Kristjaan Speakman explains Tony Mowbray managerial appointment at Sunderland | OneFootball

After Alex Neil came into Sunderland last season, the Black Cats’ form really improved and he eventually led them all the way to promotion back to the Championship via the play-offs.

Neil was able to recruit well over summer and fans will have been looking forward to the season with high hopes.

Despite starting well though, the manager made the decision to leave the Stadium of Light to join Stoke City after they sacked Michael O’Neill.

Tony Mowbray arrived at Sunderland to take over having spent last season with Blackburn Rovers, leaving at the end of the season when his contract expired.

Things have continued well under the new boss with the Black Cats currently sitting fifth in the league.

Sporting Director Kristjaan Speakman told SAFC Unfiltered why the 58-year-old was selected as the right man for the job as he said: “We’ve said before we’ve always ran an ongoing contingency plan. I think any business would do that for what you would probably class as an executive level type position. We got a lot of scrutiny last time which fair or unfair, I’ll leave for other people to judge that. We wanted to make sure we made the right decision when we recruited Alex and we were quite specific around our need to get out of the league.

“We think that was a good decision in hindsight. What we also did in that period of time was speak to a lot of other people, Tony actually wasn’t one of those for absolute clarity although that’s going to make it a difficult conversation. We had a load of conversations, but we’ve been tracking loads of different coaches externally.

“But when we came around to this change we obviously had a lot of conversations that we could draw back on, we’re running some data and understanding about how coaches had done at different teams and Tony was someone we had long liked because of his loyalty and his length of stay at Blackburn. But he also had the second youngest team last year, when you talk about balancing development with performance, I don’t think anyone’s done that better than Tony recently for the amount of time he’s done it, to achieve the level of performance at Blackburn.

“Once we were in the position where we knew it was going with Alex, I embarked on that conversation with Tony, I could add that conversation to all the other conversations we had previously. All the rest of the information and start to distil that and come up with what we thought was the best decision. Our proposition was that Tony was the best option for us. Naturally, it was something we could maybe do a little bit quicker because we felt it was going to be important in terms of the league.

“I think he’s come in and done a really good job and really embraced what we’re all about. Whether that’s technical, football or understanding the region and what we are about as a football club.”

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It’s interesting to look at how Sunderland went about appointing a new manager.

They are a club that seem to have long term visions for success and the appointment of Tony Mowbray seems to have been a really positive decision so far as the Black Cats are in good form and sitting nicely in the top six in the league.

You can see the the club weighed up plenty of factors when appointing, further than just football results and as a result they have ended up with a manager who looks well aligned with Sunderland as a club.