The season may not have ended just yet, but Sam Allardyce's Sunderland can afford to relax ahead of tomorrow's final game, having secured safety with a 3-0 win over Everton on Wednesday.
Not only can they play with some freedom away at Watford then, but the club can also start looking towards the summer market and recruiting the players that can ensure they are well away from the relegation zone next year.
All eyes on France
It seems that France is really hogging the Wearsiders' attention heading into the transfer market, and they will be hoping to make movements before everyone else turns their eyes in that direction with Euro 2016 on the way.
"The difficulty of doing things early doors is the Euros," Allardyce told local media ahead of tomorrow's game. "We'd like to get in players as quickly as we can," he said, but this is not an ideal world and so that will be tough.
However, he doesn't see this as the biggest problem the club will face this summer. Instead, "the hard part" will be "spending the money as wisely as we possibly can," the manager believes, due to the huge money that all Premier League clubs will receive at the end of the campaign.
"It will only inflate the prices during the early part of the summer," in Allardyce's opinion, but he is confident that the club can make the most of the high "value" that is in France.
"You can negotiate with the French clubs for a reasonable price and the players who come from France seem to adapt well to the Premier League," the manager says, and he believes it has been this way "for the last 10 years."
It's not surprise that he sees it this way too, with Wahbi Khazri and Lamine Kone having both come into the club in January from France and made immediate impacts - the latter even scoring two goals in that safety-securing 3-0 win last week.
Allardyce will be keen to unearth a couple more players like these, with Shields Gazette suggesting that Lamine Gassama and Clement Chantome are early targets.
The former played with Kone at Lorient and the latter with Khazri at Bordeaux before their January switches, and Sunderland will hope both players put in a good word if they are to pursue these two.
Loanees are the priority
However, Allardyce also spoke to the media about doing deals with the players currently on loan at the Stadium of Light, saying that sorting both their situations and those of the players who are out of contract is the "initial focus."
DeAndre Yedlin, Yann M'Vila, Dame N'Doye and Ola Toivonen are all on loan on Wearside, with the former two having put forth a strong case for a permanent switch.
Whether Yedlin has a future at Tottenham Hotspur in a first team that already has four full-backs is uncertain, but Allardyce may well be willing to offer him Premier League football in the North East instead after his rapid improvement in the second half of the season.
N'Doye and Toivonen, however, seem unlikely to be at the club much longer. The former's move hasn't worked out like Big Sam would have hoped, while the latter was signed by Dick Advocaat and has struggled to make an impression since the Dutchman departed.
The big deal Sunderland want to do though is one for M'Vila. The Frenchman has been a mainstay in midfield since arriving last summer, and both he and the club seem keen to strike a permanent deal.
"He wants to stay," Allardyce revealed, "so one of the things we have to do is start that negotiation."
M'Vila has expressed his delight throughout the season with his time in Sunderland, thoroughly enjoying the Tyne-Wear derby before expressing a desire to remain on Wearside beyond the summer.
Allardyce sees this deal as "one of the priorities" for the club now, adding that they will have to "sort out" the loanees and those with expiring contracts "before [they] move into the market."