The image of a boy standing barefoot on the edge of a Trafalgar Square fountain, wrapped in a Sunderland flag as he shouts to what you imagine is a mass of people, radiates an optimism and defiance which will be carried into Wembley Stadium this weekend.
It was taken when Sunderland played in, and lost, a Checkatrade Trophy final against Portsmouth, six years ago, and hangs in a corner of the North East city’s Fans Museum, where a group of visitors is lingering around it in a kind of reverie on Wednesday afternoon this week.
‘We love the spirit of this picture,’ says Carol Foster, one of the museum’s volunteers. ‘It shows the celebration that these trips to Wembley have become.’
The latest of them, casting Sunderland into the Championship play-off final against Sheffield United on Saturday, will conform to a now well-established pattern.
The emptying out of Sunderland on Friday morning. A mustering of fans around Covent Garden by mid-afternoon. A walk down to Trafalgar Square, where 30,000 people generally gather by dusk.
Sunderland’s schools were a little emptier than usual on Friday. There have been few bigger occasions for the club since Jim Montgomery’s goalkeeping heroics helped clinch the FA Cup against Leeds in 1973.
This Sunderland fan radiates an optimism and defiance which will be carried into Wembley Stadium this weekend
The latest Wembley trip, casting Sunderland into the Championship play-off final against Sheffield United on Saturday, will conform to a now well-established pattern
The emptying out of Sunderland on Friday morning. A mustering of fans around Covent Garden by mid-afternoon
There are many reasons for Sunderland not to carry with them the radiant optimism of that boy in the iconic picture.
The club’s four-year stay in League One, clinging to the Checkatrade and Papa Johns Trophy for hopes of glory, is still very much in recent memory. Their longest ever exile from the top flight – eight years – has coincided with Newcastle United finding Saudi riches, Champions League football and silverware.
The only form of red and white fame came in the mould-breaking documentary, Sunderland ‘Til I Die, first pitched to Netflix as a ‘phoenix from the ashes’ story after their Premier League relegation in 2017.
It ended up chronicling the club’s chaotic tumble into the third tier. When Sunderland faced Newcastle in the FA Cup third round last season, their first meeting since 2016, they were soundly beaten, 3-0.
But on the streets of Sunderland, in its pubs and the beautiful little museum, where a flag of club legend Niall Quinn flies beneath a perfect sky outside, it’s hard to find anything but desperation for a return to football’s high plateau, to meet the ‘Saudi Toon’ machine full on. The fact that every promoted club in the past two years has bounced straight back down seems utterly inconsequential.
Catholic priest Father Marc Lyden-Smith, who in the first episode of Sunderland ‘Til I Die prays for divine help after Premier League relegation, does detect a little local angst. ‘There’s a few extra candles been lit,’ he says. But Carol, in the museum, won’t be needing one. ‘We need to be back among the better teams,’ she says.
Neither does a Saudi sovereign wealth fund hold fears for supporter Jonathan Weightman, poring over one of the museum’s display of players’ donated boots, including Jermaine Defoe’s size 6.5 and Jobe Bellingham’s size 12.
‘Good luck to Newcastle, if that’s where they’ve found their money, he says. ‘The £100million we’d get if we go up will come in handy. It puts us in a great position, whatever happens.’
A walk down to Trafalgar Square, where 30,000 people generally gather by dusk
There have been few bigger occasions for the club since Jim Montgomery’s goalkeeping heroics helped clinch the FA Cup against Leeds in 1973
There are many reasons for Sunderland not to carry with them the radiant optimism of that boy in the iconic picture
It’s hard to find anything but desperation for a return to football’s high plateau, to meet the ‘Saudi Toon’ machine full on
The fact that every promoted club in the past two years has bounced straight back down seems utterly inconsequential
Where the broader story of Newcastle’s greater wealth is concerned, there is a brooding sense of injustice. ‘They get the cream and we get what’s left. It’s always been like that,’ Sunderland club historian Rob Mason tells Mail Sport.
He traces this right back to Newcastle’s monopoly on the coal trade, granted by royal permission at the time of the English Civil War, which was economically devastating for Sunderland. When the Civil War started, Newcastle took up arms against for the Royalist Cavaliers. Sunderland fought for the Roundheads.
But Leo Pearlman, executive producer of Sunderland ‘Til I Die and a now a non-executive director of the club, feels Toon’s Saudi riches create potential for Sunderland to be something distinctly different to Newcastle, now. Something subtler and more attractive.
