There has been tumult aplenty on both sides of the north east’s great sporting divide since the last proper meeting between Newcastle United and Sunderland almost eight years ago. The longest gap since the Second World War without a Wear-Tyne derby match has been crammed with relegations, recoveries, takeovers and reinvention, much of it recorded for posterity on your favourite streaming service.
There has been noise, angst, joy and adrenaline, but rarely on the same day, that heady, nauseating cocktail of ill-feeling only local rivalry can serve up. Whether life has been better or worse without one of British football’s biggest, littlest, meanest fixtures is not easy to say, although nobody can argue with Sunderland’s dominance.
Unbeaten in nine meetings since August 2011, a spell which included a run of six consecutive victories, their pre-eminence is balanced by imbalance; having stayed up in 2015-16 partly thanks to the four points they took from Newcastle, who went down, they tumbled as far as League One. Now sixth in the Championship, Saturday’s FA Cup third-round tie at the Stadium of Light pits them against a (as recently as last month) Champions League team and, theoretically at least, “the richest club in the world”.
Does the game still resonate? Will the stadium shake this weekend? Has the 80 per cent purchase of Newcastle by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) changed the parameters beyond recognition? These are some of the questions The Athletic attempted to answer, bringing together — in a spirit of (very temporary) harmony — fans and writers who follow the clubs.
WHERE: The Bridge Tavern on Newcastle’s Quayside; not exactly neutral territory, but they do a killer chicken parmo burger, a culinary nod to Middlesbrough, the third (slightly shorter) spoke on the north east’s rivalry wheel.
WHO: Stephen Best, Newcastle supporter and the self-professed “handsome one from the All With Smiling Faces podcast. I live in South Shields, where there’s a split between Sunderland and Newcastle fans. I have friends on both sides. I know families that are mixed.”
Chris Weatherspoon, Sunderland fan representing the Wise Men Say podcast. “I’m from Chester-le-Street (in County Durham) originally, but now live in the sunny climes of Consett, which has had a lot more black-and-white shirts in the last two years. I’ve had a season ticket in exactly the same seat since the Stadium of Light opened in 1997.”
Chris Waugh and George Caulkin, who write about Newcastle for The Athletic and contribute to our Pod On The Tyne podcast, and their colleague Phil Buckingham, a football writer and boyhood Sunderland fan.
Caulkin: I’m from Durham. I was brought up supporting Newcastle, but my best friend and girlfriend at school were Sunderland fans. I never had the ‘hate’ gene. Did you?
Best: Less so now I’m older. My dad and grandad were Newcastle fans, all my family are. I remember a friend saying, ‘It’s your birthright to hate Sunderland!’. That’s how it was. I don’t hate them so much now because they’ve been an irrelevance, but if I’m playing football and someone’s wearing a Sunderland shirt, I’ll try that little bit harder! I find it weird to hate based on geography.
Weatherspoon: Some of my best mates are Newcastle fans. I don’t think the people who go to games are the ones who preach hate. I don’t understand Newcastle fans who have a deep-seated hatred of Sunderland the place, and then talk about regional solidarity. I’m a Sunderland fan, but I’ve worked in Newcastle. I’ve always found it pretty amicable. My friend’s a Newcastle fan and it’s his daughter’s birthday on Sunday — we’ve already got an agreement that, no matter the result, we won’t be talking about it.
Best: During lockdown, I did loads of walking down the coast, to Roker and Seaburn. I thought, ‘It’s canny this, you know’. I grew up with this thing about Sunderland being the Dark Side, but it’s not at all. The more you get exposed to a place and the people then you find that common ground.
Buckingham: I live in Beverley, in Yorkshire, and I’ve bought my daughters Sunderland shirts. At football practice, a boy wearing a Newcastle strip told my eldest they had to be enemies now. I joked with her — ‘Bring it on!’. But my two best men are Newcastle fans and the older you get, the more you realise the way you felt growing up was probably daft.
