Sunderland and the fight to avoid Premier League relegation

“We must turn things around and avoid relegation,” David Moyes said in an interview after yet another Premier League defeat. This time the Black Cats lost at home to Manchester City and were left 20th and last in the table of one of the most competitive divisions in the world.

Sunderland usually manage to avoid relegation in the very last rounds of the Premier League, but with every round that passed the task looked harder this time. The team had lost three consecutive matches and David Moyes’s players were six points behind 17th-placed Crystal Palace. The remaining fixtures were not easy at all.

There were three games in which The Black Cats looked certain not to take a point: against Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea. They also had to visit Middlesbrough, Watford, Leicester City and Hull City, and having lost ten of their 13 away games that season, they could hardly be expected to win more than once on the road before the end of the campaign.

That left the home games against Burnley, Swansea City, West Ham United and AFC Bournemouth as Sunderland’s best chance of collecting crucial points. Winning all of them looked unlikely too. They had already lost eight of 14 matches at the Stadium of Light, or 57% of their home games, which pointed to one win, one draw and two defeats from those four fixtures.

Sunderland had 19 points. Adding the roughly eight more they could realistically expect would take them to 27 by the end of the season, probably bottom of the table. If Moyes wanted to keep his team in the Premier League, he would need to produce something extraordinary.

How the 2016–17 season ended

The extraordinary turnaround never arrived. Sunderland’s relegation was confirmed on 29 April 2017 at the Stadium of Light, where AFC Bournemouth won 1-0 with an 88th-minute goal from Josh King, who finished a sweeping counter-attack from a Ryan Fraser pass. With Hull City drawing 0-0 at Southampton on the same afternoon, the Black Cats were left 13 points from safety with only 12 still available, and their ten-year spell in the Premier League was over.

The final table made grim reading. Sunderland finished 20th with 24 points from six wins, six draws and 26 defeats, scoring 29 goals and conceding 69. The one reliable source of goals was Jermain Defoe, whose 15 league goals made him the club’s top scorer. David Moyes resigned shortly after the season ended, informing the club of his decision at a meeting in London and thanking chairman Ellis Short and the board in his statement.

A history of late escapes

The expectation that Sunderland would somehow survive was rooted in recent history. In March 2013 Paolo Di Canio replaced Martin O’Neill and kept the club up with one game to spare. The following season Gus Poyet took over from Di Canio, reached the 2014 League Cup final, which Sunderland lost 3-1 to Manchester City, and again steered the team clear of the drop. When Poyet was sacked in March 2015, Dick Advocaat arrived and completed another rescue, and after Advocaat resigned eight games into 2015–16, Sam Allardyce was appointed in October 2015 and kept the club in the top flight once more.

That run of great escapes ended under Moyes, and worse followed. In 2017–18 Sunderland were relegated again, this time from the Championship to League One, a second consecutive relegation. Cameras followed the club throughout that campaign for an eight-part Netflix documentary series released in 2018, and in April 2018 Sunderland were sold to Stewart Donald and Juan Sartori. For a club that had opened the Stadium of Light in 1997, with Ajax as the first visitors, it was a sharp fall from the Premier League to the third tier in barely a year.