“It wasn’t the prettiest game,” Sunderland defender Dan Ballard said afterward, which is the kind of thing one says after only a handful of shots on target and an own goal. But the objective of a derby, as Xhaka would say afterward, is to win it. And by doing so, Sunderland all but assured that they will return to play Newcastle twice more next season. “Every derby is special,” Xhaka said. “This one was a little more special.”
And so it proved. From 2018 to 2022, a football stadium with a capacity of 48,707 — the ninth largest in England — welcomed teams like Scunthorpe United, Walsall, Lincoln and Swindon. Sunderland finished fifth, eighth, fourth and fifth in League One, failing in the playoffs three times before finally winning promotion back to England’s second tier.
Yet those years in purgatory turned out to be crucial. “People see that as a failure,” O’Nien says. “It wasn’t. Yeah, of course, the outcome each time was failure. But it was all building for the moment we have right now.”
The moment began a late goal against Sheffield United in the playoff final at Wembley in May of this year, the goal all of Wearside had been anticipating since 2017. It continued with a victory against West Ham in August on this season’s opening weekend, and a 17-game start that has earned the club 27 points, as many or more than all but five other Premier League clubs heading into Sunday.
“We don’t have a big name in our squad,” says Xhaka, the former Arsenal and Bayer Leverkusen midfielder who is probably the only Sunderland player who would be recognized on a London street corner. Yet Sunderland already has taken points this season from six of the eight Premier League teams playing in Europe. “We have a big energy and a big team spirit,” Xhaka said. “That makes the difference.”
By any measure, Sunderland is one of the revelations of the season’s first half. The question now is no longer whether they’ll stay up, but whether they might even be able to play in Europe next season.
There were no movie stars in Sunderland — only a football-obsessed population yearning for distraction from economic decline. “The mood of the city is heavily tied to the mood of the football club,” says Martin Longstaff, whose “Shipyards” served as the theme of each “Sunderland ‘Til I Die” episode. “Everybody’s so much behind it that the club’s trials and tribulations affect our day-to-day lives, either negatively or positively.”
“Sunderland ‘Til I Die” was the first series that gave viewers an unalloyed look at a football club from the inside. “The cameras were everywhere,” says O’Nien. “Even in those sort of sanctuaries, like the physio room and the changing room, that are supposed to be our safe places.” But that too has reaped rewards. As a result of the artful way in which the series tugged at heartstrings, the club’s recent success has resonated far beyond England’s northeast.
All of this was common knowledge inside the club. “What we tried to do in the summer was understand the problem,” says Kristjaan Speakman, Sunderland’s sporting director. “How do you survive in this league? What do you need to do? And then we set out trying to fix some of those things.”
Granit Xhaka was in bed when the calls from Switzerland started coming. It was 11 p.m. on a Sunday night in July. A crucial member of the Bayer Leverkusen team that went undefeated in the Bundesliga in 2023-24, he would be flying to Brazil the next morning for the club’s summer training camp. “I was already going to sleep,” he said recently. “And I saw a number one time, two times, three times, four times. I was thinking, ‘Who is this guy?'”
Xhaka is Swiss, so he wondered if the attempts to reach him might have something to do with his family. When a fifth call came from the same number, he answered. “He said he’s Kyril Louis-Dreyfus and he’s the owner of Sunderland,” Xhaka recalls. “To be honest, I had the feeling someone was joking with me. Usually nobody from a club calls so late.”
The metrics pointed to adding a player like Xhaka, a veteran and a preternatural leader, as the final piece. “We did the work to make sure we knew exactly what we were getting,” Speakman says. Then they set out to sign him.
Xhaka had rebuffed interest from clubs in Italy and France, notably AC Milan. “Bigger names than Sunderland,” he said. “I had the most options of my career. But we were set.” The family had settled in Germany, to the extent that they were building a house. Xhaka would play out his five-year contract at Leverkusen, then maybe start coaching.
“Even if we didn’t do well, they’d turn up in huge numbers for the next game and still travel to see the club,” said the former Welsh international Jonny Williams, who spent the disastrous 2017-18 season with Sunderland. “They had that belief that we would turn it around.”
“If you’re good here, the fans will adore you,” Bruce said. “And if you’re very good, the fans will build you a statue.”
