Dramatic shift in one factor shows how good Sunderland AFC are under Regis Le Bris | OneFootball

The Frenchman has inspired the huge turnaround of the Black Cats.

You don't necessarily need stats to prove how much better Sunderland are now under Regis Le Bris than they were last season, but one of them does sum it up pretty well.

Appointing a head coach that had just been relegated to the French second division was certainly a bold move for Sunderland to make. They were just off the back of a horrendous disappointment of a season in which three people (Tony Mowbray, Michael Beale and Mike Dodds) led the team - the first two permanently and the latter temporarily - and they headed into the summer looking directionless.

For all that chairman Kyril Louis-Dreyfus and sporting director Kristjaan Speakman are quite public-fronting figures, as opposed to some of their counterparts at other clubs that tend to lurk in the shadows for the most part, there didn't seem to be anyone that Sunderland fans could point to and say 'This is the person that's going to get things back on track.'

The chairman and the sporting director may not get as much credit as the head coach has for Sunderland's success so far this season, but it has come about thanks to the decision they made to bring Le Bris in from Lorient.

They saw the potential in the Frenchman and decided to go with him. There's no questioning, now, that they got it right.

Sunderland: the best team in the Championship

One EFL presenter and pundit, Gabriel Sutton, was largely laughed at for his view that Sunderland would win the Championship this season.

He'd just picked a team that finished 16th in the second tier last season, who seemed destined to, and did, lose their star player, Jack Clarke, who had just brought in a head coach who was fresh off the back of being relegated, to be this season's best Championship club. So far, he's been absolutely spot on, as have Sunderland.

They have taken 28 points from their opening dozen games, and have looked like a real force to be reckoned with.

It's amazing what Le Bris has been able to achieve at the Stadium of Light so far, especially given all the factors that were against him and the club. He's managed to turn a disgruntled and frustrated team and fanbase into one that is fun again; one that excites. Nothing typifies that more than this one stat.

The stat that sums up Sunderland's improvement under Regis Le Bris

At the end of last season, Sunderland had a Goals-xG of -10.7, according to FBref.

As defined by Opta, the xG metric: "measures the quality of a shot based on several variables such as assist type, shot angle and distance from goal, whether it was a headed shot and whether it was defined as a big chance."

The Goals-xG stat takes away a team's xG (the number of goals that they are statistically expected to score) from the number of goals they actually scored.

Sunderland's -10.7 in this category, which was the worst in the league, means that they, statistically, should have scored at least 10 more goals than they actually did, based on the chances they had throughout last season.

This season, it's a different story.

Just 12 games in, they have a Goals-xG of +5.4 (a + 16.4-point improvement since Le Bris took over) and they sit top of the Championship in this statistical category.

That seismic shift in chance taking, especially considering they, arguably, lost more potent attacking weapons than they gained in the summer, is nothing short of staggering. It really shows just how much better the Black Cats have been since the arrival of the Frenchman.