A rare thing happened at Sunderland last week — our head coach signed a contract extension.
This is rare because it’s not often a manager is liked at Sunderland or lasts longer than a year. Several over the last fifteen years haven’t even been in the hot seat that long!
However, Régis Le Bris is different to almost every manager we’ve had in the last twenty years. He’s part of a rare group of men who’ve taken Sunderland to the Premier League, but he’s rare in a different sense, in that he’s a calming figure on the touchline.
Le Bris has signed a contract that’ll see him remain as Sunderland manager until the summer of 2028.
This was described by the club as a ‘long-term deal’, which it is when you look at the high turnover of managers in professional football. We’ve had him at the helm for about fourteen months and not once have I doubted what we’re doing under him.
There were the obvious raised eyebrows as we headed into the playoffs on the back of five straight defeats, but this was a fine example of how great the benefit of hindsight is. Promotion to the Premier League felt light years away following the 2-0 defeat at Oxford, but Le Bris knew what he was doing and we were fine in the end.
The gap between sacking Michael Beale and appointing Le Bris was a rough time, but once the Frenchman was appointed, it made sense. An unknown foreign head coach was always going to be Sunderland’s next boss and for some reason, this just felt so inevitable.
Le Bris had a good record at Lorient before players were sold over his head, and his reputation as a ‘turbo football nerd’ followed him to Sunderland. Few managers who come to a new country adapt as quickly as he has, and during moments where everyone around him was losing their head, he was filling his with ways of turning on the playoff switch and getting us back to the Premier League.
The club had been moving towards the model of buying unknown players and developing them before Le Bris was appointed, and we’ve continued to do it since, making plenty of money in the process. It feels as though he’s made himself at home, and along with Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, Kristjaan Speakman, and more recently Florent Ghisolfi, Le Bris is a cog in a well-oiled Mackem machine.
Sunderland sticking by a head coach is long overdue.
Far too many have come and gone in a flash, and whilst most of these have been kicked out for good reason, nothing says ‘instability’ like getting through a couple of managers in a calendar year.
These days are hopefully behind us, and in Le Bris, Sunderland have a head coach who keeps his head down and doesn’t say anything confrontational. He’s a very intelligent man and I believe that one day, we’ll look back and be so grateful for the work he’s done.
[](/opinion/97090/an-ode-to-regis-le-bris#comments)