For a long time, I dined out on a couple of 2-1 wins around the turn of the century. For that famous Ruud Gullit-Alan Shearer derby, me and my dad managed to get tickets and that’ll always be my best memory because of what had gone before. Sunderland had lived in Newcastle’s shadow for the 1990s. They had Kevin Keegan, we had Mick Buxton…
Caulkin: I was in the press box that night, rain lashing down, laptops exploding, the usual derby nausea magnified by all this other stuff. When Shearer and Duncan Ferguson were left out, one reporter said, ‘That’s not a team sheet, it’s a suicide note.’ If Newcastle had won, Shearer would have left. They lost, and Gullit resigned. So often, it’s been a case of dragging each other down. I’ve always wanted it to be between two good teams.
Buckingham: You might be waiting a while…
Best: If Shearer had moved, we probably wouldn’t have got (Sir) Bobby Robson when we did. It’s like the play-off derby in 1990 (in what is now the Championship, Sunderland won the semi-final 2-0 on aggregate, then lost the final to Swindon Town) — if we’d won, we probably wouldn’t have got Keegan. I don’t look back with happy memories but it’s funny how it works out.
Caulkin: Have you missed the derby at all?
Best: No.
Weatherspoon: I’ve been too busy despairing about the state of my club. We had a ‘derby’ in 2019 in the EFL Trophy and that was an embarrassment, really. It wasn’t a proper derby (Sunderland’s first team beat Newcastle Under-21s, 4-0). Even though we’ve got a good recent record, I haven’t really missed them.
Waugh: This has always felt like the game Newcastle don’t need. But what has it felt like from a Sunderland perspective?
Weatherspoon: My initial reaction was dread. What happened at Newcastle two years ago has fundamentally changed what this is now. There’s still a local rivalry, but in terms of it being a competitive rivalry we’re not in the same ballpark.
Caulkin: This is just mind games, isn’t it?
Weatherspoon: It isn’t. We shouldn’t really have a chance.
Buckingham: Take Sunderland’s back four: a lad signed for very little from Northern Ireland (Trai Hume), Luke O’Nien, who joined on a free from League Two. Dan Ballard is a good young defender, but it’s a long way from the markets Newcastle shop in.
Weatherspoon: I like a lot about our team, but if you look at the gulf… You can romanticise the derby and say anything is possible, but it’s a mismatch.
Those six-in-a-row games (over two years from April 2013), Newcastle were often the better side, which is what made it so nice for us. At least there was a semblance of parity. It’s a one-off game (this weekend), but in my lifetime it’s the biggest gap between them.
Best: I don’t think it’s better for it, to be honest. I don’t care for state-owned clubs, but it’s where we are. I don’t know much about Sunderland’s team, although my mates say they’re decent. If you put Sunderland’s team in a Norwich kit, then we’d win, But, because it’s a Sunderland strip… I’ve just got a horrible feeling.
Weatherspoon: I’m seeing it almost like a free hit. It could be amazing, but if we’re 3-0 down after half an hour then it’s disastrous. Changing the manager (Tony Mowbray was sacked in early December and has been replaced with Michael Beale) hasn’t gone down well, but what’s happened around the game has caused issues.
They’ve given Newcastle the whole home end, and they’ve almost damaged that home advantage. That’s annoyed a lot of people, almost like the red carpet has been rolled out for our friends up the road. If we get hammered, it’d be pretty disastrous for people running the club.
Waugh: Give us a potted history of your clubs since that March 2016 derby (the most recent meeting at first-team level).
Best: It was almost a happy relegation – there was a big thing made about trying to keep Rafa (Benitez), it worked, we got back up and did OK. But when Benitez left, it was just an awful time to be a Newcastle fan.
It’s all relative — Chris might say, ‘Ah, it must have been terrible staying up while Sunderland were imploding’ — but it was. A Bury fan might look at Sunderland and say, ‘You think you’ve got it bad, look at us.’
I’ve had my season ticket since 2007, when Mike Ashley arrived. So I’d known 14 years of just existing really. Going to the game became an obligation. One Saturday, I was on the escalator at Haymarket (a station near St James’ Park) thinking, ‘This is the most fun I’m going to have today.’ And it was! My eldest son was born the day before Steve Bruce got the Newcastle job and I remember thinking, ‘I might not bother.’
