Sunderland have spent over £100m on transfers. This is how they could do it – and why they need to

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It is a couple of months after earning promotion. In the north east of England, Sunderland are causing a stir. Before a return to top-flight football, they have spent big. The year is 2007.

It is easily forgotten now, but Sunderland’s last promotion before this one brought with it a glut of transfers. Sunderland spent £35million on new faces that summer, the fifth-highest total in the Premier League, only trailing Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester City and Liverpool. 

It seems an almost quaint figure now. To sign 21-year-old midfielder Habib Diarra this summer, Sunderland are handing over £27m ($36m). Simon Adingra, Chemsdine Talbi, Enzo Le Fee, and Noah Sadiki have all arrived for between £14m and £18m, before any future add-ons. As revealed by The Athletic on Wednesday, goalkeeper Robin Roefs is set to join for £9m, taking Sunderland’s combined transfer spend beyond the £100m mark.

The figure has increased following confirmation of Granit Xhaka’s arrival on Wearside. Xhaka has returned to England for an initial fee of £13m, fresh from a successful stint at Bayer Leverkusen.

Sunderland, just like they did all those years ago, are spending heavily in an attempt to ensure they last longer than a single season in the Premier League.

The club’s transfer business has raised eyebrows. Sunderland’s promotion team comprised a mix of academy graduates and low-cost acquisitions — the starting XI for May’s play-off final victory against Sheffield United required less than £10m to assemble.

Two months on, Sunderland now have the most expensive squad in the club’s history. Xhaka is the club’s seventh signing in a month. Add Roefs and some assumed agent fees and transfer levies, and we land at a gross spend this summer of £130m.

Sunderland are the seventh-highest-spending Premier League club this window, only trailing the traditional ‘Big Six’. On a net basis, including the Roefs deal, they’re this summer’s eighth-highest-spending club in the world.

Sunderland generated significant sales in their most recent financial year but even so, the way they have cleared club spending records is eye-catching. After accounting for sales, alongside fees spent on Wilson Isidor, Milan Aleksic and Ahmed Abdullahi since the start of their financial year last July, The Athletic estimates Sunderland’s net transfer spend to be around £94m.

The spending won’t stop there. New faces have primarily arrived in midfield — none of them play in central defence or up front, two positions that need strengthening. Further signings are expected before the season opener against West Ham United on August 16.

Sunderland’s outlay is reflective of plenty of things, but at least two obvious ones. First, the money involved in English football has never been greater; the figures clubs must reach to remain competitive grow each year.

Second, Sunderland have a lot of ground to make up. Spending on transfer fees is only weakly correlated with immediate success but, as The Athletic detailed recently, sustained spending over time tends to prove rewarding on the field.

Seventeen of this year’s Premier League clubs were in the division last year (and the year before that), and their squads have been built up accordingly. Burnley are back in the top flight after just one year away. Leeds United spent two years out of it. Sunderland last played in the Premier League in 2017.

Over a year has passed since the most recently available figures, but even taking squad cost values from the end of the 2023-24 season shows the increasing size of the gulf.

Sunderland’s £18.4m was around 80 times lower than league-leading Chelsea and, even more strikingly, it was only a 10th of the cost at which Burnley’s squad had been assembled. Sunderland’s transfer spending has paled in comparison to those they’ll face this season. In 2023-24 figures, they were only middling in the Championship.

In each of the past two seasons, all three promoted sides have been swiftly relegated. There are other reasons besides money for that, but it is impossible to deny that wealth, or a relative lack of it, is increasingly playing a part.

On transfer fees alone, Sunderland have spent £113.6m on new players. That makes them one of only six clubs to spend over £100m in the summer following promotion, and the three who spent more than them — Nottingham Forest in 2022 (£140.4m), Aston Villa in 2019 (£134m) and Leeds (£115.2m in 2020) — all survived relegation.

Ipswich spent over £100m and Southampton just under it last summer. Both went down meekly. But when money casts such a large shadow over on-field fortunes, it stands to reason that big spending will improve a survival bid’s chances.

In the past seven seasons, only three promoted clubs have spent less than £50m in their summer window and stayed up. Bournemouth later invested heavily in January, helping them finish 15th. Sheffield United stayed up in 2019-20 but have since been relegated (twice). Meanwhile, Brentford, ever the outlier, have long been marked out as one of the savviest clubs in England. It’s possible to stay up without spending a fortune, but you’ll give yourself a better chance if you do.

