Sam Allardyce has warned his players they are highly unlikely to be able to move on to better things should Sunderland be relegated to the Championship next month.

Instead he believes the vast majority of their careers would be set on inexorable downward trajectories. “Most of the players will never get a better club than this one,” the manager said. “With its facilities and supporters they really need to realise what they have here. If they moved on, I don’t think even Wahbi Khazri, Lamine Koné and Jan Kirchhoff would step up from Sunderland. I can’t see many of the lads getting a better or bigger club than this one, so their big challenge is to stay in the Premier League.”

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Allardyce needs his side, currently 18th, to win at 17th-placed Norwich City on Saturday. Although Alex Neil’s team are four points ahead, Sunderland have a game in hand and their manager is desperate to maintain his record of never having been relegated from the Premier League. “I’ve had a fantastic career and I would be disappointed to have that one relegation on my CV,” he said. “It would hurt, yes, but it’s more important for the club than it is for me. It would hurt this club immensely if they got relegated. I think survival is more important for the players than it is for me.”

Allardyce declined to discuss whether or not he might be persuaded to remain in charge should the club go down but the man who led West Ham United to promotion at the first attempt after taking over the then newly relegated side in 2011 would certainly not relish the prospect of another season in the Championship.

“Statistics will tell you that it’s very difficult for a team to come straight back up,” he said. “If you look at the three teams that get relegated each year, then over the last 15 years, very few of them have come up first time. I did that analysis when I went to West Ham in 2011, and I thought: ‘Shit. I wish I’d looked at this before I took the job on.’ We did get back but there’s not too many who do.

“Relegation has a huge effect on a football club this size or the size of West Ham that needs some really delicate managing. You need to have lots of outs, lots of ins and lots of cut-backs. There are lots of very miserable people who you have to reinvigorate and regenerate to create a feelgood factor to get the club back to where it wants to be.”