SUNDERLAND, England — Life can come at you pretty fast if you’re a Sunderland supporter.
It’s May 2016, and manager Sam Allardyce is dancing on the pitch at the Stadium of Light after a 3-0 win against Everton has secured Premier League survival and consigned rivals Newcastle to relegation at the same time. It is the sweetest of moments for Sunderland — staying up is one thing, but sending Newcastle down is like hitting the jackpot, and it confirms Sunderland’s status as the top club in England’s northeast.
Yet two months later, Allardyce stepped down to become England manager (albeit briefly), and everything began to unravel.
By May 2018, Sunderland had been relegated twice, dropping to League One and hiring four different managers during that period. The club even abandoned its iconic prematch music — Prokofiev’s stirring “Dance of the Knights” — as it spiralled into the third tier. (The Prokofiev song returned in May 2022, and the team has been on an upward curve ever since.)
Newcastle, meanwhile, reclaimed their Premier League place after just one season in the EFL Championship and by the time Sunderland emerged from four seasons in the third tier in 2022, Newcastle had been taken over by Saudi Arabia‘s Public Investment Fund, with the new owners talking of plans for Premier League and Champions League glory.
When the two teams contest the Tyne-Wear derby — so named because Newcastle sits on the River Tyne, Sunderland on the River Wear — for the first time since March 2016 in the FA Cup third round at the Stadium of Light on Saturday, both clubs will be unrecognisable from those that last faced each other almost eight years ago. Newcastle now have the ambition and financial resources to rival the top clubs in England and Europe, while Sunderland have built the youngest team in all four divisions and are owned by French-Swiss businessman Kyril Louis-Dreyfus who, at 27, is the youngest owner in English football.
– Stream LIVE: Sunderland vs. Newcastle, FA Cup third round, Saturday, 7:30 a.m. ET, ESPN+
On paper, it should be a mismatch. Newcastle, with a squad worth in excess of £400 million, will take on a Sunderland side whose average age in the New Year’s Day win against Preston was just 23.4 years. But a football rivalry that dates back to a first meeting in 1898 remains incredibly close historically with 53 Newcastle wins, 50 Sunderland victories and 50 draws in previous meetings — the clubs have taken turns being top dog.
With an injury-hit Newcastle going into the tie having lost six of their last eight games in all competitions, Sunderland — unbeaten in their last nine meetings with Newcastle — have an opportunity to remind their near-neighbours that they remain a genuine rival.
“Throughout the history of the rivalry, the two clubs have largely been equal powers,” Ian Murtagh, who has reported on Newcastle and Sunderland for over 30 years, told ESPN. “Sunderland have been English champions six times to Newcastle’s four, while Sunderland’s FA Cup success in 1973 was the last major honour won by either of the clubs.
“Newcastle became the glamour club when Kevin Keegan took charge in the 1990s and almost won the Premier League in 1996 — it coincided with the regeneration of Newcastle as a city at a time when the last coal mines closed in Sunderland. But even then, Sunderland became an established Premier League team.
“With the Saudi Arabia takeover at Newcastle, the financial gulf between the clubs has really opened and every single player in the Newcastle squad now earns more than Sunderland’s best-paid players. Sunderland are sitting on a goldmine of young talent, though. Jobe Bellingham, Jack Clarke, Dan Neil, Daniel Ballard, Anthony Patterson, Trai Hume and Pierre Ekwah are all capable of moving on for big fees if Sunderland don’t win promotion.”
The focus on youth is the central pillar of Sunderland’s blueprint under Louis-Dreyfus, whose takeover in Nov. 2020 was followed by the appointment of Kristjaan Speakman as sporting director a month later. Speakman had spent the previous 10 years in charge of Birmingham City’s academy, from which Jude Bellingham emerged as the star graduate.
