Life at Sunderland, where the game is stale, the club is rotten and relegation is inevitable
As I struggled to force the Metro machine to accept my money, a man and his son were sat on the bench adjacent to me, huddled together for warmth. The boy was lost inside a bobble hat, while his scarf and gloves looked more restricting and itchy than they did warming. He looked down at the ground while his dad wore a guilty expression on his face.
“It wasn’t always like this, you know,” the man said to his son, unable to make eye contact with the young boy. The lad merely shrugged his shoulders and maintained his gaze downwards.
Something caused the duo to divert their gaze towards me, as I stared at them in sympathy. Our eyes met and I walked away, haunted and disturbed, weaving through jaded supporters and e-cigarette vapour. His words ran through my brain and whitewashed my face like the rains of a thousand winters. It wasn’t always like this, you know.
For clubs like Sunderland, success can be burdensome. Supporters will always judge their current state against the standards of their most resounding past successes – at least those in their supporting memory. For a lot of fans, this would the golden “Reid years” in the early 21st century when the club managed to climb to the dizzy heights of a seventh-place Premier League finish. In a weird way, we are lucky to have never enjoyed a greater success than that in recent years, as we don’t have a comparison as prestigious as Leeds or Blackburn fans, for example. In other ways though, cherishing a seventh-place Premier League finish as “the good old days” is something of a tragedy.
It’s not as though Sunderland shouldn’t be succeeding. The fans are lucky enough to watch our home games in one of the country’s most attractive modern stadiums, with home attendances averaging above the 40,000 mark – that’s a lot of gate receipts, and a lot of money. Our supporters remain to be honest, working-class folk who somehow succeed in making the annual justification of splurging upwards of £400 on a season ticket, despite seeing just 10 home wins since November 2013. This is also somewhat of a tragedy.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing for fans though, is seeing their hard-earned cash lining the pockets of egotistical head coaches, criminally under-performing players, and utterly, utterly, hopeless sporting directors. The Sunderland boardroom must carry more negative energy than the haunted scene of any grizzly massacre or exorcism, and perhaps the directors should next turn to Derek Acorah to break the hoodoo – he certainly has the complexion. Whatever Sunderland try, they always, always get it wrong.
Enter Big Sam, with his chewing gum and his cartoon-dog face. His swearing in press conferences and his soft Germans. Enter Big Sam with a philosophy so rigid, negative and unambitious that he would rather see out a home draw with a fellow relegation struggler, than go for the win. With 30 minutes left to play against Bournemouth, and the travelling side on the ropes, Sam would rather batten down the hatches than bring in even one of two strikers on the bench – one of which he signed himself but a week earlier. Not only that, but he brought on Jack Rodwell, the biggest bozo of them all.
Sunderland manager Sam Allardyce and first-team coach Robbie Stockdale. Photograph: Lee Smith/Reuters
Sam Allardyce is a man playing an acoustic guitar at a house party. Yes, he can be entertaining at first, and he might occasionally strike the right chord, but when the lager starts to run out and people are getting tired, do you really want to listen to him play the same Oasis songs all night?
Sunderland are suffering from several years of zero transparency or accountability. Supporters don’t know if the club is in a healthy financial position or in dire straits. Just because your owner is a billionaire doesn’t mean the club has any money. Who takes the blame a manager is appointed and fails to deliver? Who takes the blame if a player we don’t need is signed for big money?
Sunderland could compile a saga of poor decisions with no decision-maker, as though the club is being controlled by some form of mysterious higher power. A Wizard of Oz, a Zordon, a Grand Master. When we are eventually relegated, it would not at all surprise me to see the ghostly apparition of a giant Margaret Thatcher head floating above the Stadium of Light, cackling her last laugh over the city.
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To make matters worse, our money isn’t as good as anyone else’s, and that problem is entirely geographical. While I will never sympathise or relate to Newcastle United, they also face the same struggle. Players don’t want to come this far north of London, where there are no boutique cereal shacks or smokehouses where ostrich burgers are served in pork-pie hats. This isn’t London; this is Sunderland – it couldn’t be more different. Even the England manager hardly ever ventures this far north.
The Premier League has gone beyond the realms of sport and ventured into the entertainment industry. With such heavy reliance on sponsorship, TV coverage and luscious, luscious money, it is more akin to The X Factor or I’m a Celebrity than it is to other sports like cricket or rugby. All that matters is the product, not the spirit of competition. The strain that Premier League FFP and homegrown rules places on clubs like Sunderland is completely alien to that of a larger club. Creative accounting and bright lights allow top teams to invest heavily in the youngest and brightest English talent, while Sunderland are forced to pay over the odds for their cast-offs, just so we can meet the quota for British players. The competition simply isn’t set up for teams like Sunderland to succeed.
The game is stale, the club is rotten and relegation is inevitable. For both Sunderland and Newcastle. But who cares, for this is what we’re watching right now in the Premier League. It isn’t football. It isn’t fun or exciting, and you don’t feel the same thrill of the occasion, or the pride of your team winning, because you know that in the grand scheme of things this is just three points out of a probable 40. It wasn’t always like this, you know.
This is an article from The Set Pieces
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