Exclusive: Sunderland draw up new manager shortlist with focus on candidates who have League One experience

Sunderland have finalised a shortlist of potential replacements for manager Jack Ross with the focus on candidates with previous experience of taking charge of teams in League One.

That would appear to rule out a return for former player Kevin Phillips, who had confirmed he is interested in making Sunderland his first managerial role, but also former manager Roy Keane, who is keen to return to frontline management after spending the last five years as Martin O’Neill’s assistant with the Republic of Ireland and Nottingham Forest.

Phillips has only worked as an assistant manager at clubs in the top two divisions, while it is felt Keane would be better suited to a club where he had more time to learn about the players without the pressure of trying to secure promotion.

Wycombe Wanderers manager Gareth Ainsworth and Wigan Athletic boss Paul Cook are among the leading candidates if they can be persuaded to join, with former Bradford City and Bolton Wanderers manager Phil Parkinson also in their thinking.

An appointment is expected to be confirmed next week with Ainsworth the current front runner and he has hinted he is willing to leave Wycombe for a bigger club. Although other names may excite fans more, the Sunderland board are taking a pragmatic approach and want someone who knows the division they are trying to escape from.

For the first time this season, Sunderland’s owners Stewart Donald and Charlie Methven have faced criticism from supporters over their running of the club and were even accused of sacking Ross to distract fans from their failure to attract new investors.

But Methven is adamant the decision to sack Ross was part of a planned review of the football operation at the end of the first quarter of the campaign and was nothing to do with the failure to confirm the sale of part of the business to  American investment group MSD Partners.

Those talks “remain ongoing” but Methven denied they had ever said the club was going to be taken over and insisted he and Donald do not need the extra capital while they are in League One.

“There have been a lot of rumours and things said that are simply not true” said Methven. “The talks to attract investor- we have never said it is a takeover – remains ongoing. Those discussion have been going on for some time but we must stress, this is about planning for the future in the Championship, but we need to get promoted first. We need to get out of League One for the next part of the project to begin.

“Even if the new money came in now, we wouldn’t be able to do much with it in League One because of Financial Fairplay rules, but we have always said, we want to plan ahead. There is no great urgency, but I understand some people are frustrated by that. But we cannot force people to part with their money and, as things stand, they may or may not be investing in the club.

“But that has had no impact whatsoever on the decision to sack the manager. We always planned to look at the how things were going after the first quarter of the season and after 11 games, with three quarters of the season remaining, we did not feel things were going as well as they should be.

“Some people felt we removed Ross too soon, others think we took too long, we will only know whether it was the right decision in the fulness of time, but our sole aim is to get promoted this season. We are currently working through a fairly conventional process of identifying the right person to get the team out of League One.”