For only the second time in their history, Sunderland are back in Europe. Last season, in their first year back in the Premier League they surpassed all expectations and achieved a club-record finish as manager Regis Le Bris took new signings and molded them into a Premier League unit. Year two in the top flight will be even harder as competing in the Europa League will push the squad to their limits in a time when everyone but Sunderland and the fans at the Stadium of Light will feel like they're back where they belong, despite the fact that European soccer is far from a regular occurrence in Northeast England.
Sunderland had the additional benefit of finishing above hated rivals Newcastle United in the table, while their other major rivals, Middlesbrough, are working to get back to the Premier League from the Championship. Still, to understand where Sunderland are, first we have to look at where they were. The Black Cats were relegated from the Premier League at the end of the 2016-17 season after flirting with the drop for years.
Like many teams, they expected their stay in the Championship to be a short one, but blink, and five years later, they bottomed out in League One before new ownership and stability helped right the ship to return to the Championship following the end of the 2021-22 season. After being promoted back to the top flight last season, just surviving would've been an accomplishment, but they went and did the unthinkable, finishing solidly in the top half. But while teams dream of European nights, the extra strain that they can put on a club is something that Sunderland will need to be wary of, which defender Luke O'Nein acknowledges.
"I personally think it's going to help the group this season because there are going to be more games and more squad rotation, so we're going to need everybody for every single minute due to the heavier load. I'm really proud of the group for what they've achieved, but we're going there to compete. We want to go as far as we can in the competition, and we're going to give it our all." Joining the club when they were in League One, he knows what this means for the fans who will be looking to cheer the club on, and he sees more games as being a benefit with young players in the squad such as Chris Rigg who are ready for more minutes, but it's a fine balance as they'll want to build on this momentum as their summer tour has been used to connect with fans in the United States and grow a global fanbase.
With the World Cup being in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, plenty of teams are looking for ways that they can capitalize on that, and with Sunderland's finish, there was no better time for that to align with the club than during this preseason tour, where they looked to fill the void left by Japan, a team that set up home base in Nashville. A city that wanted to be a host city in the World Cup, Nashville were able to court Japan to come there even without being on FIFA's list of approved training facilities, thanks to the mayor's chief of staff, Masami Tyson, visiting Tokyo and speaking to the Japan Football Association to convince them of why Nashville should be the place to be. That continued with Sunderland, as the club to set up different fan activations in town, keeping the "Summer of Soccer" going in the Music City.
With the Samurai Blue using it as a base camp during the World Cup, the facilities at GEODIS Park were already ones that have shown that they can support high-level soccer, and there's also the fandom in Nashville that shows these teams that it can support them being there. There's a fine balance in preseason between commercial needs and also ensuring that a club can have proper training without travelling all over the country, which is where Nashville helped give Sunderland the ability to hit both together. Sunderland are one of the fastest-growing Premier League teams and were already a recognized brand in the United States due to the success of the "Sunderland 'Til I Die" docuseries, and they were embraced in the United States during this tour.
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