Steve Bruce has agreed personal terms with Sunderland and an imminent announcement is expected from the Wearside club, confirming that he is their new manager.

Provisional plans have already been made to introduce Bruce to the media at the Stadium of Light tomorrow lunchtime. He leaves Wigan Athletic for a three-year contract at Sunderland understood to be worth £60,000 a week – £3m a year – a significant improvement on his £45,000-a-week remuneration at the JJB Stadium.

Eric Black, Bruce's assistant at Wigan, Nigel Spink, his goalkeeping coach and Keith Bertschin, the reserve-team coach, will all join him in the north-east. With personal terms and the composition of his backroom duly agreed during a second day of talks with Niall Quinn, Sunderland's chairman, in Ireland today, conversation turned to transfer targets with Bruce and Quinn compiling a hit list.

Meanwhile Wigan's attempts to replace Bruce with the Swansea City manager and their former player Roberto Martínez appear to have been thwarted by the Welsh club. "We made an approach to Swansea but they were asking for an absolutely nonsensical sum of money," said an insider at the JJB Stadium. "Roberto was our number one target but we are now drawing up a list of other targets we want to talk to."

Although Martínez, who is also coveted by Celtic, could yet end up returning to Wigan, Peterborough United's Darren Ferguson and the former Wigan manager Paul Jewell, who is without a job, are in strong contention, with Craig Levein, the Dundee United manager, regarded as a dark horse.