Hi lads, Sunderland fan here. Just wanted to say good luck with Jack Rodwell.
As you've already gathered, Sunderland fans in general consider him to be probably our worst signing in history, but I noticed not many people had mentioned his record when he was with us, and some are quoting that he was "fit and available to play" but being hounded out, which is a debatable point that I'll get to in a moment. There are a few other bits of info that are probably worth noting, so I'll throw them in too.
As some of you have quite rightly pointed out, it was Sunderland's daft fault for giving him a 5-year contract on 70k per week and a relegation clause that would only activate if we failed to get promoted back to the Premier League on our first attempt, meaning that when we were relegated to the Championship we ended up stuck with a player on huge wages that couldn't get into the first team. He was literally the only player on our books that didn't have an automatic 40% wage reduction immediately if we were relegated.
While it would be easy to say we Sunderland fans held his wages against him (because they restricted our transfer business) and the club froze him out to get rid of him, a lot of ground had been tread before we even got to that point in our relationship with him.
First of all, his record. From the last time he'd won a match that he'd started when he was still playing for Man City until his first win as a match starter in a Sunderland shirt, he went 1370 days without being on the winning team in a match he had started.
That 39 match streak included 37 starts for Sunderland in the 2.5 years he'd played for us up until that point...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/38867929
Then there's his injury record. For a while it seemed like whenever we thought he was ready to come back into the team and was making noises in interviews that he was ready for selection, he'd get another injury.
https://www.physioroom.com/news/english_premier_league/players/2742/jack_rodwell_injury.html
We had manager after manager while Rodwell was at the club that seemed to give him a chance at first and then end up not selecting him ahead of our other midfielders when he was allegedly fit to play.
After we were relegated, he decided he wasn't a midfielder anymore. Our then-new manager Simon Grayson said of him "“He told me that, before going into the first team, he had played centre-half for Everton and also through the age groups with England, and he felt that might be his best position because psychologically, and maybe physically as well, his body can’t take the demands of playing in midfield any more."
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/sunderland-hand-jack-rodwell-chance-13758808
Rodwell had been offered a way out. There were clubs interested in signing him for free and Sunderland had told him we'd happily rip up his contract and let him sign for another team, but he chose to stay with Sunderland on his 70k per week wages, training with our U23's. He at some point had announced to our management that he no longer wanted to play for Sunderland, and there was a rumour that he'd actually said that he no longer wanted to play football at all. He then released his now famous statement to the Daily Mail, which infuriated many of our fans with his talk of being the fittest he'd ever been and his hope of getting back into the England team...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-5280715/Sunderland-outcast-Jack-Rodwell-insists-hes-not-blame.html
...to which Chris Coleman, our manager at the time responded...
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/chris-coleman-reacts-jack-rodwells-14177256
When he finally left in the Summer after our relegation to League 1 and our new chairman taking over, there were champagne bottles popping open all over Sunderland at seeing the back of him.
Obviously we fans can only see snippets of information and try to fill in the blanks ourselves, so who knows what actually happened behind the scenes, but between his losing streak, his injuries, and the way each successive manager failed to get performances out of him, the rest of his time with us on high wages training with the U23's and refusing to leave to join other teams while claiming "it's not about money, I just want to play football" in his Daily Mail interview was just adding insult to injury.
The general emotion in Sunderland right now is one of shock, that any professional football club would give Rodwell a chance after his time at Sunderland.
I hope for your sake that the contract is some kind of pay-as-you-play deal with a clause that if you lose he doesn't get paid.
Anyway, just wanted to pass on a Sunderland fan's perspective.
All the best.