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.
And why not? If Sunderland had accomplished nothing else in this revelatory season, beating Newcastle 1-0 at home last Sunday, in the first Premier League game between the rivals in nearly a decade, would have been enough.
«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.»
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.
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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.
And, after all their fans have gone through, whether that even matters.
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.
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.»
That made failure even more devastating. «It’s not easy being in the northeast,» explained O’Nien, a Sunderland player since 2018. «It’s a very deprived area of the country. And when your football team is your everything, and people don’t feel like it is being looked after properly, you’re going to hear about it. It takes a certain type of mentality to deal with that. And the club wasn’t full of enough people who could.»
«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.
«There are so many people around the world who are predisposed to Sunderland because they saw the show and it landed so well for them,» says David Bruce, a lifelong supporter and Sunderland native who spent 15 years at Major League Soccer before coming home in 2024 to run the club’s business affairs. «When we do it right, when we take these good, honest, working-class values and the spirit that we all have for the club and take that to the world, it’s really quite intoxicating.»
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.
Sunderland wasn’t even this season’s best candidate. Burnley conceded fewer goals per game last season than any other club in Football Association history. Leeds has the backing of the San Francisco 49ers’ investment arm. Both amassed 100 points and won automatic promotion. Sunderland’s 76-point season ended with five straight losses before they beat Coventry City over two legs and upset Sheffield United at Wembley. Then they entered the season with the Premier League’s lowest wage bill. Little wonder that the vast majority of preseason prognosticators had them dropping back down to the Championship.
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.»
To do that, they needed one man.
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.»
In 2021, Louis-Dreyfus — son of Robert Louis-Dreyfus, the former Olympique Marseille owner, and a third cousin of American actress Julia Louis-Dreyfus — became Sunderland’s largest shareholder. Within a year, the club was back in the Championship, and the narrative of an underfunded team straining to survive in modern football had become one about competent management, intelligent scouting and the support of an energized community. By 2024, when Regis Le Bris was hired after only two years managing senior football at Lorient, Sunderland was positioned to get promoted again.
Speakman and his team studied every club that had gone up over the previous six seasons. «There’s lots of data and information out there,» Speakman said, «and we tried to capitalize on that. We tried to find out what the game model was, where they were successful, where teams had issues, what the squad composition was. We were looking for the trends and the signals and the information, the data that can suggest that if we work a certain way or play a certain style, that will give us better outcomes in games.»
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.
Of all the improvements Louis-Dreyfus has made to his football club since first buying 41% of it in 2021, convincing Xhaka to join may be the most important. Clearly, Sunderland would not be where they are without Xhaka. And Xhaka would not be where he is if not for Louis-Dreyfus. «He was instrumental in getting that acquisition over the line,» said Speakman. «It’s really important when you have a player of that stature that, when the owner is telling the story of the football club, he can speak about it with passion and depth. Kyril can.»
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.
Crucially, though, Xhaka had seen «Sunderland ‘Til I Die.» He understood the latent passion for the club. Even when it played in League One, support never wavered; crowds would exceed 30,000 in a league in which attendance usually hovers around 10,000. (Sunderland’s 2018-19 home average of 32,157 set a record for England’s third tier.)
«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 found himself intrigued by the challenge of bringing fulfillment to those fans while serving as the centerpiece of Sunderland’s Premier League revival. When the conversation with Louis-Dreyfus ended, he called his agent — first to confirm that he actually had been talking with the Sunderland owner, then to explain that he wanted to go. In the morning, Xhaka made a sales pitch to his wife. In the weeks that followed, it took negotiating in both the boardroom and the living room, but the transfer was sealed.
Over the summer, Sunderland added 13 players to the squad that had finished fourth in the Championship. Unlike the coaches of many newly promoted clubs, though, Le Bris didn’t change his team’s identity beyond tactical tweaks. «From our perspective, we’re a bold, creative, industrious football club,» Speakman said. «And that has to be evident on the pitch. We’ll have a man-to-man press in games against the best teams in the league. We’ll be really industrious, in and out of possession. And then, you have to be creative to score goals in this league.»
Xhaka is the main ingredient, on and off the field. At Leverkusen, he touched the ball 90 to 100 times nearly every game. He knew that wouldn’t happen on a newly promoted team in the Premier League — there might be games when the entire club barely had that many touches — but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be able to lead. «Of course, the club, when they took me, they knew about the quality,» he said. «But I think the most important thing was to be an example day to day, to move forward whatever happened, to stay positive, to set a standard that’s very, very high, even in the training sessions.»
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 way Le Bris has constructed his defense, pressing high at times and packing as many as 10 men into the box at others, Sunderland not only usually holds its leads, they find a way to score late surprisingly often — six times after the 80th minute. Against Arsenal in early November, the league leaders pulled off Eberechi Eze to fortify the back line and protect a 2-1 advantage. Even that would have been an important acknowledgment of respect. But when Brian Brobbey scored four minutes into stoppage time, Sunderland had gained another unexpected point.
So far, the club has amassed enough of those to be fighting for a European place next season. Lingering in the top seven or eight will be a challenge, especially since it has lost more players to the African Cup of Nations than any Premier League opponent — six in total, including major contributors Sadiki, Bertrand Traore and winger Chemsdine Talbi, with no other club sending more than three. At the same time, though, Louis-Dreyfus has said that his club plans to be active in the coming transfer window.
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.
For years, the city’s residents — known as Mackems — bemoaned the paucity of government aid that would help the city segue away from heavy industry. Lately, a new generation of Mackems decided to make that happen on their own. Passing a coffeehouse, Longstaff noted that until last year it hadn’t been possible to gather over a cup anywhere in the city after 5 p.m. New office buildings are going up. The city is physically changing for the first time in half a century, and with that its culture has changed. And just as the team affects the city, the city’s revival seems to be affecting the team.
Halfway across the bridge, Longstaff looked down at where his grandfather and thousands of others built those ships on the banks below. Some of the old shipyards are empty buildings now. Others are entirely gone, leaving nothing but vacant lots. Their disappearance is what he rendered so poignantly in «Shipyards.» «But now,» he said, «everything is so vibrant. There’s just such a positive mood in the city, around music, culture, opportunities, the future.» He smiled. «And, of course, the football.»
The feeling was palpable when Newcastle were in town. The game itself was a grind — there were fewer shots in the first half than in that of any other Premier League game this season. Other than Nick Woltemade‘s own goal, there was little for either team’s fans to cheer about until the game was over. But after it ended that cheering went on for hours, filling Sunderland’s streets in a blur of red and white jerseys until the final stragglers went home long after midnight. It didn’t feel like something was ending, though. It felt like a beginning.
