Regis Le Bris arrived at Sunderland in July 2024 alone, without any collaborators, and he spent his first days making his case inside a club that was still weighing how much of itself it wanted to change. Before he took charge at the Stadium of Light, he visited a lecture room where club historian Rob Mason was speaking about Sunderland’s past. Then he went to a pre-season training camp near Alicante and began the work that would carry the club from one campaign to the next.
A year later to the day, Sunderland were into the Europa League. Le Bris had ended the previous season with a Championship playoff final victory, then guided the club through a rebuild that turned quickly from survival project to statement of intent. The scale of that rise was built into the numbers. Sunderland, with Florent Ghisolfi arriving last July as football director, partnered with Kristjaan Speakman to sign 15 players. One of them was Enzo Le Fée, and the move became central to the next phase of the club’s recruitment. Le Bris had first coached Le Fée when the midfielder was 12 years old in Lorient’s academy, and when Sunderland chased him again in January 2025, Le Bris took the lead on the move even though Le Fée had already gone on to Roma before the loan became available.
That thread ran through the whole rebuild. Le Bris had previously worked at Lorient, as had Ghisolfi, and the connections helped Sunderland move quickly when opportunity opened up. Le Bris said, “Step by step I started to express my ideas and my concepts,” and the club’s summer business followed that logic. Kyril Louis-Dreyfus allowed him to lead the pursuit of a statement signing in January 2025, after the owner had already shown how determined he was to stretch the club’s ambition. Last summer, Louis-Dreyfus called Granit Xhaka as the midfielder was preparing for bed and had to convince him before he agreed to join Sunderland. The call mattered because it showed how far the club was willing to go for experienced players who could change the mood around the squad.
Le Fée’s arrival helped open that door. Luke O’Nien said, “I always say Enzo was the catalyst for all this. He was the first top player to trust us as a club and he’s made a big contribution to where we are today.” He added that Le Fée “works so hard, he’s unbelievably humble and, as good a player as he is, he’s an even better person.” Le Fée’s assists helped clinch promotion, and when Xhaka later arrived, Le Fée summed up the effect in one line: “Granit’s arrival changed everything.”
The result was a club moving in sequence rather than in leaps. Le Bris initially worked with Sunderland’s existing backroom staff instead of bringing in his own assistants, which meant the early months depended on adaptation more than authority. That made his first-year progress all the more striking. Sunderland’s rise was not built on one signing or one conversation, but on a chain of trust between Le Bris, Le Fée and Ghisolfi, with Louis-Dreyfus backing the whole structure. It is why the story now sits well beyond a successful season: Sunderland have shown they can assemble players, coaches and ideas around one another, and that is a far harder thing to fake than a good run of results.
Related reading: Rayan Cherki: Régis Le Bris nommé parmi les six pour le trophée
