by When the lights went out, literally, on Michael Beale in late January it was a metaphor for his divorce from Sunderland.
Beale was just moments into a press conference at the Academy of Light, the Championship club’s training base, when a power cut plunged the complex into darkness. As the manager began to speak after leading reporters to a flooded atrium in broad daylight, the sense grew that it could be a matter of time before the board pulled the plug on Tony Mowbray’s successor.
Sure enough, on Monday, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, Sunderland’s 27-year-old majority owner, added two months, 12 games and four wins to Beale’s two-and-a-half-year contract. Mike Dodds will be in charge for the remainder of the season, starting with Saturday’s home game against Swansea, where he will aim to begin closing the seven-point gap separating 10th-placed Sunderland from the play-off places.
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The 37-year-old coach is well-respected at the Stadium of Light, where he has forged close links with first-team players, particularly key attacking midfielder Jobe Bellingham. During a previous spell as caretaker manager following Mowbray’s sacking he presided over wins against West Brom and Leeds, surprising the latter when he switched to three goals.
In retrospect, Louis-Dreyfus might have been better off sticking with Dodds in December. Instead, Beale was hired and quickly faded away, a particular nadir reached when Hull beat them at home the weekend before that power-cutting press conference.
The Londoner was clearly feeling the pressure of replacing the much-respected, and by most reasonable metrics, fairly successful Mowbray, and he let his feelings show. “People didn’t want me here in the first place,” said the former Rangers and QPR manager, who made his name as Steven Gerrard’s assistant at Rangers and Aston Villa. “You can say it’s about style or this and that, but, let’s cut to the chase, people didn’t want me.”
Beale compounded his problems when he said he was “besieged” by criticism from supporters he took so personally. He rightly pointed out that Sunderland have the youngest team in the division, one of the lowest budgets in the second tier and were ahead of schedule to reach the play-offs last spring , just a year after relegating them from League One.
The only problem was that Mowbray fared better than he did with similar resources, not to mention commanding a more attractive style of play. Accordingly, when Sunderland lost 2-1 at Mowbray’s new club, Birmingham, last Saturday, Beale’s position could not be accepted.
Rather than travel back to Wearside on Saturday night, the outgoing manager boarded a flight to Glasgow en route to his family home ahead of a scheduled day off. By then many observers suspected that Beale would soon be spending much more time in Scotland. Those suspicions were duly confirmed on Monday morning.
Dodds quickly became a caretaker and Will Still, the 31-year-old Anglo-Belgian coach managing Reims in Ligue 1, promptly announced his desire to “come home” to England and stressed that -an ambitious Championship club would suit him.
Louis-Dreyfus and his ideal director of football, Kristjaan Speakman, should count themselves lucky that Sunderland remain an attractive proposition for a bright young manager. After all, good coaches could be forgiven for steering clear of a club looking for its 22nd manager in 22 years – and fifth in the three years since the French-Swiss owner took over as chairman.
But with an impressive, Premier League-standard infrastructure that includes the 49,000-capacity Stadium of Light and a well-appointed Academy of Light, not to mention Championship home attendances averaging nearly 41,000 this season, Sunderland still have considerable drawing power. .
In theory they should be fighting off requests from top quality managers with points to prove in the Graham Potter mold but the reality is different. While it makes perfect sense that billionaire Louis-Dreyfus wants to run Sunderland as a sustainable business, his blueprint for success is flawed.
Like legions of other clubs Sunderland aim to identify exciting young international talent and coach those players up to bring glory to the team before selling them on for huge profits. Unlike other proponents of this model, however, they seem to fail to accept that a certain amount of experience is necessary to provide leadership and consistency on the ground.
Beale, like Mowbray, left not long after he was publicly questioned about Speakman’s failure to provide him with a proven centre-forward. Chelsea loanee Mason Burstow and Ukrainian striker Nazariy Rusyn are currently missing some fine approach work from Bellingham and talented winger Jack Clarke among others.
In addition, the team, and Beale, were undermined when Alex Pritchard refused to continue playing for Sunderland before joining Birmingham last month. The 30-year-old attacking midfielder was their most experienced player.
Louis-Dreyfus is still desperate to oversee a promotion but, unless Dodds works miracles, doing so will require a certain amount of speculation. In the absence of such investment Sunderland’s management change looks set to continue at its current absurd rate.