A jubilant fan invades the pitch and tackles Newcastle’s Aleksandar Mitrovic after his late equaliser to draw the last proper Tyne-Wear derby (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
The amount of times I’ve lamented my dad’s decision to take me to the football … Ironically, just after my second son was born, I was driving back from Sunderland Royal (hospital) and the takeover happened. I got home and got loads of beers down me — it was great.
Since the takeover… I’ve still got a problem with who owns the club. We’ve become quite thin-skinned as a fanbase as a result. We’ve flown under the radar for that long, we’ve been a punchline but now everybody knows about us.
Yet all of that’s been tempered by watching a really good football team and a manager I like. Eddie Howe’s been brilliant, like the antithesis of Bruce. He’s got us playing good football. The transfers we’ve made for the most part have been excellent.
It’s strange now, a few bad weeks and we’re starting to get really nervy. I’ve seen polls on Twitter about Howe (keeping his job) and to me that’s absolutely absurd. You become conditioned to winning…
It’s been a bit bittersweet, but the escalator at Haymarket is no longer my favourite part of a Saturday, I’m glad to say.
Waugh: Back in 2016, Sunderland survive and relegate Newcastle. (Sunderland’s manager at the time) Sam Allardyce is almost triumphal at that point…
Weatherspoon: Have you watched Game Of Thrones, where they went on for two seasons too long? That’s where it should have ended.
Allardyce left for England and in hindsight people say, ‘We’d cracked it’, but he had papered over the cracks.
We’d won about six games a season for five years — and two of them were against Newcastle. We were always skirting not just with relegation but with completely imploding… and then it happened. When Newcastle got relegated, Ashley went, ‘Well, if I want to sell this, we need to be back in the Premier League.’ Whereas (Sunderland’s then owner) Ellis Short basically said, ‘I’ve spent enough money already.’
The team that got relegated from the Championship should never have been as bad as it was, but the rot had set in. You talk about escalators at Haymarket, but we went 364 days without a win at home. We then got hoodwinked into thinking we’d got this new dawn (under co-owners Stewart Donald and Charlie Methven), but when clubs get to that level they become fair game for any sort of tyre-kicker.
The first year in League One was quite fun. I went to Accrington in the rain and it got called off after about 70 minutes and it was ridiculous, hilarious. Then, six months later, I went to Southend and that was not hilarious, it was terrible. That first year was fine because it felt like there was a connection, but it was all built on a lie.
Then we got taken over again — by some of the same people but one different person, which is still peculiar to me — and it’s been better. Certainly on the football side they’ve done pretty well, recruited well. We’re going to see whether they can kick on because, as well as they’ve done, they’ve come from quite literally the worst position the club has ever been in.
I’m quite looking forward to seeing how Jack Clarke does if he plays against Kieran Trippier. But unfortunately, unless we get promoted he’ll be off, as will others. So then the question becomes, ‘What are we?’. They’re big on sustainability, which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but sometimes that’s a byword for doing things on the cheap.
Buckingham: The way Sunderland are run, you’d get away with more easily if you’re Preston or Stoke and 15,000 to 20,000 people are coming. But when you get 42,000 people and you try to tell them, ‘Coventry will spend more than us this year but we’re doing it the right way’ — it’s very hard to sell that.
Weatherspoon: The ownership are on a bit of a short leash and that’s born from what has gone before. I don’t think there’s a lot of trust in the fanbase any more.
Caulkin: My ideal scenario would be Newcastle and Sunderland first and second in the league and challenging for cup finals. Am I just weird?
Best: I’d gladly beat Sunderland in a cup final every year! Can you imagine Trafalgar Square or Wembley Way, though? It would be mayhem, horrible.