When manager Tony Mowbray was dismissed last month, replaced by former Rangers boss Michael Beale, it was driven by Speakman’s determination to make changes while the team was on the up. Mowbray had won promotion from League One in May 2022 and followed it up with a place in the Championship playoffs last season, but even with Sunderland on the fringe of the promotion chase this time around, Speakman opted to shake things up.
“Ultimately the club is obsessed with progression and improving, and we felt to meet that we had to make a change,” Speakman said at the time. “Do you make it early and it’s a surprise, and people are maybe concerned because it doesn’t weigh up with the results? Or do you make it too late?
“Michael comes into a team that is performing well, the team is in a good spot and doesn’t need picking up from a long, poor run of results. We felt it was the right time.”
Building a team from within and identifying emerging talent elsewhere — Jobe Bellingham, younger brother of Real Madrid‘s Jude, was signed from Birmingham for a £3m fee last June — is the policy at Sunderland, and Beale will be expected to embrace that.
“The club has a long-term strategy to deliver sustainable success,” a senior Sunderland source told ESPN. “Central to that is identifying and developing young talent with a commitment to an exciting style of play.
“We will give young players the opportunity to show how good they are. Hopefully they can help get Sunderland to the Premier League, but if not, then the second-best thing is that they get there themselves. We have the youngest team in the EFL, but age is no barrier to being good enough.
“Jobe is only 18, but he has already made himself one of the leaders within the group. When we play Newcastle, Miguel Almirón, at £20m, will have cost more than all of our squad combined. But it will still be us against them, red-and-white vs. black-and-white, and a chance for our players to show how good they can be.”
While offering a useful measuring stick for Sunderland’s progress as a young team, Saturday’s game is also a reminder of what the club continues to miss out on. Since the turn of the century, Sunderland have enjoyed 15 seasons in England’s top flight, and their Premier League exile in the EFL is out of sync with a club that sits in 10th position — one place behind Newcastle — in the all-time table of English football. They are the best-supported team outside the Premier League and, outside Europe’s top divisions, only German clubs Schalke, Hamburg, Hertha Berlin and Kaiserslautern average higher attendances than Sunderland’s 40,823 this season.
The Stadium of Light will be full on Saturday, however, with 6,000 Newcastle supporters making up a capacity crowd of just over 49,000. Due to the hostility between the rival sets of fans — a police horse was punched by a Newcastle supporter during notoriously violent scenes at a derby in April 2013 — every Newcastle supporter must travel on transport provided by the club, which will be escorted on the 13-mile journey from St James’ Park.
Anticipation is high on both sides of the divide, as highlighted by Newcastle defender Dan Burn, who will face Sunderland with his boyhood team for the first time this weekend. “It’s class, ain’t it?” Burn told the BBC. “I was just thinking, since I’ve managed to get back to the club, we have got to the League Cup final, the Champions League and now I’m going to have the opportunity, hopefully, to play against Sunderland.
“It’s just crazy. I’ve always said I wanted Sunderland to be in the Premier League so we can have these games more regularly. To be able to do it is going to be class.”
For Sunderland manager Beale, whose last job saw him encounter the frenzied atmosphere of the Old Firm rivalry between Rangers and Celtic in Scotland, the excitement of preparing for his first Tyne-Wear derby is clear. “I arrived at the club after the draw was made but you could already feel the anticipation building,” he said at his prematch news conference. “Now we’re here and everyone is looking forward to the first derby in more than seven years, which is far too long a wait.
“It’s a fixture that captivates everybody in the northeast. There’s obviously a difference between the two clubs now — the last seven years have been ups and downs for both — but it’s an intriguing game between our young team and a Champions League side.
“We’re really ambitious. We’re playing for our fans and our city and it’s really important we put that into our game — it’s our stadium with our fans behind us. That energy will go onto the pitch.”
Only 17 league places separate Newcastle (ninth in the Premier League) and Sunderland (sixth in the Championship), but the gulf seems much greater than that due to the different paths being taken by the two clubs off the pitch. Sunderland know better than most that things can change quickly in football, though. Nothing can be taken for granted.