Sunderland 'Til I Die comes to an end. But not that kind
One of the original behind-the-scenes sports documentaries returns to remind us what was great about it
It is remarkably fitting that the first action on the pitch in Season 3 of ‘Sunderland ’Til I Die’ sees Sunderland AFC get absolutely tonked. Within moments there are fans booing, shouting obscenities, and just generally being disgusted with the lads.
Watching this is like putting on an old, comfortable pair of slippers. Sunderland loses the game 6-0 to Bolton to kick off a full-blown crisis. The supporters are dismayed, the manager is sacked. Recriminations abound.
Yes, that’s the good stuff right there.
‘Sunderland ’Til I Die’ is one of the OG behind-the-scenes sports documentaries, or at least it’s one of those that kicked off a modern wave of them. The first two seasons aired on Netflix in 2018-19, documenting a calamitous couple of years for Sunderland, a grand old club in the northeast of England that had dropped out of that country’s top football tier in 2017. The documentary was supposed to follow the team’s climb back to the Premier League, but instead they were — spoiler alert — relegated again to England’s third tier, somewhat confusingly called League One.
What made the show unique in what became a very crowded landscape was the degree to which it showed the unpleasant stuff. The club’s loyal supporters, who see their team’s struggles mirror that of a working-class town that saw its main industries wither, alternate between anger and sorrow. A pair of new owners arrive, a potent mix of hapless and arrogant, and they manage to bollocks everything up further. One of them wants to blare dance music before kickoff to make the stadium more of a party atmosphere. It’s like a scene from The Office, including the staffers who steal plaintive glances at the camera.
Sunderland remained stuck in League One during the 2018/19 season, and then the documentary ceased, quite possibly because the owners were tired of the humiliation. But those two seasons stood as a stark, compelling look at the challenges of owning, working for or supporting a professional football club.
Those original seasons of the show are also part of the origin story of the successful purchase of fifth-tier Wrexham AFC by two Hollywood actors, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McIlhenney, a few years later. McIlhenney watched the Sunderland series and then set about trying to buy a club and document its rise through England’s football tiers, but, you know, successfully. ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ ultimately showed one season of heartbreak and another of triumph. The narrative of that show’s third season is currently unfolding on the pitches of the fourth tier, somewhat confusingly called League Two.
But, back to Sunderland. The club languished in League One for another three seasons and yet more new owners arrived, this time fronted by a 23-year-old Swiss-French billionaire. Not a typo: 23. He’s since become the majority owner at a wizened 27. Somewhere in there the cameras began rolling again to follow the second half of the 2021/22 season.
As recently as last spring there were no plans for a rebirth of ‘Sunderland ’Til I Die,’ or so I was told by a Netflix executive. Maybe he was just being cagey, or maybe there were protracted negotiations, or maybe the producers came cap-in-hand when they couldn’t sell what they had to anyone else, but the giant streaming service has released just a wee stub of a third season, three episodes in total.
And, despite the short length and weird timing, taking place as it does more than a season-and-a-half ago, it’s pretty delightful. The gang is all back to gnash their teeth and curse their stupid fate with this team, from Peter the cab driver to Andrew the army veteran to Joyce the club chef.
The new controlling owner, a lanky, prim fellow named Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, is unfortunately not as exciting as his exotic name, which might explain why Season 3 ended up so brief. Dull competence does not make for great storytelling.
But there’s enough there for the episodes to still feel like a reunion with some put-upon friends who remain unable to explain why they care for this bloody football team quite so much. It’s what makes this show different from so many of the behind-closed-doors series that followed it, where someone in marketing thought this would be a great idea but someone else in the boardroom clearly nixed any of the juicy stuff. You end up with lots of shots of players running around on the training pitch and telling the camera “this is a special club.” FC Barcelona, one of the biggest clubs in the world that has lurched from off-field crisis to crisis in recent years, somehow produced two seasons of a documentary that managed to brush past most of that. The latest episodes of ‘Barcelona: A New Era’, available on Prime Video in Canada, include gushing testimonials about relatively new manager Xavi Hernandez as the man to shepherd this cherished institution forward. He has since resigned.
There is much less faux gloss in ‘Sunderland ’Til I Die,’ which is how it should be. The genre only works when you see the uncomfortable bits. When manager Lee Johnson is sacked after that 6-0 thrashing, it soon cuts to midfielder Alex Pritchard on the training ground, who says he’s not sure that it was a good move. This is athlete-talk for “that’s a daft move.”
It worked out OK, in the end. I’ll respect the spoiler conventions even though much more has happened to Sunderland since the events portrayed in Season 3, but it serves as a fine epilogue to the doom and gloom of its initial stories. At one point, the fans at the Stadium of Light join in song at the end of a game, and a funny thing occurred to me: I don’t think I had ever seen Sunderland fans in full joy before.