Even at Wembley Stadium, you can’t fail to notice the Northernness of two sets of fans from Sheffield and the North East. It’s in the Yorkshire grumblings over prices and VAR delays. It’s in the ‘fook’ in the Sunderland end’s chants of, “Your support is f**king shit”. In this 2025 Championship Play-off Final, however, that provincial pride was on the pitch as well.
Talk around the £220 million match, or whatever that sum has been inflated to since the final whistle blew, is often focused on each team’s superstars – Gus Hamer, Jobe Bellingham et al. It’s a global event; a rite of passage into the Premier League, that most global of entities, and so there’s not much room in the narrative for local ties.
I hold my hands up: I did briefly consider writing an article under the headline, ‘Sunderland’s Euro vision has Blades asking, “What the hell just happened?”’, before realising I was writing it basically just for that headline. Yes, Sunderland have shown canny recruitment from abroad. But their signing of young talents from overseas, whose worth will only have been boosted further by the club’s promotion to the Premier League, is only part of the Sunderland story – and arguably not the most important.
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Captaining them at Wembley was Dan Neil, an academy player born in South Shields, who was making his 197th first-team appearance for the club, his club. Dan Neil is 23. That number alone reveals an astonishing level of consistency for a midfielder of his age, and while this wasn’t one of Neil’s better performances, especially in the context of an excellent season for the Black Cats’ young leader, he carried the emotions and dreams of every supporter from the stands onto the pitch.
It wasn’t just him, though. Following a difficult season, with questions over his performances, goalkeeper Anthony Patterson more than redeemed himself by making two truly fantastic saves – promotion-winning saves – at either end of the match and stadium. He’s from North Shields. Chris Rigg, who can’t legally drink for another few weeks but earned Regis Le Bris’ faith to start him after an impressive first season, was born in Hebburn in (oh God) 2007, not far from the Stadium of Light, where Sunderland had at that time just won promotion under Roy Keane.
And then, of course, there’s the goalscorer. The match winner. The man – no, the boy – who sent Sunderland into the Premier League with his last ever kick for the club he grew up with, before he flies south to join the Seagulls. Tommy Watson burst onto the scene with such electric power six months ago that it wasn’t a huge surprise to see Brighton swoop for him in early April, paying a fee thought to be close to £10m for a teenager who, at that point, had made a total of seven senior starts in his career. His exquisite stoppage-time finish to win the game for Sunderland was perfectly placed for the perfect goodbye.
Neil, Patterson, Rigg and Watson were all born within 10 miles of Sunderland’s home ground. This is the sort of pub-quiz fact that belongs in the 1950s and ’60s, not to a team with a staggeringly young average of 23, playing in 2025. For all of the flashes of brilliance this season from Wilson Isidor (signed from Zenit St Petersburg), Enzo Le Fée (on loan from Roma) and 20-year-old Spaniard Eliezer Mayneda, who took his equalising goal beautifully following Patrick Roberts’ equally gorgeous pass, it’s the oldest of stories at heart: local boys done good.
For some of these lads, this will be the highlight of their Sunderland careers, and I genuinely mean that as a positive. If you’re Dan Neil (and yes, he does merit two-name status at all times), won’t captaining your home club to promotion under the arch provide a longer-lasting memory than potentially helping them to unexpectedly survive a season in the top flight?
Judging by his words in the programme, I’d say so. “It means absolutely everything,” Neil said of wearing the armband at Wembley. “You dream of things when you’re a kid – making your debut, scoring your first goal – but I think walking your boyhood club out at Wembley is something that you don’t even dream of because it feels too good to be true.”
On the other side of the coin, there’s Chris Wilder. The Sheffield United manager was a boyhood Blades supporter, then played for them across half a decade, and many years later was in the crowd as they lost in the 2003 play-offs to Wolves (when he himself was managing Halifax) and the 2009 play-offs to Burnley (while he was managing Oxford). He sings Greasy Chip Butty in the pub with supporters after a big Steel City Derby win, and he knows the pain of this defeat better than anyone. “We had an opportunity to change the narrative around the play-offs and we’ve not taken it,” he reflected after that match. “It’s going to take us quite a while to get over it.” Him more than most.
But one fan’s despair is another’s delirium. In front of 35,000-plus travelling Mackems, Sunderland won football’s most valuable fixture with a team led and a result won by a handful of hometown heroes. I won’t say this is what football is all about, but it’s what it used to be about. And as the cost of entry to the Premier League grows ever-higher, it’s nice to be reminded of that.
