High-flying Sunderland are showing chaotic Man Utd how a football club should be run - and now Premier League new boys can put Ruben Amorim on the brink

In the last two seasons, all six of the teams promoted to the Premier League have gone straight back down, but Sunderland are intent on making their long-awaited return to the big time last. 

They have won three and drawn two of their six games, only losing to Burnley. They are fifth in the Premier League and have the highest points total at this stage of the season for a promoted side in the last 13 years. 

Sunderland buck the trend in other ways, too. They have the youngest owner in English football in 28-year-old Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, a French billionaire who bought the club in 2021 when they were in the doldrums of the third tier and had just endured the worst season in their history. 

Sunderland were valued at around £40m ($53m) at the time of the takeover. By contrast, INEOS chairman Sir Jim Ratcliffe paid £1.25bn to purchase a 27.7 percent stake in United in 2024.

Although Louis-Dreyfus was born into a billionaire family and his father used to own Marseille, he is no sugar daddy. While he oversaw a revamp of the training ground and improvements to the Stadium of Light after the Premier League return, he did not lavishly fund their resurgence. 

Sunderland had the 14th-highest wage bill in the Championship last year and the youngest squad, with an average age of 22. They finished fourth in the table, and although they were a massive 24 points behind winners Leeds, they took down favourites Sheffield United, flush with cash from Premier League parachute payments, in a thrilling play-off final. The promotion owed a lot to homegrown players, an area Louis-Dreyfus and sporting director Kristjaan Speakman were keen to grow when they assumed their roles in the 2020-21 season. 

In a fitting summary of how the club have returned to being a club that is admired, the decisive goal was scored by academy graduate Tom Watson. The winger, though, had already been sold to Brighton for £10m, an indication of how quickly the club moves on. Fellow academy players Dan Neil - last year’s captain - plus 18-year-old midfielder Chris Rigg and goalkeeper Anthony Patterson also played big roles in the promotion campaign.

And yet, instead of patting the local-boys-turned-good on the back, the club signed new players to compete with them. Dutch goalkeeper Robin Roefs has usurped Patterson as No.1 and played a pivotal role in the recent 1-0 win at Nottingham Forest, making six saves. Neil had the captain’s armband swiped off him by new signing Granit Xhaka and has only made one appearance, as a substitute, this season.

"It is a new season and we start from scratch with a new squad," is how coach Regis Le Bris explained the club’s ruthless approach. "At the same time, it is life for every player on the pitch. They have to accept that, to face the challenge of the Premier League, you have to first accept the challenge for your own position. 

"If you take it positively, you are in the right mood. So far, it is really easy with every player. They have time to digest the new set-up. The competition is getting harder for all positions. Every player in the squad knows that it is important to have the best team possible to be competitive in the Premier League."

A total of 17 players left in the summer while 15 arrived as the club splashed out £167.1m, giving them the ninth-highest transfer spend in the league and the fifth-highest net spend.

They were able to finance some of the deals thanks to some clever sales worth a total of £44m, chief among them Jobe Bellingham’s sale to Borussia Dortmund for a club record fee of £27m, potentially rising to £32m. Jack Clark,e’s sale to Ipswich last year brought in £15m.

The rest of the signings were funded by the massive windfall from Premier League promotion, worth a minimum of £200m in television money and commercial revenue according to the BBC. It is a gamble in one sense, but so far it is paying off. There is a logic to Sunderland’s recruitment model, too, which, according to The Telegraph, is dictated by a mixture of advanced data analytics and 'naked eye' scouting. 

In addition to sporting director Speakman, the club hired former footballer Florent Ghisolfi as director of football, having worked in similar roles at Roma, Lens and Nice. He helped recruit star summer signing Enzo Le Fee from Roma this summer, while his knowledge of the French market helped them land Nordi Mukiele from Paris Saint-Germain and Habib Diarra from Strasbourg.

Arguably the most important recruit, however, was Granit Xhaka, who gave up Champions League football with Bayer Leverkusen to move to the north east. According to The Guardian, the former Arsenal midfielder was impressed when Louis-Dreyfus showed him his 10-year business plan for the club. When Sunderland want to sign a player, they send them a video explaining the club’s history and their rise back from the dead. When talks progress, they are given further presentations detailing the investment in the training ground and their playing philosophy under Le Bris.

"My perception of Sunderland was that it was a big club that had hit rock bottom," Speakman told The Telegraph in 2024. "I was shocked when I came to the training facility, the way people treated and thought of it. The whole football club had taken a bit of a kicking. There wasn’t a lot of optimism or enterprise, everyone was on survival mode. Changing that mentality is really, really hard, but that is what we have tried to do."

At the re-booted training ground, the men and women’s teams are fully integrated, share facilities and eat side by side at the canteen. The women’s team have also made a strong start to the season, currently sitting fourth in the WSL2 while unbeaten.

Sunderland have not faced United since 2017, when David Moyes was their boss and Jose Mourinho was in charge of the Red Devils.

United also have a new-look training ground, but the team are yet to see its benefits on the pitch. They have been caught out by long balls in all six of their matches, and Ruben Amorim was furious that they were undone by two fast breaks in last week’s defeat at Brentford. Sunderland will offer them little respite, and Mukiele’s notorious long throws will further test the Portuguese’s fragile defence.

The walls have begun to close in on Amorim since United’s surrender at the Gtech Stadium. Wayne Rooney claimed that the Red Devils have "lost their soul" and declared he had "no faith" that Amorim would turn things around. Jamie Carragher, meanwhile, described Amorim’s reign as “a disaster” and declared: "This has to end as quickly as possible."

Sunderland have only won once at Old Trafford since 1968 (when Ryan Giggs was caretaker manager in 2024) but a victory on Saturday would put Amorim on the brink of the sack heading into the international break, the ideal time to make a change.

Amorim resisted plans for Amazon Prime to make an All or Nothing documentary about United this season, and neutrals must be upset because it would have made for incredible viewing. But even without cameras inside the dressing room and training ground, United have descended into farce. And it says a lot that Sunderland, the club whose downfall was broadcast to the world, now look like a model club in comparison.