‘We swap ideas in the canteen’: Sunderland united with men’s and women’s teams | OneFootball

Melanie Reay is leading the way through the maze of corridors inside the Academy of Light when a corner is turned and she almost collides with Régis Le Bris. The managers of Sunderland’s women’s and men’s teams stop for a brief, friendly chat. It is a commonplace occurrence at this fully integrated first-team training ground, where Jobe Bellingham, Enzo Le Fée, Wilson Isidor and the rest of Le Bris’s players share Premier League-standard facilities, the canteen included, with Reay’s squad.

Similar sorts of arrangements remain depressingly rare; too many men’s managers pay lip service to the importance of their club’s women’s side but would have palpitations at the idea of sharing a weekday HQ.

“A lot of training grounds are not integrated, or certainly not properly,” says Reay as she prepares to start explaining why Saturday’s FA Cup quarter-final at Manchester United represents another staging post in the rebirth of Sunderland Women. “So it’s really good that we’re fully integrated, that we can share ideas during informal conversations with Régis and his staff. We swap ideas in the canteen and it reinforces the sense that we’re all one club.

“We play broadly the same way as Régis’s first team. We want the style and culture of both teams to be part of Sunderland’s DNA and the facilities here are so good it’s a big selling point in terms of what we can offer the girls.”

The Academy of Light also introduces Reay to alternative thinking. “You cross all sorts of paths with people every day here and have conversations about different ways of doing things,” she says. “You gain loads of information.

“Régis is really interesting. He’s really helpful and so, too, was Tony Mowbray [now in charge of West Brom] when he was Sunderland’s men manager. I still talk to Tony.”

As friends and colleagues on a pro licence coaching course due to conclude in June, Reay and her Manchester United counterpart, Marc Skinner, spent Monday and Tuesday attending the latest module. “To be together a few days before a quarter-final is a bit unusual,” she says. “But we enjoy a bit of banter.”

While United endeavour to push the leaders, Chelsea, for the Women’s Super League title, a youthful Sunderland are sixth in the Championship. “Man United will be a tough test,” Reay says. “A big challenge. But it’s a different kind of pressure. No one’s expecting us to win.”

There was a time when Sunderland held their own in the top division. In the spring of 2018, at the end of Reay’s first year in full charge, they finished seventh, only for their world to collapse. With the men’s club in financial difficulties and unwilling to provide the women’s squad with the necessary funding, the Football Association declined to grant Sunderland a WSL licence and demoted them two divisions.

“It was very tough,” Reay says. “I could easily have left and no one would have blamed me. But since then we’ve gone from amateur football to being fully professional so we’ve come a long way in a short time. Our ambition now is to get back into the WSL.”

The hope is that Le Bris’s side will return to the Premier League this spring and Reay’s side reach the WSL a year or two later. “We’re not quite ready to go into the Super League yet,” Reay says. “It’s a different beast from a few years ago. It’s really running away from the Championship so we need to be properly ready.”

Although Sunderland’s Championship neighbours Durham and Newcastle share similar ambitions, the nearest WSL team to the north-east is in Manchester, a 140-mile, trans-Pennine drive. “A lot of people in London think Manchester’s ‘the north’ but there’s a lot of England beyond it,” says Reay. “It’s quite sad you have to go so far south to watch top-level women’s football live.”

During her playing days, the 43-year-old was a prolific striker for Sunderland and Newcastle but unlike her cousin Alan Shearer she has stuck with coaching. Indeed during Phil Neville’s tenure as England manager Reay joined the staff on a temporary basis but ultimately ignored FA overtures to swap club for international football. “I enjoyed the Lionesses camps,” she says. “But I prefer day‑to‑day involvement.

“I’m really passionate about developing young players and we’ve got a really strong academy here. Everyone knows about the England players – the Jill Scotts, the Lucy Bronzes, the Beth Meads – who began their careers at Sunderland but a new generation of internationals are starting to come through now.” Last month Reay briefly waved goodbye to a quartet as Mary McAteer and Ellen Jones headed off on senior international duty with Wales, Jessie Stapleton joined the Republic of Ireland and Katie Kitching flew to Costa Rica with New Zealand.

“We’re massive underdogs at Manchester United,” she says. “But it’s a one-off game so we can throw the kitchen sink at them.”

Header image: [Photograph: Kasey Taylor]