Callum Doyle was a tall and raw teenager when he arrived at Sunderland for his first taste of senior football two years ago.
He was obviously a technically gifted player, having come through the Manchester City academy from the age of 11, brought up to play the Pep Guardiola way. However, the battle-hardened pros trying to drag Sunderland back to the Championship from League One couldn’t help being a little cynical when they first saw him.
“He took a massive chance coming to Sunderland but he believed in his ability,” Lee Johnson, the Sunderland manager who signed Doyle on loan in July 2021, tells The Athletic.
“I remember his first training session. (At first), the lads were all saying, ‘I don’t know. A 17-year-old centre half coming through the door here at Sunderland. He won’t cope with the pressure’.
“He then went past four players and scored a goal. Everyone turned their heads straight away and a couple of them were chuckling and laughing to themselves, saying, ‘Yeah, that’s a real player’.”
If Sunderland’s squad thought Doyle wouldn’t be tough enough for the rigours of a League One season, he proved them wrong, starting all but two of the first 35 league games, until Alex Neil replaced Johnson in February 2022 — although Neil did think the City loanee had been exposed to too much football for a player so young.
“Callum was similar to Dan Neil last season in that they’re two supremely talented lads who I thought looked burnt out by the time I arrived at the club,” Neil explained on BBC Radio Newcastle’s Total Sport programme in July last year. “I thought they’d been overworked. I actually gave Callum a week’s holiday at one point, literally just to let him go rest and recover physically and mentally.”
Callum Doyle (centre) grapples with Lincoln’s Conor McGrandles (Photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Although Doyle only played a handful of times in the closing stages of the 2021-22 season, his first proper spell in senior football ended with play-off victory at Wembley Stadium.
His success continued that summer as he played a key role for the England Under-19s as they won the European Championship in Slovakia. He started all but one of England’s games on the left side of a back three and scored the crucial equaliser against Israel that took the final to extra time, where England eventually ran out 3-1 winners.
