My Mam didn’t always get to the match when I was growing up, but Sunderland still came to her. Usually, it came through a little blue radio.
On a Saturday afternoon, if she wasn’t at the game, the radio would be on. Wherever Sunderland happened to be playing, whatever division we happened to be in and however questionable the team we had sent out to represent us that particular week, she would be listening. I’ve inherited the habit, too, albeit with the luxury of a digital radio rather than searching
across FM or medium wave just to find Simon Crabtree and Gary Rowell.
She was one of the biggest Sunderland supporters I knew. And I never really thought there was anything unusual about that. Why would I?
Football has always loved the idea of itself as something handed down from father to son. Dad takes his boy to his first match, buys him his first scarf, shows him where he used to stand and, for better or worse, condemns another generation to the same lifelong obsession.
It’s a lovely image. It just isn’t the whole story.
Because football is passed from mothers to sons as well. From mothers to daughters. From grandmothers, sisters, aunties and friends. And when I think about Sunderland, the women were always there.
They still are.
Look, in the group I go to home matches with these days, it’s the men who are outnumbered. There are seven of us: four women and three men. Nobody thinks anything of it. My brother sits alongside his girlfriend, my sister with our Mam, my auntie with my uncle, and my wife with me, when the opportunity allows. It’s simply our group at the match.
No one talks about the women coming along to the football with us, as though we’ve generously granted them access to some traditionally male Saturday afternoon ritual. We’re all going to the match. That’s it.
And they’ll be in Europe with us, too. My wife organised our trip to Brussels, where hopefully we’ll get a ticket to see us play Anderlecht. My sister, meanwhile, is frantically working out the time and finances to see just how many European away games she can squeeze in.
Perhaps that’s precisely what I’ve always liked about football in Sunderland.
I’m not pretending sexism has never existed in football, nor would I presume to understand what every woman experiences at the match. But in my own experience of following Sunderland, I’ve never particularly recognised a dividing line between male and female supporters.
You are either Sunderland or you aren’t.
Anyone who has spent time around the Stadium of Light will recognise the different generations of women for whom going to the match is simply part of life.
Some go with husbands or partners. Some with their dads. Some take their sons and daughters. Some go with groups of friends. Some go because they’ve been doing it for decades and couldn’t imagine doing anything else with their Saturday afternoon.
And that distinction matters.
Women at football aren’t merely there because a man in their life happens to support Sunderland.
Sunderland is theirs.
It forms part of their friendships, their family lives, their weekends and their identity in exactly the same way it does for the men sitting alongside them.
Perhaps that’s particularly noticeable somewhere like Sunderland because the football club itself occupies such an enormous place in the culture of the city.
Supporting Sunderland isn’t confined to those couple of hours inside the ground.
It’s checking who’s injured during the week (we’re still mourning Brobbey and Ballard). It’s wondering what the team will be. It’s arranging Saturday around kick-off. It’s discussing the match afterwards, sometimes for considerably longer than the match actually lasted.
It’s travelling the length of the country to watch us. In the doldrums of League One, when my brother fancied exotic trips to Walsall and Shrewsbury and couldn’t find a plus one, it was often my sister who went with him. She needed no convincing (well, maybe a little).
It’s promising yourself you won’t let Sunderland ruin your weekend again, before allowing Sunderland to ruin your weekend again.
None of that belongs exclusively to men. And it never did in our house. My Mam didn’t need to be sitting inside the ground for Sunderland to matter. That little blue radio was enough.
If I’m fortunate enough to become a parent myself, perhaps I’ll get to pass some of that magic too. They’ll have two parents equally invested in why Sunderland matters, and maybe we’ll have to crack open the emergency radio from time to time. Maybe we’ll even do it on purpose.
There’s something about it that remains incredibly evocative to me now. In an age when we can follow games through phones, television, social media and rolling updates, the idea of sitting beside a little radio, waiting for somebody miles away to tell you what was happening, feels almost from another world.
But there was nothing passive about it. She was following Sunderland, living every chance, every mistake, every goal and every disappointment without necessarily seeing any of them.
And perhaps that’s partly why I’ve never regarded women supporting football as something notable in itself. One of the people who showed me, simply by being herself, how deeply a football club could become woven into someone’s life was a woman.
My Mam.
As I’ve got older, I’ve come to appreciate just how much of supporting a football club has nothing whatsoever to do with understanding formations, arguing about transfers or even being physically present inside a stadium.
It’s about belonging. It’s about recognising something as part of yourself. And for generations of women in Sunderland, this football club has been exactly that.
There will be little girls going to the Stadium of Light now who won’t give the slightest thought to whether football is supposed to be for them. They’ll just know that Sunderland is their club. Maybe their Mam took them, maybe their Dad did, maybe both did. Perhaps one day they’ll take somebody else.
And that’s how football really gets handed down.
Not simply father to son, but person to person. Generation to generation. Sometimes through a ticket for your first match, or through the stories somebody tells you about Roker Park. Sometimes through the people you sit alongside every other Saturday.
And sometimes from your Mam, listening intently to Sunderland on a little blue radio.
The women aren’t newcomers to our football story.
They were always there.
