If you’d told any Sunderland fan leaving Wembley in May that by the start of September, we would’ve won two of our first three Premier League games, spent £180 million on fourteen new players and that Granit Xhaka would be our captain, you may have been laughed all the way down Wembley Way.
However, barely three months after that playoff final win and at the first international break of the season, that’s exactly where we find ourselves. The summer transfer window was arguably the best we’ve ever had
and from early on, the club made it clear that they were keen to make sure we aren’t just one-season wonders in the top flight.
Some of the pieces needed to get off to a good start this season were already in place, with Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, Stuart Harvey, Régis Le Bris and Kristjaan Speakman comprising a quartet that was added to with the appointment of former Roma sporting director Florent Ghisolfi earlier in the summer. The transformation under this regime is something that few fans could’ve foreseen — especially after it took so long to get out of the third tier.
Appointments off the pitch and new signings on it made it a busy summer, and the wait for the big kick off felt like an eternity.
There was a fear that we wouldn’t get off to a good start from a run of games that was as favourable as you can get in the Premier League, but six points from a possible nine have helped to ease these worries, and a two-week break for the new signings to settle in ahead of a trip to Crystal Palace came at a perfect time.
For the first time in a long time, it feels as though things the club — on just about every level — are moving in the right direction.
We’ve signed players who we hope will help us stave off relegation, but at the same time, it feels as though an off-field infrastructure that makes us feel like a big club again has been put into place. New coaches and a new financial director are some of these — as is giving the Stadium of Light and the surrounding area a much-needed facelift.
From top to bottom, the club oozes confidence at the moment.
Not long ago, match days would fill us with dread, or at the very least a feeling of numbness. As the 2025/2026 campaign gets into full swing, there’s a level of both organisation and excitement at the club that we haven’t seen in a long time.
Tough days lie ahead but we’ve made a fantastic start for a newly-promoted club, and if the atmosphere of the first two home games can be repeated, the Stadium of Light will be a tough place for any side to visit this season, and we’ve got nothing to fear about taking our game on the road.
The international break will give the new lads further time to bed in, and with games against Crystal Palace, Aston Villa and Nottingham Forest — all of whom haven’t had the best starts to the season — to come, it feels as though we’ve got everything in place to have a real good go as we edge towards trickier runs of fixtures.
I’m filled with so much hope for this season, and although there’s always the nagging sense of everything possibly going wrong all at once, this is left over from those many years of the club being run like a total shitshow. Those days are seemingly gone, and the coming few months are going to be an exciting chance to show that we can belong in the top flight.
