How Regis Le Bris can turn Sunderland into Championship promotion contenders
After Sunderland began their Championship campaign with emphatic back-to-back league victories over Cardiff and Sheffield Wednesday, EFL pundit Gab Sutton has dissected Régis Le Bris’ impact at the club and looks at how the Frenchman can spark a push for the Premier League.
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Despite inheriting a team that finished 16th last season, with modest summer transfer activity, Régis Le Bris has the means to turn Sunderland into Championship promotion contenders.
That might sound odd by conventional logic, which would be to use the previous campaign’s final position as a starting point, then give or take a few places depending on key incomings and departures.
What conventional logic probably misses is that when a club have been investing in high-potential talent for two or three years, there comes a point at which those prospects approach their peak.
So, whereas clubs that favour an older recruitment policy constantly have to upgrade on any underperforming peak-age players, or replace their veterans, Sunderland have a conveyor belt system that means their squad should be getting better every year with the right coaching.
Sunderland Championship Promotion Odds
2023/24 may have been an outlier, as a Play-Off challenge under Tony Mowbray was undermined by chronic inconsistency under Michael Beale, and two wins in 13 under Mike Dodds.
However, much of this squad reached the Play-Offs as a newly-promoted club in 2022/23, with injury crises in defence and attack, when they were two years further back on their development.
As such, it stands to reason that, with the right guidance, this group can do even better with the players two years on, now the players are acclimatized to this level of football and have more confidence to let their ability shine through.
Only three of Le Bris’ 27-man senior squad are teenagers, now, and two of them are generational talents in Jobe Bellingham and Chris Rigg.
Bellingham sat a bit deeper than usual, on Sunday, due to Alan Browne’s absence, to help out defensively, and he was composed on the ball, and sufficiently agile to beat the press.
Rigg, who came in for Browne, on the other hand, was almost unplayable. The 17-year-old produced a performance of astonishing maturity, involved with a couple of the goals and coming so close to grabbing one for himself.
Sunderland managed to bat away interest from giants across Europe to tie the prodigy down to a new three-year contract, highlighting their appeal to the top young talent in the world.
And, when it comes to development, Le Bris has experience: as head of youth development at Lorient, alongside leading the Under-17s squad, he nurtured numerous players who would go onto star for the first team, such as Mattéo Guendouzi, Illan Meslier, Alexis Claude-Maurice and Enzo Le Fée.
Each of that quartet went on to represent France up to U21s level and, in Guendouzi’s case, the senior team, highlighting Le Bris’ influence.
Two wins out of two to start the 2024/25 Championship campaign. ✅
— The Championship Chat Podcast (@Champchatpod24) August 19, 2024
Back-to-back Championship wins for the first time since December. ✅
The only club yet to concede a Championship goal this season. ✅
The Régis Le Bris era is up and running at Sunderland! 🙌#SAFC pic.twitter.com/nXavYODHh0
The 48-year-old brings calming qualities, looking authoritative, in control, and stoically unruffled on the touchline, offering clear and concise instructions to direct proceedings with minimal fuss.
This is clearly having its benefits against the ball, where Sunderland didn’t press at all last season, or certainly didn’t after Tony Mowbray left.
As a result, it was difficult sometimes to give Neil, the platform to control games, Jobe, the licence to show his class, or Roberts and Clarke, the space to relish the wide areas like they did so beautifully in 2022/23 – although the latter’s form remained impeccable to his credit.
With a well co-ordinated press, however, all of those players have the means to become a more prominent influence on games, and that could make a massive difference to productivity.
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And then there’s Luke O’Nien, who is simply a mentality monster.
The 29-year-old was, as a youngster, released carelessly by Watford, and just managed to grab himself a trial at Wycombe courtesy of a positive reference from Gordon Bartlett at Wealdstone, where he’d been on loan.
O’Nien impressed then-Chairboys boss Gareth Ainsworth enormously with his determination and drive, and was deemed perfect for a manager who subsequently built his success on a culture-led process.
So, the midfielder starred at Adams Park for the next three years, helping Wanderers win promotion from League Two in 2018, earning a move to Sunderland.
There were times when O’Nien wasn’t getting into the team in midfield, but showed the strength of his conviction by filling in at right-back, where he ended up starting in the Play-Offs in his first season, and then at centre-back in the Championship in 2022/23.
Injuries to Dan Ballard, Danny Batth, Bailey Wright and Aji Alese led to a real scarcity in central defence, but they still managed to scrape into the Play-Offs in their first season up, partly because of O’Nien’s flat refusal to look out of place anywhere he plays.
In fact, the utility man has since performed so well there that, even when they have had the full set of centre-backs available, he’s still been preferred because of the way he leads people.
Are there more naturally gifted centre-backs than O’Nien, to partner Alese, even with Ballard is injured? Perhaps. Jensen Seelt was often part of PSV’s match-day squad, while Nectarios Triantis has been billed as a potential future Socceroos captain.
Yet O’Nien has stayed ahead of them because of his burning will to win, and the determination to attack every challenge he’s had in his life with the same relentless drive.
And, whereas other players might have crumbled on Sunday after making a mistake in possession that led to a Sheffield Wednesday opening, O’Nien never lost that confidence – he continued to believe he was good enough to play, and that subsequently came to fruition.
It’s an elite mentality, and O’Nien can rub off on some of these talented players – because if you have elite talent, combined with an elite mentality, what you have is something special.
Sure enough, something special seems to be unfolding at the Stadium of Light – especially if Saturday’s hosting of fellow embryonic table-toppers Burnley goes to plan.
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