In the movies, underdog sports teams always come from gritty, struggling, preferably postindustrial places. Major League wouldn’t work if it were set in Miami, instead of Cleveland. Rocky’s determination in Rocky is melded to Philadelphia: He draws his strength from the city itself, pumping his fists and jumping into the air after ascending the steps of the city’s art museum. Underdog sports teams are avatars for their downtrodden communities. They ultimately prevail by embodying the pluck and mettle of the people, taking down well-heeled, cosmopolitan competitors along the way (in Major League’s case, the Yankees). In the process, they elevate the cities they represent, which rise to reclaim the glory they lost a long time ago.

The first season of Sunderland ’Til I Die, Netflix’s documentary about Sunderland Association Football Club, the storied but recently relegated soccer team from England’s northeast, was intended to follow this trajectory. With an emphasis on the club’s passionate working-class supporters, a grandiloquent score, and frequent drone shots of the city and its massive stadium, it was meant to follow the team as it marched its way back to the heights (and riches) of the English Premier League. Along the way, the team would redeem the city, which has never quite recovered after the English economy moved on from cotton and coal in the last century.

But Sunderland’s 2018–2019 season did not work out as intended. Instead, everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. The team’s defense was abysmal; their top scorer jumped ship during the transfer window in January. Veteran Darron Gibson started the season drunkenly bitching about the club in a pub and ended it being arrested for drunk driving. Practically everyone with us at the start of the year was gone by the end: two managers, an executive, an owner, and several players. Instead of reaching the promised land of the Premier League, Sunderland was unable even to keep its perch in the second division; it was relegated again, to England’s third division.



All of that chaos created something remarkable. The cameras captured nearly everything. There was no one to block access, a true feat in the hermetic world of top-flight sports, where millions of dollars are spent manicuring the images of teams and athletes. The result was an intricate portrait of the sports world’s most profound, but rarely explored, phenomenon: failure. Now back for a second season, Sunderland ’Til I Die once again hopes to capture a soccer team—and a people—on the ascent. Instead, it provides a different, but just as compelling, look at catastrophe.

The canvas is wider in the second season. The emphasis on the city and the fans is still there—its fourth episode opens with a Leave rally, an acknowledgment that the city is overwhelmingly pro-Brexit. But it also takes us much deeper behind the scenes, with a focus on the club’s owner, Stewart Donald, and its director, Charlie Methven, both of whom come from the south of England and are trying to prove their worth to skeptical fans—and keep the club afloat financially. Sunderland AFC, in season two, is a metaphor for larger struggles, both in English and global soccer.