Even at Wembley Stadium, you can’t fail to notice the Northernness of two sets of fans from Sheffield and the North East. It’s in the Yorkshire grumblings over prices and VAR delays. It’s in the ‘fook’ in the Sunderland end’s chants of, “Your support is f**king shit”. In this 2025 Championship Play-off Final, however, that provincial pride was on the pitch as well.
Talk around the £220 million match, or whatever that sum has been inflated to since the final whistle blew, is often focused on each team’s superstars – Gus Hamer, Jobe Bellingham et al. It’s a global event; a rite of passage into the Premier League, that most global of entities, and so there’s not much room in the narrative for local ties.
