Sunderland journalist Philip Buckingham has been sharing his thoughts on the reported takeover of the League One club.
This comes after Buckingham recently made an appearance on The Totally Football League Show where he spoke about a number of different topics concerning the Black Cats.
During the podcast, Buckingham had this to say on Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, the 23-year-old, who current Sunderland owner Stewart Donald agreed a deal to sell the club to alongside Juan Sartori earlier this month.
He said: “If Kyril Louis-Dreyfus can come in and inject some life back into the club, that’s what it needs, I think, because it’s turned into such a stale club.
“I think when Stewart Donald first came in, that first season in League One, it was so close to being the perfect year for him, in terms of he could sort out the club’s mess, flip it and sell it on, Sunderland are back in the Championship and everyone’s a winner.
“Obviously they lost that play-off final to Charlton at Wembley and it’s slowly unravelled since then. The poor season last year and this season isn’t going as planned either, so it needs fresh impetus and it needs a change of ownership.”
Donald took over at Sunderland back in 2018 from previous owner Ellis Short. In the 2018/19 season, Sunderland finished in fifth place in League One with 85 points after winning 22, drawing 19 and losing five league games throughout the campaign.
As Buckingham mentioned in the podcast, Sunderland came agonisingly close to promotion back in 2019 after they failed to beat Charlton in the League One play-off final.
The 2019/20 season saw them once again fail to gain promotion to the Championship after finishing in seventh place in the league table with 59 points, 26 points fewer from the previous season.
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TIF Thoughts on Philip Buckingham’s comments on Louis-Dreyfus and Donald…
Looking at how Sunderland have been dipping down the League One table since Donald took over at the club, it’s easy to see why Buckingham thinks the club has gone “stale” and that he thinks a new owner such as Louis-Dreyfus needs to “inject some life” back into it.
Looking at how Sunderland have started their current season so far having won just six out of their 12 league games, there’s every possibility that they could finish even lower in the table than they have in their previous two seasons.
This shows that they may need to get this reported takeover done as soon as possible so that this injection of life that Buckingham mentioned can help the team on the pitch.