KICKED IN THE SUNDERLANDS
Suffering fans: watch this doc
The middle-aged woman standing outside the Stadium of Light has a smile on her face, but she says something that could sum up the experience of any fan of any team that tends not to repay loyalty with success.
“The vast majority of the time it absolutely ruins your weekend,” she says. “You come out, and I’m in a mood because we’ve lost.”
On this night, though, she is happy, her team having fought back from an early hole to earn a much-needed draw. It is one of the rare moments of such pleasure in Sunderland ‘Til I Die, the new documentary series from Netflix.
The story of the 2017/18 season of Sunderland AFC, a longtime Premier League club that had just been relegated to England’s second division, the series was conceived as a depiction of the club’s attempt to fight back into the top flight. Instead, it ends up a chronicle of a chaotic season that goes wrong in just about every possible way. As such, it’s something of an unintended treatise on fandom: why do people care so much about the teams they support, especially when the club offers so much suffering in return?
Consider this column a public-service announcement: if you are looking for something to watch over the holidays, you could do far worse than this. Not only is Sunderland ‘Til I Die highly enjoyable, it is also bound to make you feel better about whatever team you support.
Some context: Sunderland was founded 139 years ago and has six championships in England’s top league to its credit, but it hasn’t been a powerhouse for decades. Located in the country’s northeast, its slide has mirrored that of its home, a blue-collar shipbuilding and mining town in a world that has much less use for ships and mines.
Even though it plays in a big, impressive stadium, its fans are mostly those from the surrounding neighbourhood: the taxi driver and the butcher, the guy with sleeve of Sunderland-related tattoos on his arm who named his first-born son Niall for one of the club’s former heroes.
These are people who feel an intense bond with a football team that they see as a representation of themselves: the hardscrabble working-class team that can’t entirely compete anymore with the glitz and wealth of the country’s power centre.
As is often the case with behind-the-scenes documentaries, Sunderland ‘Til I Die provides a revealing glimpse of the life of a professional club. The players have a few interesting things to say, especially when things go pear-shaped, but the fun stuff comes from the various staffers who help make a club run. One of the team chefs confesses after another tough loss that she went home and had a drink, which she doesn’t like to do “on a school night.” Later, after a good result that was a long time coming, she says she had two drinks to celebrate. Given the way the rest of the season unfolds, her liver was never in peril.
The real stars, though, are the fans, the average folk who come to Sunderland games in the driving rain even when they are stinking up the joint. The film crew catches them going through their game-day rituals, then singing, cheering and crying at matches. And also yelling. So much yelling. If there was a way to harness the energy of the anger directed at the team during some games, it could have powered all of Sunderland and also neighbouring Newcastle upon Tyne.
A documentary that was intended to give some sizzle to a club so its owner could goose a possible sale price was instead a living record of what happens to a team when that same owner decides he doesn’t want to invest in something he is trying to offload. The owner in question, an American billionaire, is almost entirely absent from the proceedings. He exists offscreen, the looming but unseen villain.
Still, in the end the supporters remain. They sing sad laments together as the season ends, and line up to renew their tickets, despite everything.
It’s a lesson about sports, I think. When fandom becomes mixed with identity, cutting a team loose would feel akin to severing a limb. The supporters of Sunderland AFC would get better return by cheering for almost anyone else. But they can’t. This is who they are.
They fall back on the thought that consoles all fans after a disaster of a season: Perhaps this year, it will be worth it.