“The club has a long-term strategy to deliver sustainable success,” a senior Sunderland source told ESPN. “Central to that is identifying and developing young talent with a commitment to an exciting style of play.
“We will give young players the opportunity to show how good they are. Hopefully they can help get Sunderland to the Premier League, but if not, then the second-best thing is that they get there themselves. We have the youngest team in the EFL, but age is no barrier to being good enough.
“Jobe is only 18, but he has already made himself one of the leaders within the group. When we play Newcastle, Miguel Almirón, at £20m, will have cost more than all of our squad combined. But it will still be us against them, red-and-white vs. black-and-white, and a chance for our players to show how good they can be.”
While offering a useful measuring stick for Sunderland’s progress as a young team, Saturday’s game is also a reminder of what the club continues to miss out on. Since the turn of the century, Sunderland have enjoyed 15 seasons in England’s top flight, and their Premier League exile in the EFL is out of sync with a club that sits in 10th position — one place behind Newcastle — in the all-time table of English football. They are the best-supported team outside the Premier League and, outside Europe’s top divisions, only German clubs Schalke, Hamburg, Hertha Berlin and Kaiserslautern average higher attendances than Sunderland’s 40,823 this season.
The Stadium of Light will be full on Saturday, however, with 6,000 Newcastle supporters making up a capacity crowd of just over 49,000. Due to the hostility between the rival sets of fans — a police horse was punched by a Newcastle supporter during notoriously violent scenes at a derby in April 2013 — every Newcastle supporter must travel on transport provided by the club, which will be escorted on the 13-mile journey from St James’ Park.
