Why FA Cup’s best game might be Sunderland vs. Newcastle،
SUNDERLAND, England — Life can happen to you pretty quickly if you're a Sunderland fan.
It's May 2016 and manager Sam Allardyce is dancing on the pitch at the Stadium of Light after a 3-0 win over Everton secured Premier League survival and consigned rivals Newcastle to relegation at the same time. It's the sweetest moment for Sunderland – staying up is one thing, but sending Newcastle down is like hitting the jackpot, and it confirms Sunderland's status as the best club in the North East. 'England.
Yet two months later Allardyce resigned to become England manager (albeit briefly), and everything started to go downhill.
As of May 2018, Sunderland have been relegated twice, dropping to League One and hiring four different managers in that time. The club even ditched its signature pre-match music – Prokofiev's stirring “Dance of the Knights” – as it reached the third tier. (Prokofiev's song returned in May 2022, and the team has been on an upward curve ever since.)
Newcastle, meanwhile, reclaimed their place in the Premier League after just one season in the EFL Championship and by the time Sunderland emerged from four seasons in the Third Division in 2022, Newcastle had been taken over by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the new owners discussing. plans for glory in the Premier League and Champions League.
When the two teams contest the Tyne-Wear derby – so named because Newcastle is located on the River Tyne, Sunderland on the River Wear – for the first time since March 2016, in the third round of the FA Cup at the Stadium of Light on Saturday, both clubs will be unrecognizable from those who last faced each other almost eight years ago. Newcastle now have the ambition and financial resources to compete with the best clubs in England and Europe, while Sunderland have built the youngest team in all four divisions and are owned by French businessman Swiss Kyril Louis-Dreyfus who, at 27, is the youngest owner. in English football.
– Stream LIVE: Sunderland v Newcastle, FA Cup Third Round, Saturday, 7:30 a.m. ET, ESPN+
On paper, this should be a mismatch. Newcastle, with a squad worth more than £400m, will face a Sunderland side whose average age in the New Year's win over Preston was just 23.4. But a footballing rivalry that dates back to a first meeting in 1898 remains incredibly close historically with 53 wins at Newcastle, 50 wins at Sunderland and 50 draws in previous meetings – the clubs have taken turns to be the best.
With Newcastle injured ahead of the tie having lost six of their last eight games in all competitions, Sunderland – unbeaten in their last nine meetings with Newcastle – have the opportunity to remind their near neighbors that they remain a genuine rival. .
“Throughout the history of the rivalry, both clubs have largely had equal powers,” Ian Murtagh, who has reported on Newcastle and Sunderland for more than 30 years, told ESPN. “Sunderland have been champions of England six times to Newcastle's four, while Sunderland's FA Cup success in 1973 was the last major honor won by either club.
“Newcastle became the glamor club when Kevin Keegan took charge in the 1990s and almost won the Premier League in 1996 – this coincided with Newcastle's regeneration as a city at a time when the last coal mines were closing at Sunderland. But even then, Sunderland became an established Premier League team.
“With the takeover of Newcastle by Saudi Arabia, the financial gap between the clubs has really widened and every player in the Newcastle squad now earns more than Sunderland's highest paid players. However, Sunderland are sitting on a gold mine of young talent. Jobe Bellingham, Jack Clarke, Dan Neil, Daniel Ballard, Anthony Patterson, Trai Hume and Pierre Ekwah are all capable of leaving for big money if Sunderland do not win promotion.”
A focus on youth is the central pillar of Sunderland's plan under Louis-Dreyfus, whose takeover in November 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, where Jude Bellingham became their star graduate.
When manager Tony Mowbray was fired last month, replaced by former Rangers boss Michael Beale, it was driven by Speakman's determination to make changes while the team was growing. Mowbray won promotion from League One in May 2022 and followed it up with a Championship playoff place last season, but even with Sunderland on the fringes of the promotion race this time around, Speakman opted to make things happen.
“Ultimately the club is obsessed with progression and improvement, and we felt we needed to make a change,” Speakman said at the time. “Do you arrive early and it's a surprise, and people are maybe worried because it doesn't affect the results? Or do you arrive too late?
“Michael comes to a team that is performing well, the team is in a good position and does not need to recover from a long, bad run of results. We thought it was the right time.”
Building a team from within and identifying emerging talent elsewhere – Jobe Bellingham, the younger brother of Jude from Real Madrid, was signed from Birmingham for a fee of £3million last June – is Sunderland's policy, and Beale should adopt it.
“The club has a long-term strategy to achieve sustained success,” a senior Sunderland source told ESPN. “It is essential to identify and develop young talent committed to an exciting style of play.
“We will give the young players the opportunity to show how good they are. Hopefully they can help Sunderland get to the Premier League, but if not, the next best thing is they get there themselves .We have the youngest team in the EFL Premier League, but age is no barrier to being good enough.
“Jobe is only 18 years old, but he has already established himself as one of the leaders of the squad. When we play Newcastle, Miguel Almirón, at £20 million, will have cost more than our entire team combined .But it will still be us against them, red and white against black and white, and a chance for our players to show how good they can be.
While providing a useful indicator of Sunderland's progress as a young team, Saturday's game is also a reminder of what the club continues to miss. Since the turn of the century, Sunderland have enjoyed 15 seasons in the English top flight, and their Premier League exile in the EFL is out of sync with a club that sits 10th – one place behind Newcastle – in history . English football table. They are the best supported team outside the Premier League and, outside of Europe's top divisions, only German clubs Schalke, Hamburg, Hertha Berlin and Kaiserslautern have higher average attendances than Sunderland's 40,823 this season.
The Stadium of Light will, however, be full on Saturday, with 6,000 Newcastle supporters, a venue of just over 49,000 people. Due to hostility between rival fans — a police horse was kicked 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, who will be escorted on the 13-mile journey from St James' Park.
The anticipation is high on both sides, as highlighted by Newcastle defender Dan Burn, who will face Sunderland with his boyhood team for the first time this weekend. “It’s classy, isn’t it?” Burn told the BBC. “I just thought that since I managed to come back to the club, we reached the League Cup final, the Champions League and now I will 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 could have these games more regularly. To be able to do that will be classy.”
For Sunderland manager Beale, whose last job saw him encounter the frenetic 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, but you could already feel the impatience building,” he said in his pre-match press conference. “Now here we are and everyone is looking forward to the first derby in over seven years, which is way too long a wait.
“It's a game that captivates everyone in the north-east. There's obviously a difference between the two clubs now – the last seven years have been up and down for both – but it's a game intriguing between our young team and a Champions League team.
“We are really ambitious. We play for our fans and for our city and it is very important that we put that into our game. This is our stadium, with our fans behind us. This 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 gap appears much bigger than that due to the different paths the two clubs take off the field. However, Sunderland know better than anyone that things can change quickly in football. Nothing can be taken for granted.
