Beeline for decline: How Sunderland 'obsession with progression' turned into self-sabotage

Sunderland have managed to get themselves in a right pickle with Michael Beale, and they may be the only people remotely surprised.

It’s not easy being a Sunderland fan right now. Sometimes, even trying to understand the language that comes out of the club from Kristjaan Speakman and Michael Beale is hard enough.

Generally it’s all LinkedIn-style speak that, in their heads, offers perfect clarity yet is barely decipherable to most of us.

“It’s fair to say you need to get your logistics again,” Beale recently said when describing Corry Evans return to fitness. ‘Logistics.’

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One of the recent pearlers from Speakman was “obsession with progression,” which he said was the reason why Michael Beale replaced Tony Mowbray. Big talk, actually quite creative, but also very middle-management.

That’s absolutely fine by the way. The language can take a while to get your head around, but there is nothing really wrong with it. The problem is that you have to back it up and place your bets carefully - and Michael Beale is not looking like a safe bet upon which to stake your ‘obsession with progression’ rhetoric.

No one is going to tell you that everything was perfect at Sunderland before Beale was appointed. It wasn’t. There were problems to solve and work to be done.

The problem is, since Beale has arrived, none of those problems have been fixed and a whole lot of new ones have appeared.

All Speakman has achieved today is ensuring that the words 'obsession with progression' will be rammed down his throat literally every time he does something the fans don't like 😂😂 #SAFC https://t.co/IMXG869wYY

— Michael Graham (@Capt_Fishpaste) December 20, 2023

The tangibles

He would probably point at the fact no striker had scored this season before he arrived, and he’s right. Both Mason Burstow and Nazariy Rusyn have opened their accounts. Neither have scored enough to say the problem has been fixed, though.

In fact, Beale himself admitted that after the defeat to Huddersfield when he said Sunderland ‘don’t get enough goals from the number nine position.’ So that problem is still there.

Tellingly, though, for all the strikers have scored some goals, as a steam Sunderland have a lower goals per game under Beale than they had this season without him. So he’s made that worse.

The defence stats have remained identical, but that means that he hasn’t improved it either. The set-piece weakness has cropped up under Beale though and it wasn’t there before. Again, he pointed that out himself.

“We hadn't conceded for nine games from a set-play until we went to Ipswich,” he said.

You obviously only need to take one look at the Championship table to know that Sunderland are winning fewer points per game under Beale than they were before. 

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The Black Cats have slipped outside of touching distance in terms of the play-off positions this week and are barely clinging onto a place in the top ten.

Then there is the intangible things, which you can’t measure but is perhaps the most important stuff of all.

The intangibles

Let’s start with the most important one here: No one I have spoken to is actually enjoying supporting Sunderland under Michael Beale.

And we’ll have to be clear here. It’s not because of how he talks, how he looks or where he was born. It’s because the football is just sub-par.

Sure, there has been the odd blistering 15 minutes here (Plymouth) and an occasional decent half minutes there, but the majority of it has been incredibly poor.

This is usually the point in the discussion where someone points out that it wasn’t always brilliant under Tony Mowbray either, and they are of course right. It was, though, much better than now and happened a lot more often.

The best that Beale has got out of this Sunderland squad was not as good as the best Mowbray got out of it, and the worst under Mowbray was not as bad as the worst under Beale.

And that’s an important point, because this isn’t a case of Beale taking over a poorly performing team who we know can’t do it. We have seen the kind of football these players can produce, and they are getting nowhere near that level under the new head coach.

All the swashbuckling swagger has just gone from Sunderland’s play, and the confidence looks like it has too. Beale often talks about players taking too many touches, and that is always a sign of dropping confidence.

Then there has been a noticeable drop-off in terms of fight and energy. You think back a year to the win over West Brom at the Hawthorns when Sunderland went 1-0 down away from home against a play-off rival and fought their hearts out to turn it into a 2-1 win.

Now we are seeing meek surrenders away to teams at the bottom while their players come out afterwards and brag about how easy Sunderland were to bully.