‘I would describe Newcastle as more of a global entity now,’ he tells Mail Sport. ‘Sunderland have a fantastic position to fill as a local club with a global outlook.’
It was precisely because Sunderland faced struggles, reflected in the lives of their working-class fans, that the documentary proved such a hit with audiences from Canada to South Korea and left American actor and screenwriter Rob McElhenney determined to buy a British club – which turned out to be Wrexham.
‘People saw something akin to their own experience of watching sport: pain, misery, defeat,’ Pearlman says. ‘I wasn’t expecting us to drop down the divisions, but when we trained the lens on the city and its people, we saw them celebrated. That was uplifting.’
It is in the same spirit that Sunderland will take their chances against Newcastle, despite a superiority complex on Tyneside, where fans’ general view of Sunderland’s play-off final is: ‘We want them promoted because it’s six points for us.’ That neglects to mention that Newcastle have not beaten their rivals in the league for 14 years, losing six consecutive meetings from 2013 to 2015.
‘I want to be playing them as often as possible and many fans share my view on that,’ says Pearlman. ‘That 3-0 FA Cup defeat was still one of the most memorable times of the past few years.’
When Sunderland faced Newcastle in the FA Cup third round last season, their first meeting since 2016, they were soundly beaten, 3-0
Sunderland will take their chances against Newcastle, despite a superiority complex on Tyneside
Sunderland have not lost to their fierce rivals in the league for 14 years, and won six in a row in the mid-2010s
The Sunderland of today is a rather different to the one Pearlman’s brilliant films depicted
Sunderland was recently designated a ‘Global Music City’ and now has a spring in its step
The Sunderland of today is a rather different to the one Pearlman’s brilliant films depicted. A place with a spring in its step, recently designated a ‘Global Music City’ and the UK’s first city of 5G connectivity where one of the largest film studios in Europe is being built, with Pearlman’s company, Fulwell 73, among the investors.
When Sunderland ‘Til I Die was filmed, the club was under the disastrous ownership of businessman Stewart Donald. But the 28-year-old Swiss-French businessman Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, who bought out Donald, has helped build the club back up.
Sporting director Kristjaan Speakman, who arrived from Birmingham City with Mike Dodds, Jude Bellingham’s first coach, has brought a capacity to unearth young talent, as well as a personal connection with the Bellingham family.
So, to go with Jobe Bellingham, the Championship’s Player of the Year, young players like Trai Hume 23, and teenagers Tommy Watson and Chris Rigg have helped put Sunderland here. Dodds is now managing Wycombe Wanderers.
It’s the smaller touches which also seem to have put a spring in Mackem steps this weekend, though. The new Hummell kit, stocks of which rapidly sold out, the improved Tannoy system at the Stadium of Light, and the idea of renaming the ground’s old West Stand ‘The Jimmy Montgomerie Stand’, with a ceremony before the play-off semi-final second leg against Coventry, which Regis Le Bris’ side won in the 122nd minute.
That unforgettable night against Coventry – fans singing in unison as they marched away across the Monkwearmouth bridge, past the blue plaque which is a permanent reminder of how Sunderland fought the Royalists, and night bus drivers blasting their horns – is the fuel which has left Sunderland believing they can win again today.
‘Monty told me he’d never experienced an atmosphere to match it at the stadium. He told me it was right up there with the Manchester City game at Roker Park in ’73,’ says Jim Christie in the Sunderland Supporters Association place on Millennium Way.
This is some comparison. Bob Stokoe’s second division Sunderland beating Malcolm Allison’s City 3-1 in the 1973 FA cup quarter final, was voted the Roker Park Match of the Century.
Dan Ballard scores the unforgettable last-second goal to send Sunderland to Wembley
Jobe Bellingham is among the young jewels in Sunderland’s crown
Chris Rigg, who made his first-team debut at the age of just 15, is another Sunderland rising star with a list of suitors
Gavin Henderson, a host of the Roker Report podcast, says the rebuilding of Sunderland means the Premier League need hold no fears.
‘If you believe in what the club has done over the past few years – very well run, with a good squad – you’d have to think we could get a foothold wherever we are next,’ he tells Mail Sport. ‘This is a group of players who’ve been built up over four or five years.’
The challenge is how to hold onto some of those talents, now. Watson has already been sold to Brighton. Rigg has West Ham and Everton keen, while Bellingham has attracted Dortmund, Frankfurt and Leipzig.
