It should come as no surprise that Sunderland Til I Die, a sports documentary, won over audiences across the globe, considering how dear a project it was to its creators.
The fact that Sunderland supporters were the ones who could least appreciate Sunderland Til I Die may have been the ultimate irony of the song.
Very bleak days in Sunderland were documented in often painful detail in the first two seasons. Days when supporters—known for their unwavering optimism—had to face despondency.
Naturally, the series was a big success and is regarded by many as one of the greatest sports documentaries ever made.
Its influence was so great that Hollywood decided to take over Wrexham. Humphrey Ker, the executive director of Wrexham, claims that Rob McElhenny’s perspective on football was entirely transformed by Sunderland Til I Die.
Ker said on the BBC’s “Sacked in the Morning” program, “I think that just blew his mind because it showed the relationships we have in the UK with our football teams.”
This week marks the release of Season Three of the show on Netflix, and it has the same heart and passion as Seasons one and two. This is the last installment that Sunderland supporters may finally enjoy because the Black Cats are finally starting to move in the right path once more.
Gabe and Ben Turner, owners of Fulwell73 and the London-based Sunderland fans who brought Sunderland Til I Die to the world’s attention, were interviewed by Sunderland Nation.
The brothers should have pursued it naturally, but it raised an intriguing query. When asked to explain Sunderland AFC to someone who was not born into the community, where do you even begin?
Gabe said to Sunderland Nation, “I think the starting point is most teams in sport lose.” “Most people can connect to blind faith and going in knowing that you’re getting nothing for it other than being with your family and your friends and experiencing the ritual together. One team wins and everyone else loses.
“What are you getting paid for it, exactly? Yes. That, in my opinion, is where it all begins. And then, you know, we were Sunderland supporters growing up in London, as Ben usually says.
As far as we were concerned, Sunderland was a magical place. You wouldn’t often expect to hear that from folks from London. Everyone aspires to live in the capital, which is the city.
“However, the truth is that growing up in London and having your football team play there [in the northeast] means that for us, the allure of Roker Park, traveling to the area, and putting on your uniform there was nothing short of fantastic.
Our perception of Sunderland has always been idealized. We obviously know a ton of people from the area and always have, and they’ve always been extremely wonderful people. Our cousin Leo (Pearlman, another STID producer and Fulwell73 partner) was up there when we were growing up.
Thus, certain individuals are trying to teach the rest of the world how to lose in football by learning how to do it themselves. You probably can connect to it if you’re from Pennsylvania and you cheer for a terrible hockey team that never wins.
Remarkably successful in Sunderland, Fulwell73 is set to bring a big new film studio on the banks of the Wear.
However, Sunderland Til I Die was the result of numerous factors, inadvertently involving both Donald Trump and David Beckham.
Ben said that after Donald Trump’s election, there was a lot of discussion about the Rust Belt in America when they first started talking about it with Netflix.
“We said to them during one of our meetings that the UK is essentially a Rust Belt. This is an area where modernity seems to have left behind and is only barely hanging on.
But teams still lose, just as in most sports. That describes a large portion of the earth. There is a resonance about it.
And we have a long history of producing sports dots. Our career kind of took off once we started in 2005 and produced a movie titled In the Hands of the Gods.We wanted to make the movie Class of 92 as we are football fans, I recall when we were proposing it. We said to ourselves, “We’re in if it means hanging out with David Beckham.” Then, when we started pitching the movie, people would constantly ask us, “What’s the point?”
This was much before sports talk gained much traction. What was the purpose? Everyone is aware of the resolution. They won the treble against Bayern Munich in injury time, and it will never be as fantastic as it was [in real life] because it was so unexpected.
What then is the movie’s purpose? We couldn’t claim it was so we could spend time with David Beckham. Thus, we needed to devise a more superior solution.
We eventually discovered that the story has significance outside of football. Although The Godfather is primarily a gangster narrative, it is also a family story.
As a result, we kind of come to the realization that there needs to be more to the tale than simply the activity you’re witnessing because of our intense want to be near things we find great, particularly Sunderland Football Club.
And like Gabe points out, the northeastern region’s Sunderland is simply so glorified and idealized. It resembles a love letter to a location that seemed to us to be the stuff of dreams.