How Sunderland's talent for surprise can help them survive in the Premier League

Independent

25-05-2025

They have been to Accrington more recently than Anfield, Cheltenham more recently than Chelsea. They played Morecambe, not Manchester United, AFC Wimbledon not Arsenal. The fixture list bore an incongruous look with Fleetwood and Burton, Rochdale and Scunthorpe. Sunderland were slumming it, the club marooned in League One for four seasons.
They would happily get stuck in a division again; now that, as the chant went, they are Premier League, the return to the elite sealed in spectacular fashion at Wembley. For manager Regis Le Bris, whose players had told him earlier in the season they wanted to get promoted, 'they believed in their dream'.
Captain Dan Neil demurred, arguing the way in which Sunderland went up was 'not even what dreams are made of because you wouldn't dream of something like that'. Not when Dan Ballard's 122nd-minute decider against Coventry was followed by Tommy Watson's 95th-minute Wembley winner against Sheffield United.
After the dream – or the drama deemed too surreal to even figure in a dream – comes the reality. The prize for promotion involves predictions of an immediate relegation. Should he stay, the chances are that Jobe Bellingham will notice the pessimistic prognostications. 'People doubted us,' he said, after Sunderland stumbled into the play-offs with five successive defeats, only to win them. 'People say we are inexperienced but you get experience by failing and we have failed together so many times and in the end we've come good.'
Experienced beyond their tender years, they are Sunderland's most successful failures for many a year. Recent history bodes badly. Sunderland's most recent Premier League campaign, with a squad with far more pedigree and a manager, in David Moyes, with a track record of top-eight finishes, yielded a mere 24 points.
The last six teams to go up from the Premier League have gone straight back down, none even touching the 30-point barrier. The last play-off winners, Southampton, got a mere 12 points. Sunderland were in League One in 2021-22. They came 16th in the Championship last season. It is easy to write them off.
Not necessarily correct, though. A glimpse at this season's trophy winners shows football is not inevitable; Sunderland's recent past, this year included, shows a wild unpredictability. The next step is the biggest but, like Leeds, they have the potential to be much more than a yo-yo club; if, that is, they can get a foothold in the Premier League.
Ipswich could not, despite spending almost £150m; Leicester and Southampton took the combined expenditure of 2024's promoted trio past £300m with little to show for it. Sunderland will have to be smart in the transfer market.
But they have been. They became a club for the ageing and the overpaid in the 2010s, dodging the drop until they became the unhappy underachievers. They have a new identity, borrowing in part from Brighton and Brentford: buy young, buy good. They had Wembley starters aged 17, 19 and 20 in the homegrown Chris Rigg, Bellingham and the scorer Eliezer Mayenda. The teenager Watson is off to Brighton but it will be instructive if promotion means Sunderland can prevent Borussia Dortmund from replenishing their stock of precocious Bellinghams. Remain in the Championship and it felt probable they would be weakened by sales.
Instead, promotion will trigger a permanent deal to sign the classy Enzo Le Fee from Roma. He is one of a group who have the talent to perform at the higher level. Time will tell if promotion is well timed for the progress of Mayenda, Rigg, Romaine Mundle and Wilson Isidor.
Others have underpinned the rise. The heart and soul of this team, Anthony Patterson, Dennis Cirkin, Luke O'Nien and Neil, were stalwarts of Sunderland's League One side. Some of the Ipswich players who jumped two divisions in quicker succession acquitted themselves reasonably; for most, however, it was a step too far as they went down.
The probability is that Sunderland will require an injection of some experience; goals, too, as they only mustered 58 in 46 league games. That their defensive record is rather better than Ipswich and Southampton's were 12 months earlier at least offers hope they can exhibit more pragmatism and solidity.
The pragmatic argument may be that even parachute payments from coming up and going back down again can be transformative. In a different era, that was what Sunderland did: their first poke at the Premier League under Peter Reid ended swiftly but, when they went up again, they promptly finished seventh.
The gulf between the divisions has grown too great for a repeat. Now 17th would represent a success in an era when the fate of the promoted is to be celebrating one year and commiserating the next. But rewind 10 months and many an assumption was that Sunderland would be somewhere in mid-table, perhaps an outside bet for the play-offs if a young team gelled under a newcomer of a manager. They confounded expectations then. The challenge is to do so again.