Sunderland’s spending might yet catch Forest’s £140m promoted-side record, and mentions of their spending a couple of years ago immediately draw thoughts in the direction of what came next: a points deduction for breaching the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules (PSR).

Yet there’s a key difference. Forest’s arrival in the Premier League came on the back of 14 years in the Championship, football’s equivalent of a financial black hole. Almost without exception, the longer a club stays in England’s second tier, the more money they lose. In Forest’s case, that amounted to pre-tax losses of £185m — £62m of those arrived during their final two seasons in the division. This meant they entered the Premier League carrying heavy existing losses on their rolling three-year PSR calculation.

Sunderland, though, were only in the Championship for three seasons before winning promotion, and spent four years of their Premier League exile in League One. They still lost money, carrying infrastructure and running costs far too large for a third-division side, but in some ways, those seasons allowed for a reset.

Majority shareholder Kyril Louis-Dreyfus inherited a near-blank slate when he took over in 2021. Sunderland still lost money, but it wasn’t anywhere near as much as would have been lost had they been carrying a Championship wage bill for years.

Those losses amounted to £17.5m between 2022 and 2024. Seven Championship clubs lost more than that in 2023-24 alone.

Sunderland can add back what the authorities deem ‘good’ costs in their PSR calculation. In their case, having a Category One academy means those add-backs are sizeable. Exact figures are unknown, but The Athletic estimates Sunderland’s PSR result in their first two Championship seasons was profitable.

Everything points to another profitable PSR year in 2024-25. Sunderland might even have made a pre-tax profit for the first time in 19 years. Through the sales of Jobe Bellingham, Jack Clarke and Tommy Watson, they’ve generated over £40m in player profits, to go alongside a much-improved commercial offering and higher attendances than a year ago (as well as higher ticket prices).

Sunderland’s operating loss (pre-player sales) was £16.9m in 2023-24, and there have been various investment programmes undertaken across the club since then. Wages, inevitably, will have risen, and 2024-25 will also bear whatever bonuses fell due as a result of promotion. Yet those player profits are hefty. Sunderland might have been profitable last season, or at the very least hovering near break-even.

Moving into 2025-26, Sunderland and their fellow promoted clubs have lower loss limits than the rest of the division, and the club don’t appear to have received ‘secure funding’ from the owners, limiting them to three-year losses of £15m. But entering the Premier League from a position of profitability stands them in better stead than most others have managed in recent years — including Leeds and Burnley this time around.

Hardly any of Sunderland’s spending this summer fell into their 2024-25 accounting period (we estimate less than £2m), though the same isn’t true going forward. Of the £130m gross spend, The Athletic projects £29m a year will hit Sunderland’s books as amortisation costs over the next three seasons, before £24m in 2028-29 and £18m in 2029-30. In comparison, the club’s 2023-24 amortisation bill was just £4m.

That’s without even mentioning wages. Those are unknown, but expensive signings rarely come on low salaries. Existing players are likely to have received promotion wage rises too, which means further expense. There are also around £22m in potential add-ons.

Sunderland’s total future costs across fees and wages may have increased by a quarter-billion pounds.

If that sounds like a scary number, then it needs to be viewed alongside the opposing half of the ledger. In broadcast revenue alone, Sunderland will see a £100m increase in turnover this season. Premier League status affords the ability to earn more in other revenue streams, too. By our estimate, Sunderland’s transfer activity might have added £60m in annual costs over the next couple of seasons, which is still well below the revenue uptick they’ll enjoy this season.

It also feels like a necessity. Just as transfer fees rise, so have wages, increasing the cost of Premier League survival. Across the last three seasons, when wage data is available, seven Premier League clubs paid less than £100m in annual salaries. Five were relegated, with only (you guessed it) Brentford the nonconformists both times. Nine-figure wage bills are increasingly important to stay in the Premier League, but Sunderland’s most recent wage bill was £31.4m.

Sunderland sources, kept anonymous to protect relationships, expect sales will follow. Whether Sunderland have purposely waited until a new accounting period to move out some players is unknown — with Watson and Bellingham, waiting wasn’t an option — but it would make financial sense. With no compliance issues in 2024-25, sales from August onwards will hit the 2025-26 books, staying on the three-year rolling PSR calculation until the end of the 2027-28 season. The club have committed to significant future costs, so anything to offset those will be welcome.

