Club histories

Sunderland

The club

Sunderland were founded in 1879 as Sunderland and District Teachers A.F.C. They play at the Stadium of Light in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, capacity 48,095, having left Roker Park in 1997. The club are the Black Cats and play in red and white striped shirts with black shorts.

Recent seasons

Sunderland spent four seasons in the third tier after relegation in 2018. They were fifth in League One in 2020/21 and lost in the play-off semi-finals, then went up through the play-offs in 2021/22; the exact finishing position and points total for that season are given inconsistently in the sources read here and are not established. In the Championship they were sixth in 2022/23 with 75 points, reaching the play-offs, 16th in 2023/24 with 60, and fourth in 2024/25 with 88 points, winning promotion through the play-offs. Their first Premier League season since 2016/17, 2025/26, went far better than expected: seventh with 54 points from 38 games, 14 wins, 12 draws and 12 defeats. That equals the best finish by a newly promoted club since Wolverhampton Wanderers in 2018/19, and 54 points is the highest total by a promoted side since Leeds United's 59 in 2020/21. Seventh place carried European qualification.

Honours and landmarks

Six top-flight league titles: 1891/92, 1892/93, 1894/95, 1901/02, 1912/13 and 1935/36. Two FA Cups, in 1937 and 1973, the second of those the famous win over Leeds United as a Second Division side. They were league runners-up five times and FA Cup runners-up in 1913 and 1992, and lost League Cup finals in 1985 and 2014. They won the FA Charity Shield in 1936. Record attendance at Roker Park was 75,118 for the FA Cup sixth round replay against Derby County on 8 March 1933. At the Stadium of Light, the club set the League One attendance record on 26 December 2018 with 46,039 against Bradford City. Dave Halliday's 43 goals in 42 games in 1928/29 is the club's all-time single-season record. The Wikipedia infobox gives the record fee received as £30m for Jordan Pickford to Everton in 2017 and the record fee paid as €31.5m for Habib Diarra from Strasbourg in July 2025; older prose on the same page still cites Darren Bent to Aston Villa in 2011 (potentially £24m) and Asamoah Gyan in 2010 (around £13m), which the more recent figures supersede. Sunderland also hold two unhappy records: relegation with 19 points in 2002/03 and then 15 points in 2005/06, the lowest Premier League totals of their era.

Notable scorelines

Record win: 9-1 against Newcastle United on 5 December 1908, still the largest away win in top-flight history. Record defeat: 0-8, suffered four times, against Sheffield Wednesday in 1911, West Ham United in 1968, Watford in 1982 and Southampton in 2014. The 1973 FA Cup final, won 1-0 against Leeds United with Ian Porterfield scoring and Jim Montgomery making the double save, is the club's defining match.

Head-to-head notes

No published all-time head-to-head records were established for Sunderland against their 2026/27 Premier League opponents; the club's own site did not return usable content to an automated fetch and the sites that publish such records block automated requests. The opening fixture is away to Ipswich Town, promoted back to the Premier League as 2025/26 Championship runners-up, so the two clubs met in the Championship as recently as 2024/25 and 2023/24, but a full record is not established.

Right now (2026/27)

Régis Le Bris remains head coach, appointed in June 2024 from Lorient, and has now taken the club from the Championship to a European place. The defining piece of summer business was the sale of striker Eliezer Mayenda to Rennes for £22m on 5 July 2026. Nazariy Rusyn left for Karpaty Lviv for £600,000 on 1 July and Timothée Pembélé joined Le Havre for an undisclosed fee on 16 July. Harrison Jones went to Peterborough United on 18 June and Zak Johnson to York City on 26 June. Milan Aleksić was loaned to Partizan Belgrade for the season on 20 June and goalkeeper Matty Young to Huddersfield Town on 29 June. Dan Neil left for Rangers, and Dennis Cirkin, Niall Huggins and Bertrand Traoré also departed at the end of their contracts. The only senior arrival so far is right-back Thomas Meunier, a free transfer from Lille on 15 July 2026. Academy recruitment brought Ethan Berry from Crystal Palace and Adam Nelson from Glentoran on 1 July and Alfie Pollock from Glenavon for an undisclosed fee on 26 July.

Pre-season took the squad to the United States. Sunderland won 5-1 at York City on 18 July 2026, lost 4-2 to Liverpool in Nashville on 25 July and 1-0 to Leeds United in Harrison, New Jersey, on 30 July, with Wrexham in Pennsylvania on 2 August, two matches against Lens in France on 8 August and Rennes at the Stadium of Light on 15 August still to come. The Premier League season starts late, on 21 August 2026; Sunderland's first match is away to Ipswich Town at Portman Road on 22 August at 3pm, followed by Fulham at home on 30 August, Brentford away on 5 September, Arsenal at home on 12 September and Manchester City away on 19 September. The Europa League league phase begins in September 2026. It is the first time in the club's history that they have qualified for Europe through their league position, and their first European campaign since the 1973/74 Cup Winners' Cup.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunderland_A.F.C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026%E2%80%9327_Sunderland_A.F.C._season https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%80%9326_Premier_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026%E2%80%9327_Premier_League https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026%E2%80%9327_UEFA_Europa_League

Researched and written for not4quarters. Where a fact could not be established from the sources read, this page says so rather than guessing.