Perhaps the incident on the touchline between Beale and Trai Hume at Birmingham may shed some light onto why the players are not seemingly as willing to go the extra mile now? I know Beale has denied it, saying he didn’t see it, but do you believe him? I don’t. I mean, he was looking straight at him and stepped aside for him.

Michael Beale has claimed he 'did not see' Trai Hume despite appearing to be looking directly at him

Imagine if it had been Tony Mowbray doing that. Well, for a start, Mowbray wouldn’t have done it. Even if Beale did not see Hume, he’s still supposed to be managing him and he knows he’s just taken him off. He should be making the effort to show his player some appreciation.

But even if somehow it did happen to Mowbray and he claimed he simply hadn’t seen Hume, 100% I would have believed him. The trust was there, but it’s not with Michael Beale. There’s another thing that has been lost since the former Rangers man took over; another thing that has declined.

Oh, and before three weeks ago, when was the last Sunderland player who went on strike and refused to play for the club? Maybe that genuinely is just a coincidence, but then again…

That trust that has been lost is absolutely vital too, by the way, because it is the lifeblood of the connection between fans and the club. You can’t have one without the other. We used to feel both, and I am not talking about many moons ago. I mean literally a dozen games ago.

In fact, the connection was as strong as it has been for a very long time. True, questions were raised about the transfer model and ownership, but fans were generally engaging with the club incredibly positively.

IMAGO / PA Images

It felt, for the first time probably since the Roy Keane days and briefly under Martin O’Neill and Sam Allardyce, that the club was on a journey and we were being taken a long with them. We felt part of it again, listened to, like our support was worth something. It felt like a football club.

Now that one isn’t really on Beale. It’s on the person who appointed him, Kristjaan Speakman, but it is still something that has immediately declined under Beale.

As has the actual belief. And, wow, is that a biggie.

What was interesting before the Birmingham game was that all the talk beforehand was ‘what if we lose?’ It was a chance to really put ourselves back in a good position, and a game that on paper everyone should feel confident about winning. No one did, though. They would have before. There’s no question about that.

The beeline for decline

Appointing new managers, head coaches (whatever) is nothing new to Sunderland fans, and we know this.

In fact, aside from maybe Watford, you’d probably struggle to find a fanbase more well-drilled in adapting to life under a new manager.

The process is simple. First you have a bit of a moan because, let’s face it, how often have any of us actually got the manager we wanted? You then open your mind as best you can though and give him a chance.

Beale has had less of a chance than normal here, and I accept that, but that was because it came with what should have been a real positive for him: he got to take over a team performing well.

That’s rare for a manager (head coach, whatever). Normally you just keep things ticking over and slightly tweak things over time. You don’t need to worry about getting a fair chance because, frankly, it shouldn’t be all that difficult. You get a chance when things new managers inherit huge problems because no one can say it was their fault. And, if you don’t immediately make things better, well what chance did you have anyway?

WATCH: Petulant Sunderland boss Michael Beale ignores his own player during defeat

That’s not what has happened here, though. Here, Beale has made literally everything worse. Even the very best that he has produced are just things that we already had without him, and even then he’s producing them less often than we had them before.

And what is really agitating supporters even more was that it was all so completely unnecessary. It wasn’t like when Mowbray came in and the club had been put in a bad position by Alex Neil quitting. It was the club who have voluntarily decided to do it to themselves.

They can’t exactly claim to be surprised by how it’s gone either, by the way. I mean, no one else was. I guarantee you that outside of Beale’s friends and Kristjaan Speakman’s office, there was not a single person looking at the appointment and confidently predicting it was going to go well. At best, there will have been some who were open-minded, but that was the ceiling there.

So the whole things feels like a wholly predictable and completely unnecessary vanity project for both Speakman and Beale with fans and their joy of supporting their club offered up as collateral damage.

Meanwhile, every single thing, both measurable and immeasurable, has got worse. Appointing Beale was not ‘an obsession with progression,’ it was a beeline for decline, and right now it’s hard to imagine how it can possibly get any better without swift action from those who made the mistake in the first place – and even then they will likely find trust hard to come by from the supporters when it comes to appointing a successor. 

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