'You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone,' as the song goes. Sunderland might not exactly have paved paradise and put up a parking lot, but they have allowed the best manager/head coach the club had had in years to slip through their grasp.
Plenty of managers have come and gone on Wearside in recent years - far too many, in fact - but normally they are sacked or resign. Alex Neil is the first to leave for another job since Sam Allardyce left to become England manager in 2016, and the first to be lured away by another club since Jimmy Adamson quit to take over at Leeds United in October 1978.
The Black Cats confirmed this afternoon that Neil has been given permission to talk to Stoke City about their vacant manager's job, but even as that statement was released the Scot was making his way around the Academy of Light and saying his goodbyes before heading for the Potteries to complete the paperwork. His mind was made up. He was off.
READ MORE: Alex Neil set to leave Sunderland for Stoke City
The mood amongst supporters when the news broke was a mixture of shock and anger.
Why would Neil leave? Why Stoke? And why couldn't a club like Sunderland convince him to stay?
After all, in Neil the club had at last found a man who did not merely talk a good game, but one who had earned the respect and trust of fans by delivering success on the pitch. He had taken over in February, inheriting a team that was on the slide, and galvanised the players into a side that finally won promotion via the play-offs to end the club's wretched four-year stay in League One.
Sunderland seemed a club on the up again, and that mood continued into the new season with a positive start to life back in the Championship as the Black Cats picked up eight points from their first five games. But all was not well behind the scenes.
Neil was originally appointed on a 12-month rolling contract, which offered little security to him - and, crucially, little protection to Sunderland when it came to fending off interest in a head coach whose success was bound to attract attention from elsewhere. A new, improved, long-term contract would have been both a reward for promotion, and would have allowed Sunderland to negotiate away the clause that meant they were obliged to let Neil speak to a Championship club that made a formal offer, and increase the amount of compensation to which they were entitled.
This is important because Stoke were put off at least one other managerial target by the size of the compensation package that they would have to pay to prise him away. But the club's sporting director Kristjaan Speakman hinted at the end of last season that no long-term deal was in the offing, claiming that 'everyone is happy' with the 12-month rolling deal.
Clearly not.
First things first, let's not kid ourselves - Neil will receive a pay rise at Stoke, and probably a long-term contract as well. Sunderland will claim that they did their best to keep him, but they either could not - or would not - match Stoke's offer.
How hard they tried is another matter. The problems at Sunderland ran deeper than that, however.
There was also the issue of the transfer model adopted by the club, and its impact on the window. The first warning shots were fired in Neil's post-match press conference at Wembley in May, when he said: "When transfer windows open up, when you are going to the next level and you aspire to be higher than that level, that's very different.
"There's got to be a lot of work, a lot of investment, a lot of facets that make you competitive in the next league. Like anybody, if you are doing a job then you want the tools to do that job and I am no different."
Just ten days ago Neil was asked whether he had knocked on the owners' door to ask for more players, and he said: "I can't knock on the door any more. There's probably no door any more - I've probably bust it down!"
Sunderland's model dictates that the club will generally only pay significant transfer fees for players under the age of 24, who can be developed and potentially sold at a profit, such as latest arrival Jewison Bennette for instance. But Neil looked at his squad - which finished fifth in League One last season but going into the Championship campaign is lighter on numbers and has less cover in certain positions - and wanted more experienced, ready-made, players to help make the step up.
He has been saying for weeks that Sunderland need reinforcements, and that he needs four or five more senior players before the window closes. Well, the window closes in six days' time and the last 'ready-made' addition was Ellis Simms, who joined on loan from Everton on July 29.
Aside from his own contract, one item that you can be sure was on the agenda when Neil spoke to Stoke was the club's transfer policy and how much say he would have over it. The question now for Sunderland is: 'what next?'
Earlier in the year, there was a 13-day wait between sacking Lee Johnson and appointing Neil, and in that period they suffered embarrassing back-to-back defeats against Doncaster and Cheltenham which put their play-off chances in jeopardy, and also made a huge blunder in the transfer market when they brought in Jermain Defoe for a shortlived swansong. Over these next 11 days, Sunderland face games against Norwich City tomorrow, Rotherham United on Wednesday night, and Middlesbrough a week on Monday.
We are entering the final days of the transfer window, and there is no head coach to consult over new arrivals. Sunderland have made a good start to the season, but they cannot afford a period of drift in the Championship such as they experienced in League One.
The pressure is now on Speakman to deliver a new head coach - and signings - quickly.
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