Given the ever-diminishing returns of promoted Championship clubs, all immediately relegated with 66 and 59 points between them in the past two seasons, any promoted side will be up against it. Sunderland need their talents.
Former manager Peter Reid says the level of local support will count. ‘The people are absolutely football crackers,’ he tells Mail Sport. He will be at Wembley on Saturday.
Sunderland would also take an acute sense that, when it comes to football, they have never allowed the more economically powerful Newcastle to emasculate them.
‘Historically, Newcastle has never been as successful as Sunderland,’ says Mason. ‘They’ve never held as many league titles as Sunderland and would need to win the Premier League three times to do so. Their record attendance is 7,000 lower than Sunderland’s.
‘I’ve heard a few people suggesting on the radio that “it’s more fun in the Championship”. We’d be kidding ourselves if we thought that. We are one of the biggest clubs in the country, with the history and the fanbase.’
Sunderland would also take an acute sense that, when it comes to football, they have never allowed the more economically powerful Newcastle to emasculate them
Where the broader story of Newcastle’s greater wealth is concerned, there is a brooding sense of injustice
Newcastle have never had as many league titles as Sunderland, who are currently on their longest run outside the top flight in their history
He insists that ‘it’s not always hatred’ between the two clubs. ‘You can have plenty of argument and counterargument.’ Many families are divided on club lines, of course. It is even said that there are two or three people of older vintage who have season tickets for both clubs.
Pearlman feels the intensity of the rivalry derives from the fact that these two groups of people are actually very similar. ‘The people of the North East are great storytellers, stubborn and determined. The mindset for both sets of people is, “We’re going to thrive, despite the lack of support.” The similarity is possibly why there’s so much conflict.’
But the mutual mockery is merciless. Though anyone outside of the North East can’t hear it, there’s a distinct difference between the Geordie accent and the rather peculiar way people speak in Sunderland, all of 10 miles away.
When Newcastle fans wave their door keys at Sunderland supporters during a derby match, it’s a mocking reference to a phrase typifying the Mackem accent – ‘wheese keys are these keys?’, rather than ‘whose keys are these keys??’
The term ‘Mackem’ was borne of Geordies’ mocking Sunderlanders pronunciation ‘we make ‘em’, from the days when the city on the Wear built a quarter of all the world’s ships. Sunderland people duly adopted the term.
In turn, they mock the ‘oo’ in the Geordie pronunciation of ‘book’ or ‘cooker’ and the way, as some see it, that Newcastle fans feel the need to wear their black and white replica shirts in every social setting.
This taunting has receded during Sunderland’s exile from the top-flight and at the Times Inn – a pub which has a mural of Montgomery with the FA Cup on its gable end wall and a clock permanently stopped at 3.32, the time Ian Porterfield scored against Leeds in ‘73 – it can’t return soon enough.
‘When we played Newcastle in that Cup tie two seasons back, I ran out of beer at 10pm and took the equivalent of a month’s income in one day,’ says Steve Lawson, who runs the place. ‘A video clip of our fans here that day got 1.6million hits!’
Ian Porterfield scores the goal that won the 1973 FA Cup for second-division Sunderland against Leeds
The taunting between rivals has dimmed during Sunderland’s exile from the top flight but many fans cannot wait for its return
‘We are one of the biggest clubs in the country, with the history and the fanbase’
Sunderland are 90 minutes from ending eight years outside the top flight
There’s little evidence around here of Sunderland taunting Newcastle about their new-found Saudi wealth. ‘I suppose you could laugh at them and say it’s sportswashing,’ says Lawson. ‘But we’re more bothered about what we’re doing. Our own business. Trying to get back.’
At his pub, they’re more interested in taunts about Newcastle players, the juicier of which are printed on the walls. Any kind of black and white attire in here will, Lawson says, raise eyebrows and provoke a comment along the lines of, ‘you should know better’.
As he plans the Roker Report’s output for Wembley, Henderson believes fans can travel to London without fear. ‘I think to a degree the pressure is off for this game,’ he says. ‘If we don’t go back up, people will sit back and say, “We’ve still had a brilliant season.”’
But in the Fans Museum, they’ve only got one outcome and one future opponent in mind. Across the room from the image of the boy is a signed table football, in which a red and white team faces a black and white one. ‘It replicates a derby match and it’s quite popular,’ says Carol. ‘But no one ever wants to be the black and whites.’