Weatherspoon: I don’t agree with hatred but I also don’t particularly want to see Newcastle do very well. If I had the choice of top two or both teams being terrible then obviously I would pick top two, but I don’t know…
I do genuinely think the takeover at Newcastle has fundamentally changed what it is. People might laugh, but I think the people who’ve taken over make it a tragedy for the club, because now anything Newcastle do is tarnished.
I’m not one of these people who thinks every single Newcastle fan is a card-carrying supporter of Saudi Arabia, because that’s ridiculous, but I do think it makes it a lot harder to be indifferent to how Newcastle do. I realise I’m not an unbiased person saying that…
Caulkin: Do you think Sunderland fans would have behaved differently if PIF had invested there?
Weatherspoon: No, I don’t. I can say, hand on heart, I would have stopped going, but that’s born of my own experiences — we’d been through a lot as a club and I was sick of it; I think that would have finished me off. But in general? The fanbase? No, I think it would have been pretty much the same reaction, as it would elsewhere.
Perhaps where the difference is, when Sunderland fans weren’t happy with Short, I don’t think anybody was protesting on moral grounds. At Newcastle, Ashley was held up as immoral and (people were saying), ‘We’re better than this.’ You can’t get any more immoral than the people who own them now, but that seems to have gone out of the window because they’re winning games.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think it’s quite sad that more people haven’t spoken out. I see journalists who have spoken out about the takeover get dog’s abuse, but they’re saying, ‘No, this is an institution worth speaking out for.’ At Sunderland and Newcastle, we’ve always talked about the clubs being a centrepiece of the community and I feel that the takeover has really tarnished that.
Caulkin: A counter-point is that Newcastle are now finally doing the things which should make them that centrepiece, whether it’s taking the women’s team seriously or bringing their charitable foundation into the club. If there’s a dichotomy, it’s that Howe, the players, the staff who run the club day-to-day, are serious people trying to do the right thing.
Weatherspoon: I get that. Newcastle fans should be able to go to a game and not feel morally uncertain whether they’re allowed to cheer for their team. But that is why these regimes buy football clubs, because they know that, in doing so, they’re buying soft power, influence. It’s a very difficult situation and I’m not saying, ‘Any Newcastle fan who goes to the match is wrong for doing so’, because they’re not.
Why should you have to give up something you’ve done your entire life? But it was the same at Manchester City. There are people in positions of power who have turned a blind eye.
Best: I broadly agree. I think Newcastle’s Saudi ownership is a symptom of the way football is going. Maybe you can trace it back to Sunderland being known as ‘The Bank of England club’ in the 1950s and, yes, that’s very, very petty from me!
Money is power; it’s grown from Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers in the 1990s, to (Roman) Abramovich at Chelsea, to (Manchester City’s Sheikh) Mansour and now the Saudis. I believe it’s to the detriment of football.
Waugh: Stephen, do you feel uncomfortable about the relationship between Newcastle and Saudi? As a reporter covering Newcastle, I feel conflicted about how they’ve become inextricably linked.
Best: It has altered my relationship with the club a little bit. Not to the extent that I don’t go anymore, but the two friendlies that Saudi played at St James’, the green away kits… you can’t disassociate one from the other.
It left a bitter taste on takeover night when you saw people wearing head scarves, shops selling Saudi flags — that shouldn’t be what Newcastle United is about. But there’s part of me that feels, ‘I’ve got to see the Champions League’, even if the two games I went to, we lost — I had Covid for (the win over) PSG! It’s given us that. I watch the women’s team and I love what they’ve done, seeing the foundation’s influence grow. But it’s tempered by what’s always there at the back of my mind.
Buckingham: The ownership is a reflection of how football has changed. If you go back to the 1990s, you’ve got Sir John Hall, the local boy, Newcastle fan, then you have Bob Murray, the same but Sunderland. Steve Gibson at Boro, is like the third limb who has actually held on.
Now you’ve got a Gulf state owning one and a Swiss-born businessman who’s an heir to a billionaire’s fortune alongside a Uruguayan politician, who is the son-in-law of a Russian oligarch. They’re not in it for the love of Sunderland, are they? That’s just where football is now. They’re businesses to be owned.
