Genius or madness? Sunderland’s £160m transfer window aims to smash historical precedentplaceholder image
Genius or madness? Sunderland’s £160m transfer window aims to smash historical precedent | Getty Images
Sunderland have spent a record-breaking sum and signed an army of new players - but is it a tactic that will pay off in the Premier League?
When Sunderland scored deep into stoppage time to beat Brentford in their final match before the transfer window closed, the script was deeply familiar – the same last-gasp heroics that had seen them past Coventry City and Sheffield United in the play-offs last season now earning them three points in the Premier League. But the cast was very different.
Only three of the players on the pitch when Wilson Isidor scored in the sixth minute of stoppage time were with Sunderland last year to enjoy Tom Watson’s famous late show at Wembley. Over the summer, the Black Cats sold their best player, made 15 new signings and spent an estimated £160m – more than any other newly-promoted team in Premier League history.
It's one of the riskiest summers of spending any side has embarked upon in top-flight history – but is it an inspired gamble, or an expensive, Football Manager-style mistake that will come back to bite them next May?
Why Sunderland’s summer spending spree represents a major risk
Sunderland aren’t the first team to try and buy what amounts to a whole new squad to prepare for life in the top tier. It isn’t always a successful strategy.
There was Burnley in 2023/24, for instance, who signed 18 players over the course of the season under Vincent Kompany but managed to accumulate just 24 points. Like Sunderland, they signed them young, with 11 of their new players aged 23 or younger. It didn’t do them much good, even if they did eventually turn profits on talented trio James Trafford, Sander Berge and Wilson Odobert.
Then there was Fulham in 2020/21 – 13 new faces, many of them extremely good players ranging from Antonee Robinson and Ola Aina to Ademola Lookman and Ruben Loftus-Cheek. The scouting, in retrospect, was impeccable, but the result was a lack of cohesion on the pitch and a prompt return to the second tier.
Then there was Ipswich Town just last season. They were praised for their recruitment at the time but 16 new players, many of them drawn from the cream of other Championship teams, couldn’t keep their heads above water.
Even the rare occasions on which a team signed a cast of thousands and survived, they did it by the skin of their teeth - with Nottingham Forest being a fine example of a team who were poor for two years after their promotion, largely because of a lack of coherent team identity as the players were bought and sold en masse, but managed to be just a little less bad than the teams who went down.
In short, Sunderland are following an example set by teams who tried the same approach and largely failed. That old canard about the definition of insanity springs to mind.
There are also some high-risk signings in among the 15 fresh arrivals (13 in truth, with Enzo Le Fée a returning loanee and Marc Guiu performing a swift about-turn back to Stamford Bridge) and they are certainly taking a swing by signing Brian Brobbey on transfer deadline day, even at a relatively affordable £17m or so.
Brobbey was a highly-rated prospect at Ajax who scored an impressive 31 goals in 62 Eredivise appearances before last season, but whose form fell of a cliff in 2024/25. Brobbey scored just four goals from an xG north of 10 and looked appalling in front of goal, a situation perhaps partly explained by a life-threatening run-in with an Amsterdam gangster.
It eventually came to light that Brobbey was being extorted for €150,000 by a criminal who exploded a bomb near the player’s car and then shot Brobbey’s friend as part of their efforts to secure the payment. The criminal was eventually caught, convicted and imprisoned for attempted murder, and Brobbey’s on-field issues were cast in a different light.
Hopefully a new start in Sunderland will help him but one can only imagine the psychological scars, never mind the very physical ones worn by Brobbey’s friend. You do have to wonder what the chances of him scoring the goals Sunderland will need to have a chance of staying up really are.
Elsewhere, there are players coming in with patchy historical track records such as Arthur Masuaku and Nordi Mukele, ageing veterans like Granit Xhaka and lots of players who are distinctly wet around the ears. Thanks to all those fresh-faced new arrivals, Sunderland’s starting line-up against West Ham on the opening weekend of the season had an average age of 24.1, the youngest of any team in the division.
Still, perhaps rolling the dice this hard was a necessity. The last six teams to come up have gone straight back down and simply rolling into the Premier League with a play-off winning team, as impressive as it was when it counted, was unlikely to have worked either – and with Jobe Bellingham leaving, a change of tack was a necessity. In any case, the early results suggest that Sunderland are doing something right.
Sunderland may have cracked the transfer window code – if AFCON doesn’t stop them
Heading into the September international break, Sunderland are sat sixth, level on points with Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur, having beaten both West Ham and Brentford. The other two promoted teams only have one point more between them.
Several of those new signings look extremely impressive. 20-year-old midfielder Noah Sadiki seems to have been everywhere. Xhaka has been immense. New goalkeeper Robin Roefs looks the part and saved a penalty against Brentford. There have been thrilling flashes from Simon Adingra and Chemsdine Talbi. Mukeiele was excellent on debut.
The early signs are that even if signing a host of new players at once is a bad idea, they might just have picked a lot of the right players this time around, and while their collective youth and inexperience could prove problematic in pressure situations down the line, head coach Regis Le Bris has so far managed to mould them into a cogent, coherent team.
Where teams travelling down this route have failed in the past, Sunderland are – so far – succeeding. There are plenty of questions to answer, especially about the quality and quantity of chances they can create for their central strikers and their capacity to put those chances away, but they don’t look like a squad assembled in a rush. Watch them play against Brentford and you don’t see a side filled with strangers.
That’s to Le Bris’ immense credit, although there is a long road to travel ahead of them and no guarantee that their form will be sustainable. In their 2-0 away defeat to fellow newcomers Burnley they struggled to create chances or to contain their opposition, hardly expected to be one of the league’s great attacking forces this year. The mood at the Stadium of Light is excellent and results better than could have been hoped for, but the fixtures will get harder.
There is also the looming shadow of the Africa Cup of Nations. Of Sunderland’s new signings, no fewer than seven of them are expected to travel to Morocco in December for a tournament which will take them away from Wearside for up to a month.
That includes the excellent Sadiki, Adingra, Talbi, the highly-rated midfielder Habib Diarra and deadline-day signing Bertrand Traoré. Both talent and experience will be drained during a critical period of the season which includes challenging fixtures against likely European contenders and what may be a crucial home game against Leeds United.
By the time we emerge blinking into the new year, perhaps Sunderland’s tactics in the transfer market won’t like quite as sharp as they do now – and there’s certainly plenty of precedent that suggests that they might have been better off focusing their recruitment on a smaller number of players.
But right now, Le Bris has his team ticking and most of that £160m seems to have been spent on players who are gelling quickly and playing good football. Perhaps, this time, a newly-promoted team have come up and cracked the code. We’ll find out in 2026.
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