Sunderland Pay Long-Term Price in Hope Jermain Defoe Provides Short-Term Boost

Moving in opposite directions, Jozy Altidore and Jermain Defoe are currently in the exact same situations. Effectively swapped this month, both forwards leave their previous clubs having proved to be expensive flops, but arrive at new clubs hailed as potential saviours.

Considering how poorly Defoe’s time at MLS side Toronto FC went, it is perhaps a surprise he was so strongly courted by clubs in the Premier League when the transfer window opened at the start of the month. Cathal Kelly of Toronto paper The Globe and Mail said this week that Defoe “was—and this is really saying something—perhaps the biggest high-profile bust in recent Toronto sports history,” which is not exactly what either the player or Sunderland would be hoping to read. 

In a piece that occasionally felt like a character assassination, it continued:

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Defoe was frequently injured owing to a pre-existing hamstring problem. That eventually morphed into a groin problem. There was a strong sense inside the club that he was malingering, refusing to get an operation he perhaps didn’t need.

Defoe left Canada long before TFC’s season ended and never had any intention of returning. Long before this deal was done, he and his family had moved all their belongings back to England.

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If all that is true, then Defoe has really landed on his feet in earning a three-and-a-half-year deal at Sunderland, a deal that will pay him a reported £70,000 a week. At 32, he is five years removed from his best goalscoring season (2009/10), when he nabbed 18 Premier League goals in 34 games, and now has a deal that sees him handsomely rewarded until a few months shy of his 36th birthday. Considering the recent injury history that so frustrated Toronto, it is a deal weighed with no little amount of risk.

The initial reaction to it has therefore been one of surprise and no little incredulity, a disbelief that Sunderland would willingly invest so much on a player that, by choosing the MLS last January (when there were still World Cup places to be played for) had given every impression he was giving up on his career as an elite-level player in exchange for the biggest possible payday.

It is not impossible, of course, that he went to Canada with good intentions and simply did not adjust to new surroundings (the closeness he shares with his London-based family, which has experienced no little tragedy in recent times, is well-documented), which eventually impacted on his football. Certainly, he seems relieved to be back on home soil.

“I am delighted to be here, and I’m looking forward to the challenge,” Defoe said in statement. “It is a great club, and I’ve always enjoyed coming up here and playing against Sunderland because of the stadium and the supporters. It is a great place to play, and I’m really looking forward to it.”

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Part of the reason Defoe could command such a handsome wage packet—for comparison, recent £30 million Manchester City signing Wilfried Bony is reported to be on £100,000 a week—is that he was, for whatever reason, so in demand this month. The managers of West Brom, Leicester City, Hull City and QPR were all public in their desire to sign a new striker this month, meaning the demand for proven Premier League goalscorers far outweighed the supply. Defoe’s return came at the perfect time, and his agent must have been able to virtually name a price, with Sunderland tacitly admitting they had won something of a bidding war to get him.

“Jermain is a player who has proven his quality in the Premier League,” Lee Congerton, the club’s sporting director, acknowledged. “Naturally, with a player of his calibre, there was a lot of interest in him, not only in England but across Europe, so we are delighted that he has chosen to come to Sunderland.”

He will certainly fill a position of need. Sunderland’s attacking issues have been obvious for all to see for much of the season, with Steven Fletcher struggling for consistency (in both form and fitness) and Connor Wickham, who does not currently have the look of a prolific goalscorer, often moved out to the wing.

Defoe, in theory, immediately comes in and offers a genuine threat in and around the six-yard box, although he may not be quite the player Sunderland manager Gus Poyet remembers from their brief spell together at Tottenham back in 2004, and again between 2007 and 2008 when Poyet returned to White Hart Lane as a coach.

"I know all about his attributes and his qualities firsthand, and his exceptional goal-scoring record speaks for itself,” Poyet said upon the signing's announcement:

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He has something different, something special.

We know each other very well—he was very young when we played together and I was coming to the end of my career, so I know him from inside the pitch.

When I returned to Spurs as a coach it was a great experience for me to work with him, so I am really looking forward to having him as my player now and for him to be part of our team.

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Poyet may be delighted with the deal, but there remain a great number of questions surrounding it—least of all being: Is Defoe still good enough to score at this level? It is worth remembering that 12 months ago Defoe could scarcely start a Premier League game for Spurs, despite the fact Roberto Soldado was struggling to adjust to life in English football and Emmanuel Adebayor had been ostracised by then-manager Andre Villas-Boas.

When he did play, the pace and driving runs that were such a feature of his play in his youth seemed to have dried up, removing much of his prior ability to create his own chances. If that quality has now fully disappeared, then you wonder how he will actually help Sunderland—their problem is creating chances as much as scoring them, and Defoe only theoretically helps in one of those areas.

He scored two goals on his debut for Toronto, but his return declined sharply after that, and the standard of the MLS remains a long, long way adrift of even the bottom end of the Premier League.

Scoring on his debut is something of a habit for Defoe, however, and perhaps looking at the short-term impact is how we can explain this deal. In terms of initial outlay the transfer cost Sunderland virtually nothing—if anything sending Jozy Altidore, a player worth next to nothing at this point, the other way actually saved the club money in wages, making the deal itself a no-brainer.

Then perhaps the race for Defoe’s services forced the club to elevate their wage offer while also extending it to offer him some additional security. This might have been unpalatable but was probably necessary, and perhaps the club justified it by predicting, based on his track record, that he could make an instant impact.

Currently 16th in the Premier League, one point above the relegation zone and having managed just 18 goals in 21 games, Sunderland will feel that if Defoe scores the five or six goals that keep the club up in the Premier League, his deal will pay for itself. By securing the extra £60-plus million that comes with continued top-flight status, they will be more than able to cover the approximately £11 million Defoe will be owed over the duration of his contract, even if he is no longer able to earn that money on the pitch by the second or third year.

That is the calculated gamble the club have decided to take, similar to the one they made when they appointed Paolo Di Canio as manager, or indeed Poyet in similar circumstances a year after.

Both of those gambles paid off, in the short-term at least, but it remains to be seen if Defoe’s will eventually join that list.

His struggles in Toronto are the worry, and maybe rather than homesickness or external issues they were actually symptomatic of a general decline that Sunderland's inability to spot may end up proving rather costly.