Sam Allardyce ripped aside his jacket and beat his chest like King Kong. 46,000 inside the Stadium of Light roared their approval. Sunderland’s players danced along during a lap of honour. They had just beaten Everton 3-0 to stay in the Premier League for a 10th consecutive season and their victory helped to relegate neighbours Newcastle United. There was joy on Wearside and a surge of optimism.
Had the Netflix cameras been rolling, they would have captured a champagne dressing room, where owner Ellis Short joined the revelry; the next day, they would have caught Penshaw Monument lit up in red and white by Sunderland City Council.
“It’s hard to beat that feeling,” Allardyce tells The Athletic. “I’ve won promotions with different clubs and it’s special but so is the feeling you get when you and your staff have managed to save a club. It’s relief but it’s also satisfaction. You know how much it means to Sunderland fans and everyone at the club. You could sense the relief.”
The club and its wider fanbase felt it was a moment of opportunity. Allardyce had only been there for eight months and he sensed it, too. It was May 2016 and it felt like Sunderland had bottomed out. The club had been teetering on the brink of relegation for seasons and had become known for acts of dramatic escapology.
But Allardyce, Sunderland’s eighth permanent manager in seven erratic years, had taken a sluggish squad that scraped 12 points from the first half of the 2015-16 season — and looked certainties to go down — and galvanised them into a streamlined team.
Jan Kirchhoff had arrived in January from Bayern Munich and had made a huge impact. “We all felt like we’d created something we could build upon,” he tells The Athletic. “That we were able to stay in the Premier League, perform in it, and might even be able to attack the top-10 teams. All of us felt like we had a great future.”
In the second half of that season, Sunderland’s record was P19 W6 D9 L4. Three of those defeats were to clubs in the top four. Against Everton, Allardyce named the same starting XI for the seventh game in a row. The previous match had been a stirring 3-2 victory over Chelsea. At last, Sunderland had a solid foundation.
Allardyce felt three high-calibre signings that summer would turn them into a team that could look forwards with optimism, rather than with the familiar sense of dread or confusion. “We have to move away from the fact that we’re all so happy at being heroes for surviving,” he said the next day. “We have to think much bigger, have much more ambition.”
And yet, within two years, Sunderland were in League One. Back-to-back relegations ripped the heart and soul out of the club, much of it caught on camera in Neflix’s Sunderland ‘Til I Die.
No one foresaw that on the night of Sunderland 3-0 Everton. Then, "Sunderland ‘Til I Die" was still a chant, an expression of pride, rather than a soundtrack to decline. Then, Sunderland were still a big football club with possibilities, rather than a box set. It had provided a glimpse of the club it could be.
This was only four years ago this month. Even three years ago, Sunderland were still in the richest league in the world. Today, they feel like a Premier League memory.
Sunderland stand uncertain in seventh place in the third tier and, if the season ends now, it will be the lowest finishing position in their 141-year history. Today, talk is not about potential, about “a great future” — it is about flawed ownership, creditors, parachute payments, loans and regression. Talk is about Sunderland unravelling. It is about Sunderland dying. Nobody is dancing.
