Sunderland Now More Resistant to Approaches for Top Players – A Welcome Change

The summer transfer window has opened and speculation is in the air.

Sunderland’s top players have been and will continue to be the subject of transfer rumours, with bids possibly arriving for the likes of Jack Clarke, Jobe Bellingham, Trai Hume, and most likely several others.

The way we work these days means that we’ll be selling at least one of our big names this summer, in order to fund the signings of several new players. The club knows this, so several offers and genuine interest have been pushed back.

Bids for our players are inevitable and it’s more than likely that one will be accepted, but the fact that the club standing is firm on transfers is good, and it’s something that under the previous regime, we had none of.

The Charlie Methven and Stewart Donald era saw us sell academy products for pennies, but we’re now turning down bids in the region of £20 million for players.

Photo by Ian Horrocks/Sunderland AFC via Getty Images

So far Crystal Palace have reportedly been put off a move for Jobe due to the price tag we’ve placed on him, and more recently, Southampton have allegedly decided against a move for Clarke.

These are examples of how a club in Sunderland’s position should work.

We don’t need to sell all of our best players in order to make a quick buck, and the fact is that in the last few years the only player who fitted into this category is Ross Stewart — and even then, we got £10 million for a player who’d barely kicked a ball in 18 months.

This is what you can call good business, and it’s maintaining this that’ll keep Sunderland AFC moving forward.

We’ve sent a message to teams who’ve shown an interest in our players and it is this: ‘cough up’.

Other clubs now know that they’ll have to meet our demands, and that the days of selling players cheaply and unnecessarily are hopefully over.

Photo by FRED TANNEAU/AFP via Getty Images

The day will come when players are sold but ideally, when this does happen, we’ll get good money for them.

Jobe’s name has led to him being talked about regularly, and his almost full campaign at the age of eighteen has done him no harm. If the club does feel that it’s right to cash in this summer, they’ll not be short of suitors.

Getting plenty of profit is the most important part of this, and also giving ourselves enough time to use the money by putting it back into the squad before the window shuts at the end of August.

Sunderland players becoming ‘hot property’ isn’t a bad thing, and it shows that a policy of developing players in order to make them better footballers is working.

We’ve yet to reach the stage where we sell any of the players we’ve developed, but when we do, it’ll be a big test for the recruitment after a couple of windows of not getting it right.

July is here and with the new season six weeks away, Régis Le Bris needs to be backed in the window and if he is then the feelgood vibes from his appointment and developments off the pitch will continue.