The San Siro-bound Milanese metro carriage was uncomfortably overcrowded and the handful of locals on board looked distinctly uneasy as visiting Newcastle fans chanted three words at full volume.
“We hate Sunderland,” they chorused with some emphasising the point by thumping empty beer bottles against the train’s ceiling. “Why?” a thoroughly bemused Italian eventually inquired.
The answer will become apparent at the Stadium of Light on Saturday lunchtime as the first Tyne-Wear derby since 2016 starts.
Much has changed in the intervening eight years, most notably Newcastle’s Saudi Arabian-led takeover in 2021 and Sunderland’s plunge into the third tier in 2018. The Wearsiders are now Championship residents but, whereas their current squad cost about £20m to assemble, more than £500m has been spent on Newcastle’s.
It dictates that what once ranked as a clash of near equals would normally appear an embarrassing FA Cup third-round mismatch. Yet given Eddie Howe’s visitors are scarred by a run of seven defeats in eight games and have not beaten their local rivals since 2011, a distinct nervousness permeates the Tyneside air.
Four months after that Champions League draw at Milan and a little over three weeks since the Serie A side extinguished Howe’s European hopes in the return, the rise in tension is almost palpable. Police have deemed the inter-club enmity so dangerously intense that the 6,000 travelling Newcastle fans have been barred from using the local metro.
They must avoid all conventional forms of public and private transport and traverse the 14 miles separating the cities on a convoy of free buses flanked by heavy-duty police escorts. No one will be handed a match ticket until they reach Wearside.
The idea is to avoid a repeat of the violence that, outside St James’ in 2013, led to a police horse being punched in the face by a Newcastle fan after Sunderland’s then manager, Paolo Di Canio, enraged his hosts by performing a celebratory touchline knee slide as the visitors won 3-0.
“The knee slide’s been mentioned a few times,” says Sunderland’s promotion-chasing manager, Michael Beale, as he prepares for his fifth game since replacing Tony Mowbray. “But I can’t tell you what I’d do if we won!
“The clubs are in completely different places to 2016. We’ve been down to League One and are now the youngest team in the Championship, possibly in the country. My players have big ambitions to play Premier League and Champions League football but they’ve got everything to prove against top opponents.”
The teams’ fortunes have certainly diverged since March 2016 when Rafael Benítez’s Championship-bound, Mike Ashley-owned Newcastle drew 1-1 at home with a Sunderland side managed by the soon to be England manager Sam Allardyce.
Yet if the black and white banner draped across a bridge in northern Italy in September declaring “You’ll never see a Mackem in Milan” emphasised a growing chasm on the pitch, off it a lingering parity endures.
Regardless of the Saudi millions invested in refurbishing Newcastle’s training ground, Sunderland’s Academy of Light remains the superior facility, and the 49,000-capacity Stadium of Light ranks among England’s finest grounds. Moreover, although Kyril Louis-Dreyfus cannot remotely rival the Saudis’ wealth, Sunderland’s Swiss-French majority owner is a billionaire.
Louis-Dreyfus has struggled to win local hearts and minds, though. If fans were upset by Mowbray’s harsh sacking they are outraged by Sunderland’s initial decision – now overturned – to redecorate in black and white a club hospitality suite housing 700 Newcastle fans paying £600 a head for derby tickets.
Sunderland approved the signage for a Newcastle-themed decoration of a bar at the Stadium of Light for Saturday's FA Cup derby last month.
It is understood Newcastle were invited in December to submit designs for the Black Cats Bar, which will provide corporate hospitality for travelling fans for the third-round tie, and that they were signed off by a senior member of staff at the Wearside club.
The move is understood to have been intended to lessen the potential for the area, which normally carries Sunderland's livery, to be damaged by rival supporters.
Sunderland fans reacted furiously on Thursday when images of banners carrying the messages "Keep the Black and White Flying High" and "We are United" emerged on social media. Sunderland's motto "Ha'way the lads" in red had also been replaced with the Geordie spelling "Howay" in black.
