Around ten years ago, many Sunderland fans could have been forgiven for thinking their worst days were behind them.
Multiple relegations and promotions, yo-yoing between the top two leagues, sat languishing 24th in the Championship, along came club legend Niall Quinn and Manchester United’s Irish hero Roy Keane to fire the Black Cats instantly back into the Premier League. Things could only get better, right?
A few years passed and Quinn’s Irish consortium were looking to sell, to move the club on to the next level. Enter: Texan Billionaire Ellis Short. Fans were excited, this was a chance to establish one of the country’s ‘sleeping giants’ and compete for top eight finishes, trophies and potentially European qualification. What materialised could not be further from the hopes and dreams of those supporters.
One top ten finish in ten years, eleven managers and finally, one, ultimately deserved relegation. Few could be blamed for being overjoyed at Sunderland’s exit from the Premier League, hanging on by the skin of their teeth year on year, a bland and unimaginative brand of football, and the over reliance on Lee Cattermole, it was time to go.
TV pundits and fans up and down the country have mocked Sunderland’s attendances since that relegation, with no real regard for the actual facts behind it. A stadium that would regularly pack in 42,000 – 49,000 fans in once of the country’s least affluent areas, slowly declined as the team’s performances did. Just 25 wins from the last 155 home games is a marker of just how bad Sunderland have been. Even this weekend, Tim Sherwood said he didn’t understand the team’s relegation as they had one of the biggest budgets in the Championship. £1.25 Million was spent in the whole 2017 – 2018 season, only six teams spent less.
Those on pitch troubles could almost be forgiven; if it wasn’t for the way the American owner handled everything else during his tenure. Three directors of football, one appointed as he was his friend’s son and paying ten million pounds for a player who only played eight times for the club, Ricky Álvarez.
Now the club, relegated to League One with over £100m of debt, stare into the abyss with the owner completely reluctant to do anything about it. Rather than try to contain the monster he has created, he is letting it run riot. To Sunderland fans, it won’t feel like their club anymore.
So what is a club? Strip back all the television deals, the marketing, sponsors on sleeves, multi millionaire average footballers that come and go through the revolving door. Strip that all back and what do you have? A club is nothing without its supporters, and the absolutely pivotal high stakes of finance in football has made us all, to some degree, lose sight of that. A stadium that was a cauldron of euphoria, relegating bitter rivals Newcastle United only two years ago, has been fractured into a lifeless shell of sadness and apathy that may not even have a future itself. Those fans don’t deserve the gut-wrenching desolation of nothingness their club has become, no fans do.
That is not to say the club is too big for League One. Football shows no patience or respect for names and history, past European and Premier League champions have competed in that league, only the present matters. The owner deserves to be where he allowed his incompetence to take him, the fans, however, do not.
Sunderland are, what so could easily have been Aston Villa, or Nottingham Forest, Southampton or Sheffield Wednesday. All huge clubs, with tens of thousands of fans and great history, that have been on the brink of collapse. They have all recovered to some degree, Sunderland look like they will never recover.
They may be the first of the Premier League Billion Pound TV deal era to fall from grace, but they certainly won’t be the last. Rumours of similar financial issues of soon to be relegated West Bromwich Albion. Clubs can only afford to throw obscene amounts of money at painfully mediocre players for so long before the bubble eventually bursts. Hull City are another club that could quite easily go down the same path.
To put it in to context, Jack Rodwell, the midfielder who allegedly feigns injury to avoid playing earns £70,000 per week. Accrington Stanley, who Sunderland will face twice next season, have a weekly wage budget of £15,000 for their entire squad. It is not sustainable.
Reflecting on everything, the owners, the players, the managers do deserve the humiliation, the pain and suffering, but to them, it is nothing, as they will all go onto pastures new. Those who can’t just move on and forget about it, the people who have turned up in their thousands week after week left to pick up the pieces, they are the ones who suffer, and at the end of it, they may not even have a club for much longer.
It is a tale of a club that has been mismanaged, an owner that has the footballing nous of an obtusely dull-witted fool, and the seemingly irreversible damage that those ‘Mackem’ supporters now have to live with for probable decades. If the club even survives at all, that is.
Will fathers have a club they can take their son to? Will the club ever recover to become the one Brian Clough claimed he would have “crawled on his hands and knees over broken glass” to manage? Only time will tell, for now though, the story of Sunderland AFC is a warning to the rest of football’s elite, that billionaire owners, the Premier League cash cow and the mind-set of ‘that nightmare will never happen to us’, can quite soon turn in to horrendous reality.
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