Sunderland are bottom of the Premier League this morning, and for once nobody at the club is pretending otherwise. After a 2-0 defeat at Bournemouth on Sunday left them with one win from seven games, defender Nordi Mukiele stood in front of the Sky Sports cameras and said what so many supporters at the Stadium of Light have been quietly thinking for weeks. “We are not good enough,” he admitted. “We deserve to be where we are today, definitely. Maybe because we became arrogant, this is what I think.”
It is a remarkable thing for a player to say about his own dressing room, and it lands with particular weight given where that dressing room was standing twelve months ago. This is the same Sunderland side that finished seventh in the Premier League last season on their first attempt back in the top flight, reaching a Europa League place that had not been within reach of anyone at the club since 1973. Mukiele’s honesty, uncomfortable as it is, has become the story of the week in the North East.
A fourth straight defeat, and nowhere left to hide
Bournemouth needed six minutes to get their reward at the Vitality Stadium, Marcus Tavernier finishing smartly to put the hosts ahead. Sunderland’s afternoon got worse eleven minutes later when Kevin Danso was shown a straight red card for hauling down Evanilson as the Brazilian broke clear, a decision VAR checked and upheld without much argument. Playing with ten men for the remaining seventy minutes against a side with genuine Premier League ambitions of their own was always going to be punishing, and Evanilson duly added a second just after the break.
The numbers from the game tell their own story. Bournemouth had 65% of possession and racked up an expected goals total above four, while Sunderland barely registered a single meaningful attempt all afternoon. It was Sunderland’s fourth league defeat in a row, following losses to Brighton, Manchester City and Arsenal, three of the stronger sides in the division, but there was no disguising the manner of this one. Manager Regis Le Bris did not try to find excuses afterwards. “We were below the level,” he said. “We were not Sunderland today, and that is not acceptable. It was a bad day. We won’t look for excuses.” He called the result “really painful” and praised Bournemouth as “relentless,” while admitting his own players simply were not there on the pitch when it mattered.
A fairytale turned upside down in a matter of months
What makes Mukiele’s comments sting is quite how good last season was. Sunderland came up from the Championship and were expected by most neutral observers to be fighting relegation all the way to May. Instead, under Le Bris, they finished seventh with 54 points from 38 games, scoring 42 and conceding only 48, reached the fifth round of the FA Cup, and did it all in front of an average home crowd of nearly 47,000 at a rocking Stadium of Light. Brian Brobbey’s seven league goals led the way, and the club secured a return to European football for the first time since the Jimmy Montgomery era, more than half a century ago.
That achievement earned Sunderland a place in this season’s Europa League, and in a strange twist of form, it is the one competition where the old swagger has survived. They beat both AZ Alkmaar and Torreense in their opening league phase matches, results that sit oddly alongside a Premier League return of one win, one draw and five defeats from seven games, and a goal difference of minus eight, among the worst in the division. It is as though the team Mukiele described as having become arrogant only shows up for the games supporters least expect them to win.
The transfer window that was supposed to build on success
Sunderland did not stand still over the summer. Twelve new signings arrived at a combined cost of around £141.5 million, a huge outlay for a club that had just been promoted, built on the logic that a seventh placed finish deserved reinforcement rather than consolidation. Mukiele himself was part of that spending, arriving from Paris Saint-Germain for a reported £12 million on a four year deal. The 27 year old Frenchman had won domestic honours at PSG and spent last season on loan at Bayer Leverkusen, helping them finish as Bundesliga runners-up, and his pedigree was meant to add precisely the kind of calm know-how Sunderland would need at this level.
Instead, his most notable contribution so far has been a verdict on his new teammates that nobody at the club will enjoy hearing repeated. It is a familiar story in football: a squad reinforced after overachieving finds the step up to meeting raised expectations harder than the one that got them there in the first place. Mukiele’s willingness to call it arrogance rather than simply bad luck or bad form is what has made his words travel so far this week, and it will not have gone unnoticed in a dressing room that needs, by his own admission, to rediscover how it played twelve months ago.
What comes next
There is no time to dwell on it. Sunderland travel to Poland on Thursday to face Lech Poznan in the Europa League, a competition in which they remain unbeaten, before returning to Premier League business against Leeds United at the Stadium of Light on Sunday. Danso will serve a one match suspension for his red card, since bans picked up in domestic football do not carry over into European competition, with Luke O’Nien the likely man to replace him at the back.
Le Bris has spoken throughout the difficult run about addressing problems rather than panicking, and there is little sense yet that his position is under genuine threat, not least given the goodwill his achievements last season bought him. But a club sitting bottom of the Premier League twelve months after finishing seventh needs results quickly, and Mukiele has at least made clear that the players know it too. Admitting arrogance out loud will not win a single point against Lech Poznan or Leeds United, but it is, at the very least, an honest starting point for putting it right.
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