Just now, tomphil said:

I hope it is cheap he was/is on 70k pwk so to go down to 7 like say Whittingham for instance is a huge drop.

70k was his original Sunderland wage, which didn't change when we were relegated to the Championship because it had a 1-year delay built in to the relegation clause.  When we went down to League 1 the 40% reduction kicked in, but then the new owners agreed a contract termination with him not long after they took over.

Just now, JacknOry said:

it feels great to win games - be one of the top dogs no matter what league. Once you out of it, you have that winning habit and im sure you will be fine in the Championship just as i think we will be this season. 

Thanks for buying Steele btw

Haha, I've seen a few comments about this Rodwell signing being karma for selling us Steele.  Funnily enough, he was actually starting to look like a decent goalkeeper at the very end of the season after a horrendous start with us.  I was actually quite disappointed he left as I thought he'd be a good keeper in League 1.  The new feller Jon McLaughlin's been quality though.  No regrets now. ?

5 minutes ago, Tom said:

By the way Mackem, enjoy league one it can be truly bonkers but fun if you are doing well in it. Seen a few Sunderland fans on twitter enjoying it already.

As long as you end up getting out of it you’ll look back with fond memories!

Thanks!  I'm really enjoying it so far.  After the last 10 years or so of barely escaping relegation time and again, then finally being double-relegated, it's nice to see us actually winning games again.  ?

3 minutes ago, JacknOry said:

Were those clubs going to match the 70k per week contract he was on?

Probably not, and in honesty if it was me and I thought my career had already peaked and this was my last chance to earn huge money, I probably would have stayed too.  I probably wouldn't go to the press and tell them I just wanted to play football and it "wasn't about the money" though.  ?

2 minutes ago, JacknOry said:

Welcome to the boards.

I dont have the time to read all the links as about to hit the sack but i keep reading about this losing streak. 

37 starts in 2.5 years is hardly great as it is but were all those defeats down to Rodwell? I just don't really get the correlation here. Bemoan an injury record or attitude but his record is like he played in one third of the games during that period and it was not a great period for your team as a whole. Not sure this stat really means anything to be honest.

Anyhow, as you can see, our boards are quite split on this signing and even the most optimistic have their doubts. We don't know the full ins and outs of his time with you guys and appreciate you coming here to try and give the opposite side. He has obviously become something of a hate figure for you guys and we have had a fair few in recent times too - mainly owners and managers mind.

We will see, he will not be first choice anyway and he has it all to prove on a low-cost contract for a season.

 

That is a fair point.  We weren't having the best of times for the majority of those seasons, but he was the one with the record, so he became the "Jonah" as far as a lot of the fans were concerned.  A dead albatross around our necks.

Whenever his name appeared on the teamsheet, the reaction from a lot of fans was always "oh, we've lost this one then".  There's obviously a chicken-egg-snowball debate that could be had about that situation. 

Just now, RV Blue said:

Are you kidding? He signed a contract with you and he was honouring that contract, it’s not his fault that the contract you offered him was one of the stupidest things I can remember a football club doing. Every man and his dog would have accepted that deal and to say that he should have just ripped it up out of the good of his heart is naive at best.

 

You are shocked that any professional club would give a chance to a 27 year old former England international? Somehow I think your judgement is (understandably) clouded by the fact that he was on £70k per week.

Finally, good luck for the season. I hope you come straight back up.

Hi, I agree completely about the contract.  It was definitely our club's fault for giving him the contract, not his fault for accepting it. 

The dissonance came about from him stating in the Daily Mail interview that it wasn't about the money, he just wanted to play football, while turning down opportunities to sign for other clubs to remain at Sunderland, training with our U23's.  

I know what you mean about the "giving a chance to a former England international" thing.  It does sound harsh, and yes perhaps my judgement is clouded.  I am trying to stay balanced with my appraisal while relaying the general feeling about him in our fanbase and trying to show the reasons our fans feel the way they do about him.  With Rodwell, for any Sunderland fan, it's really not an easy thing to do to stay objective when discussing him. ?

Good luck to you guys too!

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.