Sol Bamba is reportedly a candidate to become Sunderland’s new manager eight years after becoming a £2 million transfer target for the Championship outfit.
The last time Sol Bamba was mentioned in conjunction with a move to Wearside, he was a towering centre-half standing tall at the heart of Leeds United’s backline.
According to the Daily Star, Sunderland showed an interest in taking the club captain away from Elland Road in a potential £2 million deal all the way back in January 2016. Nearly eight years on, Bamba is on the Black Cats’ radar again, albeit with a very different role in mind.
TEAMtalk report that the now-38-year-old Bamba is ‘under consideration’ by a club looking for a up-and-coming coach willing to buy into Kyril Louis-Dreyfus and Kristjaan Speakman’s youth-first policy.
Sunderland still looking for a new manager
The former Middlesbrough and Cardiff City ace is the latest 30-something to be mentioned as a potential Tony Mowbray replacement. Sunderland looked at Francesco Farioli and Mathias Jaissle before they moved to Nice and Al-Ain respectively.
There are talks ongoing with Reims boss Will Still, per ESPN. Kim Hellberg had a meeting with Louis-Dreyfus last week but now appears set to take over at Swedish outfit Hammarby instead.
Farioli, Jaissle, Still and Hellberg have all achieved big things in their coaching careers at an early age. Bamba, in contrast, has never taken sole charge of a football club before. That is likely to change sooner rather than later, however, with Bamba keen to follow in the footsteps of his old mentor Neil Warnock following a short-lived spell back at Cardiff as an assistant coach last season.
Sol Bamba an option for the Black Cats
“Management is what I’m looking to do,” Bamba, who earned nearly 50 caps for the Ivory Coast, told talkSPORT in 2022.
“I want to learn the trade, but I also don’t want to start right at the bottom because any good chef needs a good kitchen and good ingredients to be successful. I’m not going to say I need or deserve a Premier League club. I’m realistic.”
Sunderland, then, could be a very useful starting point, the Black Cats offering a platform not only to budding young players looking to make a name for themselves – Jobe Bellingham, for instance – but for budding young managers too.
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