EVERY player Sunderland have been 'linked' with signing during the summer window - and the situation now

Indeed, sporting director Kristjaan Speakman has the decisions Sunderland make this window will leave the club in a stronger position not just for this season's promotion push, but for the campaigns ahead and moved to clarify the club’s ‘data’ led approach.

"It's perhaps a bit of a communication error on our part," the Sporting Director told The Echo.

"When something different comes in, I think certain words or phrases can maybe be picked up on and that's maybe happened with 'data'.

"What we're after is an evidence-based approach.

"So when we make a decision on a player, we want to have evidence that we can use to back up that decision.

"Data analysis, the numbers, is one small part of that.

"Now in the future it is something that could become bigger, because we are looking to develop that and the group of people we have in place have only been there for a very short amount of time.

"So it's not a situation where we are relying on numbers or data analysis to make a decision. What we're looking to do is bring together all the different components that we can sit round the table and discuss as a group, to come up with the answer, if you like.

"We're trying to have that evidence-based approach rather than the old school approach if you like, where the phone rings, 'this player is available, let's sign him'.

"What we're trying to do is run [every player] through a process. That doesn't necessarily have to be time-consuming, it can actually be fairly swift if we've got all the relevant evidence that we've collated.

"Stuart Harvey and James Young have done a great job to combine and collaborate, to try and ensure that the information is there for myself, Lee, the board to make those decisions based on evidence."

Here, though, we take a look at EVERY player Sunderland have been linked with signing and what has happened since: