People often ask me where my Sunderland obsession comes from. The honest answer is that I do not remember a time when it was not there. What I do remember is where it came from.
It came from my cousin Dylan (you can see him above, front row in black).
Long before I had a season ticket, before I spent weekends travelling around the country following Sunderland and before I began writing about what this football club means to me, there was Dylan.
Dylan was Sunderland. Not merely a Sunderland supporter,
but the first person I remember being all things Sunderland.
As a child, he seemed to know everything: the players, the chants, the stories and the history. Every conversation somehow found its way back to football and, more specifically, Sunderland.
He taught me the chants, including quite a few that, looking back, I was definitely too young to know. I was fully informed about flutes for 50p, and the apparent question marks surrounding Alan Shearer’s birth.
He also taught me one of the great revelations of childhood: you could swear at the match, but you could not swear like that anywhere else.
There were words you were not supposed to say at home, at school or in front of adults. At the football, somehow, they were allowed. To a young boy, that was properly cool.
Dylan was the one who introduced me to all of it.
His favourite player was Lee Clark, and he was devastated by the infamous Newcastle shirt incident at Wembley. I can still remember the genuine hurt in his reaction. As a child, I did not fully understand why it mattered so much. Of course I do now.
Some of my favourite memories involve nothing more complicated than sitting in my Nana’s living room pretending to be Sunderland players. We would put a football in the middle of the room and see who could slide tackle it first. Looking back, I am amazed we did not destroy the place, or at the very least lose several layers of skin to carpet burns.
We listened endlessly to Niall Quinn’s Disco Pants. Not only the song people actually cared about, either. We would happily sit through the other tracks nobody else would give a second thought to simply because they contained snippets of Sunderland commentary.
There was something magical about hearing those voices, the goals, the noise and the excitement, even on a CD.
When he played FIFA, Sunderland were not always included in the game. That was not a problem. Dylan simply edited Manchester United so their players had the names of Sunderland’s squad.
I remember spotting Roy Keane in the line-up and immediately realising what he had done.
Looking back, he spent years quietly trying to convert me.
In the end, he succeeded.
One of my strongest memories is from the play-off final against Charlton. I was living in London at the time and Dylan came to stay with us. He wore a red-and-white jester’s hat for the occasion. It was the first and only time I ever saw him wear it. Afterwards, he decided it was bad luck. That was the end of that.
Football is full of little superstitions, and Dylan collected them the way other people collected stickers.
As children, we absorb more than we realise. Years later, I can still see his fingerprints all over my own support: the way I think, the way I react and the way I care.
In 2004, I attended a Sunderland match with my best friend, Luke, and we bought our first season tickets shortly afterwards. Dylan was supposed to come, instead of Luke, but he was not well enough.
At the time, it felt like nothing more than a disappointment. Just one of those things. Looking back now, it feels strangely significant.
That season ticket changed my life. It became thousands of journeys, countless memories and relationships that would never have existed otherwise. The years that followed brought promotion, relegation, Wembley trips, heartbreak, joy and everything in between.
Dylan never got to see any of it.
He died in 2005. He was nineteen years old.
Yet somehow, he still goes with me.
I know that might sound strange, but I suspect football supporters understand things like that better than most.
When Sunderland needed a late goal against Coventry in the play-off semi-final, I found myself asking Dylan for one. Not audibly, and not in any religious sense. Just quietly, in my heart.
I needed Sunderland’s number one supporter to do us a favour.
Then the goal came, and the Stadium of Light erupted.
Of course, I cannot say Dylan made it happen. Football does not work like that. But the fact my mind went there at all tells me something. More than two decades after his death, he remains part of how I experience Sunderland.
He is there in every chant I still know, every superstition I still follow, every overreaction to a result and every ridiculous amount of hope invested in eleven footballers wearing red and white.
People often talk about inheriting support for a football club. Usually they mean parents passing it to children or families continuing traditions through generations.
My Sunderland story feels slightly different.
The fanaticism was borrowed.
Borrowed from a cousin who loved Sunderland so completely that even now, more than two decades later, a little part of him still walks through the turnstiles with me.
Dylan never saw the years of Premier League football that followed. He never saw that late play-off goal against Coventry. He never saw Sunderland’s latest adventures in Europe.
Yet somehow, he is present in all of those moments. Not because he was there, but because he taught me how to be there.
And the older I get, the more I realise that my Sunderland obsession was never really mine to begin with.
It started with Dylan.
Every match since has simply been my turn to carry it.