This summer has seen Sunderland ramp up their level of spending, but they’ve also largely continued the policy that got them promoted, with sporting director Kristjaan Speakman and head of player recruitment Stuart Harvey dramatically reducing the average age of the squad.

Since the summer of 2021, including Xhaka and Roefs, 62 players have been signed. Of those, 45 were under 24 years old.

This summer, Adingra (23), Roefs (22), Diarra (21), Sadiki and Talbi (both 20) are continuing that trend. Le Fee joined on loan in January, turned 25 in February and saw his deal become permanent the moment the final whistle blew at Wembley — the first time Sunderland have spent a fee on anyone aged older than 24 since embarking upon this new strategy.

Xhaka’s signing is the second instance and the former Arsenal captain represents a clear departure from recent recruitment strategy. In spending £13m on the Switzerland international, which could rise to £17.3m in future add-ons are triggered, Sunderland have, for the first time under Louis-Dreyfus and company, spent a fee on a player without any clear intention of making their money back via that player’s future sale. Xhaka will be almost 36 by the time his three-year contract comes to a close.

Sunderland have signed older heads over the past few years but all of them have been for nothing in fees. Reinildo Mandava, the 31-year-old Mozambique international left-back who signed when his Atletico Madrid contract expired at the end of June, continued that theme.

Xhaka’s signing has bucked it, though it’s easy to see why. He brings much-needed experience to a squad that, even with the addition of Adingra, had just 45 full Premier League games played across it — 37 of them by Adingra.

If they survive relegation, Xhaka’s £13m fee will seem a small price to pay in exchange for another year or more of Premier League riches. If they finish in the bottom three, the Xhaka signing will be viewed as a punt that didn’t pay off.

Whatever they do this summer, first-time relegation will remain a possibility, and more likely a probability. Where Xhaka and Reinildo have joined on three- and two-year deals, the rest of this summer’s cohort have signed up to longer-term contracts. Whichever division Sunderland occupy in a year, they’ll own young players with several years left on their contracts who, theoretically, still aren’t at their peak.

That can be viewed in one of two ways. In the negative scenario, this summer’s signings are flops and a relegated Sunderland are left with several expensive players they either can’t shift or need to accept a loss on.

Alternatively, even after relegation, they’ll possess assets who can be sold to mitigate the impact of the drop. Resale value has been a key tenet of the club’s transfer policy under Speakman and Harvey, and remains so even now that spending has increased.

Sunderland have proven adept at understanding the transfer market in recent years, selling players at significant profits. Bellingham’s June move to Borussia Dortmund is the latest such example. Even with the sell-on due to Birmingham City, his move should lead to a £20m profit.

There’s wider evidence that shows relegated clubs have successfully generated big money from selling their better players. Across the 12 teams relegated between 2020 and 2023, after adjusting for Burnley’s later accounting date, £716m was earned from player sales in the season following demotion — an average of £60m per team. In 2023-24, Southampton, Leeds United and Leicester City generated £295m in sales between them. Last year, Burnley banked around £96m from post-relegation departures.

Naturally, Sunderland believe the players they have signed are capable of performing in the Premier League. Should that prove insufficient to secure survival, they’ll trust their ability to move still-young players on without too much of a hit, ensuring those hefty future costs committed to this summer don’t actually materialise. The risk is they’ve bought poorly, but that’s true of any transfer.

Sunderland followed the expensive summer of 18 years ago with more spending in January. One point above the relegation zone at the turn of the year, a further £8m went on reinforcements. It proved worth it. Roy Keane’s men survived, and Sunderland would stay in the Premier League for another nine years.

Last weekend, coincidentally, threw up another callback. Sunderland travelled north of the border to Hearts and a testimonial for Craig Gordon, who broke the British transfer record for a goalkeeper when they paid Hearts £9million to sign him in 2007. They lost 3-0 but, perversely, it might not have been the worst thing.

Amid the excitement that has flowed since the play-off triumph two months ago, a torrent of good feeling that Xhaka’s arrival has only bolstered, it is easy to forget the task that stands before Le Bris and his side. The gap between England’s top two divisions, in many respects, has never been greater.

Sunderland aim to bridge it by spending big, something they can do — and, everything indicates, will continue to do — albeit while trying to remain true to the strategy that got them here in the first place. It might not work. But they certainly can’t be accused of not giving it a go.

(Top photos: Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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