. “Regardless of other circumstances, the right thing was for the club to protect its investment,” said Bain. “That’s what I mean about efficiency.”

Sadly, though, Mannone was not adequately replaced, and Sunderland have lost a host of points this season because of goalkeeping errors. Efficiency, it seems, can sometimes have extremely damaging consequences.

WAGES

They might have tumbled down the leagues in the last two seasons, but Sunderland continue to be saddled with a wage bill that would not look out of place in the Premier League.

The club’s most recent set of accounts, which were released last April, revealed a wage bill of £83.8m, resulting in a wholly unsustainable wages-to-turnover ratio of 77.6 per cent.

That will have fallen as a result of players having to take a wage cut in the wake of relegation, but those players will not see their wages fall again in League One. As a point of comparison, Accrington Stanley, who recently won promotion to League One, have an annual wage bill of around £1.2m.

X-RATED STATISTICS

The extent of Sunderland’s failings over the last couple of seasons has been so dramatic that there a host of statistics that can be used to highlight the scale of their plight.

This one takes some beating though – in the whole of 2017, Sunderland led for a grand total of 20 minutes in all of their home games. They were ahead for three minutes against Bolton, four minutes against Millwall and 13 minutes against Fulham, and only went on to win one of those games.

No Football League or Premier League side has collected fewer points than Sunderland in the last five seasons, and no side has a worse home record.

YOUTH PRODUCTION

Sunderland’s academy might have produced Jordan Pickford and Jordan Henderson in the last decade, but for much of the club’s time in the Premier League, a lack of young players coming through the system was a major issue.

Chris Coleman has had to blood some youngsters this season, and in the likes of George Honeyman, Ethan Robson, Lynden Gooch, Joel Asoro and Josh Maja, the Black Cats will at least be able to call on a clutch of talented juniors as they look to rebuild in League One.

Will they continue to run a category one academy though? It costs a fortune to meet the requirements of the Premier League’s Elite Performance Plan, and Sunderland’s academy system could be one of the first casualties of a second relegation in the space of two years.

ZERO

The number of home wins Sunderland recorded between December 17, 2016 and December 16, 2017, and the number of victories the club have picked up in their last five matches, when they desperately needed a win to pull them out of the mire.

It is also the number of seasons that Sunderland have spent outside the top two divisions since they claimed the Division Three title in 1988.

Having been relegated under Lawrie McMenemy in the previous season, Sunderland ran away with the Third Division title in the 1980s. Will they be able to bounce back so rapidly this time around?