'My big hope is..' Sunderland owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus explains club's transfer strategy ahead of January

Approaching two years since his arrival on Wearside, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus sits in the Sunderland Empire to promote ‘The Sunderland Story’, which will take to the next stage in May to celebrate the club’s history, often illustrious and equally often turbulent.

Louis-Dreyfus’ part in that tale is relatively brief but most definitely not uneventful.

The hope is that somewhere down the line an updated version will return - Louis-Dreyfus jokes that it will be more celebration than comedy or even tragedy.

Sunderland currently sit within striking distance of the Championship play-off places having finally ended their League one exile in May, but the relegation zone is not yet far enough to allow any complacency.

Louis-Dreyfus is, at this point, quietly satisfied: “We’re now approaching the halfway stage so it’s a good time to reflect on how the first half of the season has gone.

“First and foremost, if you get promoted via the League One play-offs there is statistically a very high chance that you’ll immediately be relegated, I think it’s about 90% of teams who do that go back down.

“Ultimately, to be competing up near the top of the table is very, very pleasing and we don’t take that for granted - the vast majority of our squad had never played at this level before. I think we have a lot more certainty than we had six months ago, we’ve seen the division and how we compare.

“It’s a division that’s very competitive and everyone can beat everyone - I think that we’ve got a good chance to be competitive.”

Louis-Dreyfus says every team’s position has its own context and being a newly-promoted side with a young squad is only part of Sunderland’s. They have also undergone a change of head coach and battled through a significant injury list, and as a result his endorsement of Tony Mowbray’s tenure so far is emphatic.

“What I liked here is that Tony came in with an open mentality - we knew we had injuries but we didn’t give up,” he says.

“We tried to be creative to pick up results in a lot of the games and that was really pleasing.

“To come into a club and a new group without a pre-season is not easy and it wasn’t an easy situation but so far it’s gone really well and we’re really pleased with it.”

January offers a further opportunity to strengthen and consolidate, but the message from the club has been that recruitment is now entering a different phase.

With the bulk of a young squad in place, it is now about crucial tweaks rather than major overhaul. There will be investment, but it looks set to be a much quieter window than we have become accustomed to.

“When I came in we had a very peculiar situation where I think we had only about 12 players left [under contract] at the end of my first season,” Louis-Dreyfus explains.

“It was therefore about bringing in a big number of players that summer and then we got promoted and so you have to go through a similar process because you’re stepping up a league.

“My big hope is that, unless we get promoted to the Premier League in the next months, we’ll be able to recruit less and focus on more specific profiles of exactly what we need, rather than needing to go out and find 12 players.

“We’ve got a really good core of players now in my opinion, and it’s about adding every window, whether it’s this January or next summer, trying to identify the areas where we make those specific improvements that we need.”

Louis-Dreyfus candidly admits that Sunderland are a long way from where he feels he needs to be, and while no one is ruling out a promotion push this time around the focus is on building a structure that can sustain one every season.

“The tip of the iceberg is the first team and then you have everything else behind the scenes,” he says.

“There’s been a huge amount of work behind the scenes which I hope yields a lot of success in the next five to fifteen years, and that’s not yet visible. For example, we’ve just hired our last member of staff in the football department [Academy Manager] so for the first time we have a full staff - these are the pieces of jigsaw that we think will bring us results in the future.

“There was a need for a lot of change in the first team and we’ve seen that no matter how much you spend, it’s never easy to bring in 10 or 12 players and immediately start winning. “To get out of the division in our first year [of ownership] and to be competing this season is very satisfying - we want to keep up the same rate of improvement.

“When we came in it was a very difficult situation and I said to the people in the building that we just needed to concentrate on improving week by week, even if it is just one or two things where we can make a difference step by step.

“I just want to keep that up, I think we’ve had that linear improvement and it’s about making sure we don’t stagnate, it’s not easy but it’s our aim.

“I have to say that we’re still very, very far off where we need to be and we’re still in the very early stages.

“It’s still early days and you can always learn, we have made thousands of mistakes that we can learn from. Coming from the top end of French football [I understood] we were a long way off, and we’ve come a long way but we have a long way to go.

“But I’m still so pleased, we have moments with specific things where we think, ‘six months we wouldn’t have been able to handle this way’.

“We’ve been catching up with the other Championship clubs because we were a long way behind, now we’re slowly getting there and it’s then about trying to go on and surpass them.” he adds.

“I would never want to disrespect the other 23 clubs in this division, many of whom have been here a long time, you’re not going to overtake them overnight. If it was that easy, anyone could do it every year.

“The main thing is to catch up and then to find the ways to outperform them.

“The division is very tight and we all know what a good run of form can do to your position in the league, good or bad. For me it’s about continuous improvement more than anything else, we want to have solid foundations that get us up.

“We would all love to finish in the top two this season and of course with where we’re at the moment it’s not totally unimaginable that we could do that, but at the same time we’re trying to get to a level where we have the structure and a level of working in place where we can compete for promotion every season.

“[Being Chairman] It’s more a responsibility than anything else and I take it very, very seriously. I go to all the games and I’m around a lot, so I feel that… people getting up at 4am to go to an away game and getting home at midnight etc.

“More than anything else I feel I have a responsibility which I take very seriously, and we’re giving everything to make the next three to five years as successful as we can.”