Waugh: To finish, a two-pronged question: a result prediction and, in the context of your club, what would it mean for their season, manager and ownership?
Weatherspoon: Obviously, I hope we win but unfortunately I think Newcastle will… I hate to say that! The result, probably more so than the performance, will determine what it means for our season.
The manager, Michael Beale, has only been in five minutes and has done OK. But I do think the trust and support the ownership have had… I’ve not seen a backlash from fans about the derby ticketing since, well, the last lot. It’s really irked people.
If we win, fantastic. If it’s a narrow defeat, that’d be OK. A heavy defeat, you can see the wheels coming off a bit. The caveat is we have a young team and they seem to oscillate weekly between great and bad.
Buckingham: I think Sunderland will lose, but it’ll be a lot closer than if they’d played three months ago. For the first time in my lifetime, we’re going into a derby when they aren’t in the same division, so it becomes hard to predict a win for the underdog.
I don’t think it carries a huge significance for Michael Beale. Maybe if they lose by five or six and it turns into humiliation, then it starts making a mark on managers and owners. But I don’t see that happening. I think a narrow away win, then we can get back to living in different worlds again.
Caulkin: It’s the beautiful horror of the derby, isn’t it? It consumes everyone. It shouldn’t be prominent in our thoughts because it’s the biggest imbalance there’s been for a long time, but Sunderland fans still sing about Newcastle, Newcastle fans, even in this new world, sing about Sunderland. It’s just there, constantly.
Newcastle should win but, either way, it has the capacity to be a tone-setter for the rest of the season. A bad result could make life really awkward. But I can’t wait for it. I look forward to that dread because it means something.
Best: I wish it was already Sunday, I’m putting the boys to bed and it’s in the past… A narrow, scruffy Newcastle win, 1-0, an own goal or it’s come off a beach ball, I’d take that all day.
“I can’t see Newcastle running away with it. It’s funny how quickly things turn around. At the start of December, we had the best form in the league over a couple of months. Now we’re in the doldrums, this and that player are ‘sh*te’ apparently and we’ve totally lost our blob.
If it had been Beale managing Rotherham or Coventry, I’d be confident. But because they’ve got a red-and-white shirt, a Sunderland badge, the Stadium of Light, even one-fifth full of Newcastle fans… I’m not confident.
Maybe we’ve got more to lose. For Sunderland, it’s a free shot. If Sunderland get beat, it’s, ‘Plucky Sunderland overturned by Saudi oil-run Newcastle.’ If Sunderland win, people will be thinking, ‘The people’s club have downed the behemoth Newcastle.’
In a footballing context, I’m concerned with how tired we are, and the mistakes that have followed. Callum Wilson being out is big. Missing that edge makes this game more difficult. Six weeks ago, people talked like we had the best defence in the world. Now, against Liverpool, it looked as if (centre-backs Fabian) Schar and (Sven) Botman had met for the first time.
I’m dreading it. Absolutely dreading it!
Waugh: I expect it to be very nervy, but Newcastle should win. Their season could unravel rapidly otherwise. The pressure would mount on everyone at the club, during what is already a difficult transfer window when they need to do business amid FFP (financial fair play) constraints.
They’ve got injuries galore, and questions are starting to be asked of the manager. Prematurely in my opinion, but equally, when results are bad, nobody is above scrutiny. Unless they really hammer Sunderland, they don’t really benefit from it. Of all the brutal cup draws Newcastle have had this season, this is the worst.
Caulkin: Are you actually looking forward to it?
Waugh: No. Because of how magnified everything gets after a derby. And I’m a natural pessimist.
Best: I’ll probably not watch the first half, because the bairn is playing football, but I’ll be so pumped up I’ll be putting reducers in on four-year-olds!
GO DEEPER
Do you miss the Tyne-Wear derby? Raw, gorgeous, inglorious… gone
(Top photos: Getty Images)
Olivia Martin is a dedicated sports journalist based in the UK. With a passion for various athletic disciplines, she covers everything from major league championships to local sports events, delivering up-to-the-minute updates and in-depth analysis.
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