Alex Neil makes further mockery of Sunderland exit excuse with recruitment comment

Former boss Alex Neil has now decided he likes the recruitment model Sunderland are trying to emulate after all...

Alex Neil has again ridiculed his own given reasons for leaving Sunderland by saying the Brighton recruitment model is the one he wants Stoke to implement.

Neil walked out on Sunderland in August to join Stoke, abandoning his post with so much disregard for the club that he was at another ground whilst the club he was being paid to coach was playing a Championship game.

He later claimed that the reason he left Sunderland was because he wanted more control over transfers.

However, ahead of Stoke’s FA Cup game against Brighton, Neil has said that the Seagulls’ transfer model – which is the same as the one he criticised at Sunderland – was what he wanted his own club to adopt.

Asked if Brighton offered an example for what he wanted Stoke to become, Neil said: "Of course.

“If you look at where they were when I played against them as Norwich manager when the owner Tony Bloom had Chris Hughton as manager and they were fighting relegation [in the Championship], they had the big striker Chris O’Grady up front, put the ball up to him and worked off his feet. You thought, ‘All right, they’re a Championship team.’

“They’re now signing players for millions of pounds and sending them straight out on loan. That’s a ridiculous thing to be able to do.

"I think from where they were then to where they are now is a remarkable rise. The infrastructure is incredible. They didn’t have a stadium at one point, playing at the Withdean, and now they have a state-of-the-art training ground with assets coming out of their ears in terms of selling players.

“The one key asset which has allowed them to do that is one, getting promoted and two, recruitment.

“[Leandro] Trossard they bought for £13m, sold him for £21m; Marc Curcurella they bought for £15m, sold him to Chelsea for more than £50m. There are so many different stories. They knocked back about £80m for Moises Caicedo, the midfield player.

“They’ve got players they can sell for hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds now and they go and get players like [Jeremy] Sacramento and [Julio] Enciso from South America and Tony Bloom has obviously got algorithms for how they recruit and it’s remarkable how far they’ve risen.”

Of course, the reason Alex Neil went to Stoke was for money and to be closer to his family home. Both are perfectly reasonable and understandable, which is why it always felt so needless for him to criticise Sunderland on the way out. 

Neil will be back on Wearside this weekend as Sunderland host Stoke at the Stadium of Light. 

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