Brilliantly and beautifully, Sunderland are in Europe.
A club only promoted to the Premier League via the play-offs last year, who have not graced the European landscape since 1974, and whose opening scorer here in Trai Hume cost £200,000 when signed in 2022 while they were still scrapping in League One.
Embarrassingly and extraordinarily, Chelsea are not.
For so long, they were in a prime position to qualify for the Champions League next season. They bottled that, and then the Europa League and the Conference League, all amid accusations of players downing tools. Which would be daft within itself when their wages are incentive-based – a policy which means it would be their own pay-packets they were ripping up as well as their club’s reputation.
Sunderland shamed the visitors here, their manager Regis Le Bris helped by the fact that his players actually appeared to give a damn.
They appreciated the historic achievement awaiting them, embraced it as a generational triumph. It was only after an agonising 10 minutes of added time that Sunderland’s fans deservedly got to light their red flares in the stands, singing ‘I can’t help falling in love with you‘ en masse.
Chelsea plunged to even greater lows with an embarrassing and entitled display at Sunderland
The Black Cats profited at Chelsea’s expense to secure a spot in the Europa League next year
As they were also chanting while exiting the Stadium of Light – after listening to an emotional speech from their experienced captain Granit Xhaka – they are on their way to the Europa League. It is one hell of a story. Four years ago, they were ending their season away at Morecambe. Now, they are dreaming of Marseille and beyond.
‘It is hard to realise,’ Le Bris said. ‘The journey was special. We felt it with our fans.’
For Chelsea interim Calum McFarlane, he could only oversee a game which summed up their entire season in so many ways – a defeat which ticked several frighteningly familiar boxes.
An utterly unserious attitude? Tick – save for Levi Colwill, Chelsea’s defenders appeared as if they had already checked out of this campaign. A defensive disasterclass? Tick – Hume’s opener simply involved a long ball and a header on, and Malo Gusto’s strange own goal gave Sunderland their unattainable lead. Dire discipline? Tick – Wesley Fofana fouled Wilson Isidor when he was already on a yellow to leave the visitors down to 10 men while trailing 2-1, becoming their 10th red card of 2025-26, or 11 if we count the one shown to previous manager, Enzo Maresca.
Chelsea carried a sense of entitlement, and that is not how football works.
The players will have known Xabi Alonso was watching from afar, and yet the incoming manager may only have added a few additional names to his for-sale list.
Without European football, you do wonder whether a mass exodus will now need to happen at Chelsea.
Not only because a few of their players may think they still deserve to be at a club in the Champions League – arrogant as that would be – but because a bloated squad is no good when you only have the Premier League and two domestic cup competitions troubling the calendar.
McFarlane refused to throw his players under the bus after full-time, but did say: ‘We should be finishing a lot higher up the league.
‘For me, with this group of players and talent, we should be in the Champions League. We haven’t. We’ve been too inconsistent at times this year. It’s cost us.
‘The message to the fans – we’re as disappointed as them and we’re gutted we couldn’t do it for them. We’ve let them down today. We weren’t able to put the performance in that they deserved.’
IS ENZO CITY BOUND?
After full-time, Chelsea’s players trudged towards their away fans.
Joao Pedro apologised, Marc Cucurella applauded, and Enzo Fernandez waved with two hands. Whether that was goodbye for the summer from the 25-year-old Argentinian or for good remains to be seen.
Maresca likes having the odd familiar face in his squad after taking signings with whom he had already worked to each of the three clubs he managed. There was Adrian Bernabe to Parma, Callum Doyle to Leicester, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall to Chelsea, to name a few.
Enzo Fernandez apologised to supporters at the end as links to Man City continue to intensity
Cole Palmer scored but his lack of consistency is exactly why he is not going to the World Cup
Maresca is now set to succeed Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, and he and Fernandez had an especially close relationship at Chelsea. The 46-year-old Italian liked Fernandez – enough to hand him the captain’s armband barely a month after he was accused of singing a racist song following Argentina’s 2024 Copa America triumph.
While there has been overwhelming online noise surrounding Fernandez’s situation heading into this summer – inevitable considering his own agent, Javier Pastore, admitted they will ‘explore other options’ if an appropriate contract extension is not forthcoming – Chelsea sources claim there is no concrete update from their side and that they remain only rumours.
The speculation that City are determined to snap him up could yet prove true, of course. Fernandez considers himself an elite player, worthy of competing at the highest level. Chelsea will not be there next term.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD FOR PALMER
When Cole Palmer was announced as a Coca Cola ambassador last month, true to brand, the company’s PR team were fizzing to tell us how he would be fronting campaigns including during the upcoming World Cup. The ‘coldest link-up yet’, they called it.
Slightly awkward now that Palmer has been excluded from Thomas Tuchel’s England squad, along with a fair few others who you imagine will have been checking the availability of villas in Ibiza this last week.
Palmer scored a cracker from 25 yards here, but he struggled to dictate this contest overall.
Not since the Club World Cup final win over Paris Saint-Germain have we seen what we might describe as a ‘proper Palmer performance’. The type where those in attendance walk away thinking, oof, he is one the world’s best.
