Strategy brings Cats stability

KRISTJAAN Speakman says Sunderland’s latest retained list is evidence the club is no longer ‘limping from short-term strategy to short-term strategy’.

The Black Cats have published their retained list and it shows just one senior player – midfielder Carl Winchester – out-of-contract this summer, with all the club’s key talent already under contract.

That avoided a repeat of the situation last summer where five first-teamers were released at the end of their contracts, and another three were still in talks over new deals, although the trio all ended up staying.

The year before, seven firstteamers were released and four more were in contract talks, three of whom stayed.

This summer there is more stability in the group, with players such as Dan Neil and Corry Evans handed new deals earlier this year, while the club had already exercised options to extend the contracts of Danny Batth, Alex Pritchard and Ross Stewart.

Sporting director Speakman (below) said the club is now in a very different place with contracts to the one he inherited when he was appointed midway through the 2020-21 season as part of the process that saw Kyril Louis-Dreyfus take over on Wearside.

“You want to have wellstructured contracts and the nature of the club when we inherited it was that it was limping from short-term strategy to short-term strategy, which is never ideal,” Speakman told the club’s YouTube channel.

“We’ve certainly tried to build a squad that has some longevity in it, and I think naturally when you acquire talented players you want to retain those talented players for as long as possible.

“Ultimately, there might be an end-date to that whether a contract runs to the end or you sell a player, whatever it might be, but we think we are in a really good spot at the minute. We’ve still got a lot of work to do so we are not complacent in any shape or form, but we feel we have got into a rhythm and a way of working that will hopefully bring some future

successes.”