Regis Le Bris Leads Sunderland Into Europa League After 2024 Rise
regis le bris took Sunderland into the Europa League a year after he arrived at the club alone. He built influence step by step, first with the backroom staff already in place, then through recruitment that helped turn promotion into something larger.
Le Bris and Sunderland’s rebuild
Le Bris became Sunderland head coach in July 2024 and said, "I arrived alone, without any collaborators," before adding, "Step by step I started to express my ideas and my concepts,". That process mattered because he did not walk into a ready-made operation; he had to shape it while working with the club’s existing staff.
By last season’s end, Sunderland had won the Championship playoff final. A year later to the day, Le Bris led them into the Europa League, a jump that tied the club’s rise to his first season in charge rather than to a single result.
Enzo Le Fée and Ghisolfi
The recruitment chain behind that rise ran through Florent Ghisolfi, who became Sunderland’s football director last July, and through Le Fée, one of the 15 players signed by Ghisolfi and Kristjaan Speakman. Le Bris had first coached Le Fée as a 12-year-old in Lorient’s academy, and Sunderland’s owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus allowed him to lead the pursuit of a statement signing in January 2025 after Le Fée had moved to Roma and a loan move was discussed.
Le Fée’s assists helped Sunderland clinch promotion, and Luke O’Nien described him as the turning point in the club’s rise: "I always say Enzo was the catalyst for all this. He was the first top player to trust us as a club and he’s made a big contribution to where we are today." O’Nien also said, "Enzo works so hard, he’s unbelievably humble and, as good a player as he is, he’s an even better person."
Xhaka changed the tone
The next layer came when Louis-Dreyfus called Granit Xhaka out of the blue last summer while he was preparing for bed, and the midfielder moved from Bayer Leverkusen to Sunderland. Le Fée put it bluntly: "Granit’s arrival changed everything". That was the point where Sunderland’s recruitment stopped looking like a promotion project and started producing the squad depth to push into Europe.
For Sunderland, the practical shift is already clear: Le Bris now has a club that followed a playoff final win with European qualification, and the route there ran through the players he helped bring in, the director who knew his methods, and a transfer call that pulled Xhaka into the project. The rise was not built on one signing alone, but on a chain of decisions that kept adding quality until the season ended with Europe instead of just celebration.
