“Thanks for helping me a lot in my training. Good luck boss.” Amad Diallo was quick to respond to Tony Mowbray’s shock sacking by Sunderland late on Monday night and it is hard to interpret the Ivory Coast winger’s social media message as anything other than a rebuke to the Stadium of Light’s seemingly trigger-happy board.
The talented Diallo shone under Mowbray’s tutelage while on loan at Sunderland from Manchester United last season and were it not for a knee injury sustained during the summer the 21-year-old might well have been part of Erik ten Hag’s first team by now.
He is one of a series of young players, many teenagers, recruited by Sunderland as they pursue a policy of attempting to win promotion to the Premier League while investing in youthful, often cut-price talent with potentially high resale value. It is a well-worn template adopted, to varying extents and with varying degrees of success, by assorted clubs.
Under Sunderland’s version of the model, the manager has very little say on incomings and outgoings. That is one key reason why Alex Neil defected to Stoke almost immediately after leading Sunderland out of League One last year.
Mowbray stepped in and immediately overachieved, leading them to last season’s Championship playoff semi-final. He leaves them ninth in the division, three points away from top-six place. For a club so recently in the third tier, that represents very good going.
Granted, Sunderland have won two of their past nine games, but young teams are notoriously inconsistent and much of their football, invariably free flowing, improvisational and attacking, remained a joy to watch. Moreover, leading managers have always been happy to loan gifted players on the edge of their first team squad to teams coached by Mowbray. Not only does he possess the knack of improving individuals technically but his integrity and intuitive ability to know precisely when to be sensitive and when to be no nonsense helps develop his charges as people.
During Rafael Benítez’s time in charge of Chelsea, they won a cup tie at Middlesbrough, then managed by Mowbray, and after the game Benítez waxed lyrical about the home manager’s tactical vision on a shoestring and his impressive character. Benítez has always cautioned about much of football being “a lie”, but he made it clear Mowbray was someone who could be trusted.
Accordingly Sunderland’s owner and chairman, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, and sporting director, Kristjaan Speakman, may suddenly find it more difficult to secure loans and to persuade agents that Sunderland is the right destination for their clients. Last summer, Chelsea were happy to place Sunderland ahead of several other clubs as they looked to place their 20-year-old forward Mason Burstow in a Championship squad. Apparently, Mowbray’s presence at the helm proved pivotal. Similarly, would a player Sunderland will possibly soon sell on for a hefty profit, the 23-year-old winger Jack Clarke, have progressed so well, so fast, under another mentor?
Having played at centre-half in a young Middlesbrough side that, against all odds, rose from the third tier to the first in the 1980s, Sunderland’s latest managerial casualty has never been afraid of promoting talent from his club’s academies, but Mowbray is streetwise enough to know that a collective degree of experience is essential if teams are to prosper. It did not go down too well with his bosses this season when he hinted that the regular 40,000-plus crowds at the Stadium of Light deserved a bit more proven substance from a recruitment department that relies heavily on data analysis.
There has been a certain frostiness between Mowbray and the club’s executives since the end of last season when it emerged they had been flirting with the idea of appointing Francesco Farioli, the highly rated Italian coach now in charge of the Ligue 1 side Nice. Farioli had done well at Alanyaspor in Turkey but, considering Mowbray’s feat in reaching the playoffs, that dalliance represented an unmerited slap in the face for the 60-year-old.
Sunderland had applied data-driven metrics to identify up-and-coming coaches and the 34-year-old Farioli’s statistics looked good. It seemed Mowbray’s real world experience, not to mention human skills, did not count for quite so much.
Since the summer Mowbray has probably been at least half-expecting to be dismissed. As he recently put it: “There’s a balance between developing players and achieving positive results. Sometimes players just aren’t ready.
“It’s going to be a slightly longer journey [to the Premier League] than some people here hoped because of the inexperience of these players. I’ve always been a development coach. I try and make players better, make them grow. Hopefully results follow. If they don’t you lose your job.
“That’s fine, I understand football. But I hope the players I’ve worked with will remember the period they spent with us as helping them understand the game better and become better footballers.”
Amad certainly does. He will be far from alone.