Sunderland swiftly apologised for "a serious error in judgment" and announced an immediate review, and the chairman, Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, said he was "disgusted and hurt" by the "inappropriate signs", which have been removed. PA Media
One of Louis-Dreyfus’s predecessors, the businessman and philanthropist Sir Bob Murray, would not have made such a naive mistake. Rather more significantly, Murray is adamant that, as Sunderland’s owner, he would have declined any attempted Saudi buyout owing to the kingdom’s “human rights violations”.
Beale steers a more diplomatic course. “There’s a time and place to comment on the ownership of football clubs and what’s right and wrong,” says the former Rangers manager. “Let’s focus on a really intriguing game. Financially, we’re building something very different here with young players. One club’s about getting to the top quickly, the other’s trying to take a development route. It’s two different visions.”
Beale added that, money apart, there was no real difference in “size, support or status” but Howe demurs. “I’m not going to get into a war of words with any manager but I don’t think it’s wise to make those comparisons or comments,” he says. “We know who we are and what we are.”
The former Sunderland captain turned BBC local radio co-commentator Gary Bennett is looking forward to seeing whether Beale’s much-coveted winger Jack Clarke, the midfielder Dan Neil, the forward Jobe Bellingham (Jude’s younger brother) and others can fulfil their potential on Saturday. “It’s a great stage for Sunderland’s players,” he says. “There’s nothing like a north-east derby – the noise will be something else.”
Happily that soundtrack has changed appreciably since 1985 when Bennett was subjected to horrendous racist abuse at Newcastle. It was the era when the National Front routinely recruited outside St James’ but, more positively, that watershed incident served as a catalyst for the establishment of the transformational education charity Show Racism the Red Card.
“Off the pitch the north-east is a much more diverse, more understanding and more educated place now,” says Bennett. “And on it, the clubs are incredibly diverse; so many nationalities will be playing in this derby.”
The similarities between Newcastle’s green away strip and Saudi Arabia’s national flag incite accusations of state annexation but Bennett points out that Howe’s team have not won anything. “They’re very, very wealthy now,” he says. “But they’ve got to keep recruiting well. Finance alone doesn’t win trophies.”
Sunderland’s club historian, Rob Mason, endorses the point. “The early 1950s brought Newcastle three FA Cups in five years while Sunderland won nothing, despite being the moneybags team of the era, known as ‘the Bank of England club’,” he says. “That failure during their time as the top-spending team in the country serves as a warning to those who think silverware will automatically follow money. Newcastle are massive favourites but this is the FA Cup and all Wearside is hoping it conjures up what would be one of the greatest derby victories of all.”
Jim Montgomery is optimistic Sunderland can win. The club’s former goalkeeper and hero of the 1973 FA Cup final triumph against Leeds has invited Bob Moncur, who captained Newcastle to their last major trophy, the 1969 Fairs Cup, to sit alongside him. “I’m sure we’ll have some laughs,” says Montgomery, highlighting the often humorous side of a rivalry that divides numerous families across the Tyne-Wear conurbation. “Sunderland were underdogs in 1973 so we know what can happen.”
Montgomery has recently been treated for prostate cancer at the Sir Bobby Robson Cancer Trials Research Centre within Newcastle’s Freeman hospital, funded by the late England coach’s charity foundation.
As a former Newcastle manager, Robson was proud Sunderland and Middlesbrough suspended footballing hostilities to help finance the establishment of a project which continues to save countless lives.
Despite widespread misgivings about the Saudi Arabian regime, there is similar pan-regional consensus that Newcastle’s owners should be encouraged to assist in achieving the desperately needed economic “levelling up” programme the UK government has failed to deliver.
Visible infrastructure improvements are yet to materialise but the kingdom’s ambassador to the UK has dined with local business leaders in Durham, the Saudi companies SABIC and Alfanar are investing billions in green fuels development on Teesside and the national airline, Saudia, plans to launch direct flights to the Gulf from Newcastle airport.
For the moment, though, football is primarily responsible for putting an overlooked region back on the map. “This game’s not just about the north-east,” says Beale. “It’s the tie of the round. The whole nation’s looking forward to it.”
