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Sunderland will play in the Premier League next season and a lot of credit for that achievement goes to Regis Le Bris.

The Frenchman has brought the Black Cats to the top-flight after only his first season in England and while also nurturing a lot of their players, who had seen the club finish 16th in the 2023/24 season.

Le Bris has now spoken to Italian outlet Cronache di Spogliatoio about his experience at Sunderland so far and he expressed his admiration for the club’s supporters.

He praised the fanbase, saying: “These are people who live for Sunderland. They have an incredible passion for this club. And despite these difficult years they have been through, when I arrived last summer I found enthusiasm.

“The first time I met them was in front of the official club shop, when the new shirt came out. There was a 100-metre queue, with people waiting there since morning to buy the shirt. They didn’t know me, I was almost a stranger.

The fans welcomed me super well, from day one. During the pre-season camp in Spain, 2,500 of them came to watch a friendly. Incredible. For the play-off final at Wembley, 35,000 of our tickets were snapped up while Sheffield didn’t manage to sell them all, but even at the start of the season there was great enthusiasm, despite few people believing in us.”

Speaking further about how the club has managed to defy the odds, the 49-year-old said:

The season before, Sunderland had finished 16th. Opta gave us less than a 5% chance of finishing in the top 6 and a 25% chance of being relegated back to League One.

We managed to overturn the predictions with the work on the pitch and with the strength of an extraordinary group, which used the common energy to obtain great results. The data is important, the statistics can help to understand certain things, but then there is the human energy that often makes the difference.”

Le Bris also spoke of how a pragmatic approach to management helped him understand Sunderland as a club better, and that has played a key role in promotion.

I arrived alone, without any collaborators. Often you can think that when a foreign coach arrives, he can impose his own ideas, considering them better than the local ones or the previous ones. I didn’t do that. In the first two weeks I let the staff members work, observing their way of doing things.

“And then, step by step, I started to express my ideas and my concepts of football. We got to know each other quickly, both with the Sunderland collaborators and with the players. And it all worked out great.”

The interview shows Le Bris’ humble approach to management and how he made the most of intangibles and turned them into an advantage for Sunderland.

Sunderland fans should be excited about life in Premier League and on the basis of recent evidence under Le Bris, perhaps they can beat the odds again.