Sunderland, Hull and Middlesbrough struggle to adapt to life after relegation

Middlesbrough’s owner, Steve Gibson, predicted his team were set to “smash the Championship,” and Hull City’s new manager Leonid Slutsky spoke of celebrating promotion by “singing, rapping and dancing”. Three hours’ drive up the road at Sunderland, Slutsky’s freshly-installed Sunderland counterpart, Simon Grayson, revealed his ambitions to manage “this great club” in the Premier League.

Fast forward a little over half a season, and despite each being in receipt of £47m worth of parachute payments this term alone, the trio of sides relegated from the top tier last May have all changed manager.

Although Tony Pulis, who replaced the sacked Garry Monk at Boro on Boxing Day, still harbours play-off ambitions, his new side currently sit a modest ninth. So much for a summer transfer market spending spree approaching £50m.

Meanwhile Hull, now under Nigel Adkins’s charge, are 20th, four places above bottom-placed Sunderland, now managed by Chris Coleman. The pair meet at the Stadium of Light on Saturday.

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“This division is improving all the time,” says Ian Holloway whose QPR side entertain Boro on Saturday. “All the coaching and the coaches are improving. All the managers know how to stop you and your team; everyone’s got access to the same data, the same analytical tools.”

Throw in the reality that, in terms of ability, there is very little between the majority of Championship players and it is easy to appreciate that, of the three sides relegated at the end of the 2015-16 campaign only Newcastle United – “coached by Rafael Benítez, the most illustrious coach to have managed at this level,” reflects Holloway – made an immediate return to the Premier League.

Yet the problems endured by Norwich City and the currently resurgent Aston Villa had very different root causes to those besetting Boro, Hull and Sunderland. Boro’s have, broadly, been philosophical. Essentially, Monk’s attempt to rip up his predecessor Aitor Karanka’s ultra cautious, extremely defensive blueprint and replace it with a much more expansive approach backfired.

Monk persistently talked of the difficulties of getting the balance right between attack and defence. “Change doesn’t happen overnight,” he said, the day before his dismissal. “It’s taken a bit longer than I’d hoped but the players I inherited had one system drilled into them every day for three years; it’s not easy to change the style.”

Similarly radical change – albeit primarily of personnel – helped ruin things for the first Russian to manage in England. Previously in charge of CSKA Moscow and Russia, Slutsky arrived in East Yorkshire all smiles but departed a sullen figure dubbed a “broken man” by club insiders.

Between June and 1 September he had overseen the departure of 16 members of Marco Silva’s old squad and signed 11 players for a collective £16m. The departees included key midfielder Sam Clucas, who joined Swansea for £15m, Harry Maguire, a talented defender who moved to Leicester for £17m and left-back Andy Robertson, an £8m Liverpool capture.

Of the 28 players that started a Premier League fixture for Hull last season, only 11 remain on Humberside.

Despite spending a decade in the Premier League, Sunderland had made so many transfer market mistakes and fallen into such deep debt that Grayson was only able to invest £1.25m on 10 new faces while offloading 15 senior professionals.

Moreover he was left with some disaffected individuals, most notably centre half Lamine Koné and £13.6m record signing Didier Ndong. That pair are not the only ones who no longer want to be on Wearside.

“When you take over a football club and you don’t have such good characters then it ain’t half hard,” said Holloway following QPR’s 1-1 draw at Sunderland in October. “It might be that the not good characters are on far too much money, aren’t your signings and aren’t happy at the club. I’m not saying Sunderland have those problems but without stability it’s very difficult.”

Coleman, installed in November, has since spoken of the club requiring “a thorough cleansing” – and the perils of tackling a relegation “dogfight” with “kittens”. He is desperate to re-home Jack Rodwell, his unwanted £70,000-a-week midfielder, but unsurprisingly there are no takers.

Boro possess some fine players, the £50,000-a-week defender Ben Gibson and the £15m striker Britt Assombalonga among them, but the psychological impact of relegation should not be underestimated.

“I’ve been part of a relegated side [at Southampton] and there is a hangover, it can be difficult,” says the former Sunderland defender Danny Higginbotham. “Confidence dips. When a team gets relegated, it’s because they’ve lost a lot of games; it takes time to get that belief and resilience back.

“Often, scoring the first goal is vital. When Boro have scored first they’ve tended to win but, after conceding first, confidence can be sapped.

“Boro bought a lot of players last summer but there’s plenty in the dressing room who were there last season, and it’s not easy to recover and go again. Mentally, some players take time to get back to the level they need to be at.”