Xhaka had been a standout at Arsenal, and then under Alonso at Leverkusen. He understood what top teams required. He has an infectious confidence that an inexperienced team with an average age of 24.2 — only Chelsea is younger — can believe in. “He’s just such a human being,” said striker Wilson Isidor.
Xhaka pushed for a greater awareness of nutrition, made a point of sitting beside fringe players and even academy players at meetings and meals. He imposed his personality on the culture of the club. “He changed so many things,” Isidor said. “He did so much. He said, ‘I know the Premier League requires a lot from the player. And that’s why we require a lot of things from the club.'”
From the top on down, Sunderland responded. “We started to change everything,” Isidor says, “to put players in the best position to succeed.”
It’s not surprising that opponents underestimated Sunderland early in the season. “When bigger teams were playing against us, they would think, like, ‘Oh, this team was just promoted,'” Isidor says. “But they didn’t understand the rage we feel to defend that jersey.”
They understand now. “When you play three games, four games, five games, momentum can happen,” Pep Guardiola of Manchester City said earlier this month. But seventh place in December can’t be dismissed as merely a quick start. “After 14 fixtures in this Premier League, to take results and be in that position? They deserve it.”
Guardiola had just watched tape of a 1-1 draw at Anfield in early December that Sunderland easily could have won. Xhaka barely touched the ball during the last few minutes of that game, yet he was the most noticeable player on the field — pointing here, waving an arm there, shouting encouragement, stepping forward to block a channel so an attacker couldn’t proceed. The most valuable player, Isidor called him.
The players try their best not to notice any of it. “What’s important for us is to just work day by day, the basic stuff, weekend after weekend,” Xhaka says. “And to make ourselves happy and the people around us happy with the football we play. We will take as many points as possible doing that. And then, after 38 games, we will see where we are.”
No Premier League club with 26 or more points after 16 games has ever been relegated. But whether Sunderland stays in contention or settles into midtable, their supporters are enjoying the journey. “There’s just such a positive mood in the city now,” Longstaff says. “We were so sure that it would happen eventually, that we’d have that upward trajectory again. But I don’t think anybody particularly expected us to be where we are in the Premier League, doing well so quickly.”
One day last week, Longstaff left a new performance venue called the Fire Station where he works. He walked past the modernistic glass-and-metal Culture House in the center of downtown that will open next year, toward a striking new footbridge over the River Wear that connects the stadium with downtown. He wanted to make the point that the city looks markedly different than what “Sunderland ‘Til I Die” viewers remember.
SUNDERLAND, England — It was, without a doubt, the longest postmatch celebration of the season. Sunderland players were still on the field 10 minutes after the final whistle: Granit Xhaka blowing kisses, Noah Sadiki wandering in front of the goal mouth with his arms held out like airplane wings, Luke O’Nien at the center of a rousing rendition of “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” The team gathered for an impromptu photo, infuriating Newcastle’s supporters and delighting their own. Twenty minutes after that, there was still dancing in the aisles around the Stadium of Light.
Still, the real marvel, as anyone who watched the hugely successful “Sunderland ‘Til I Die” series on Netflix will understand, is that a derby against Newcastle in the Premier League could happen at all. When Sunderland, one of England’s biggest and most historic clubs, fell into the Championship in 2017, a quick return to the Premier League seemed inevitable. Instead, they were relegated into League One as the cameras rolled. The second season of the series was even darker. It revealed such dysfunction inside the club, and such despair around it, that even getting back to the Championship felt like an improbable goal.
A city of 300,000 a half-hour’s drive south of Newcastle, Sunderland was Wrexham before Wrexham, a faded manufacturing center desperate to find hope in its football club. Watching “Sunderland ‘Til I Die” is actually what inspired producer Rob Mac (formerly McElhenney) to buy a down-on-its-luck club of his own. But while Wrexham had long struggled to keep its place in the Football Association, even dropping into the nonleague fifth tier at one point, Sunderland had been a Premier League fixture for a decade before its fall.
It seemed likely, though, that the revival would be short-lived. With the financial gap between the Premier League and the Championship widening each year, promoted clubs’ first-year survival rate is at a record low. After the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, all three that came up from the Championship went right back down, something that hadn’t happened twice in succession in English football history. And since 2020, only five out of 15 promoted clubs have been able to qualify for a second season, the lowest percentage since the Premier League began.