The Sunderland fans who don't want SAFC to get promoted

Bad news. Even citizens with little interest in football realise the club’s continuing absence from the Premier League is detrimental to the city.

Club and city alike enjoy a higher profile when the team plays top flight footy, along with the attendant benefits of being noticed around the world.

With a following wind, they might have scraped into the play-offs; ie. they only ever had an outside chance of gaining access to another outside chance.

Curiously, some supporters seem to feel that slithering into the Premier League would have been disastrous, which is understandable. The current squad would be relegated immediately and with bells on.

However, we can never know which new players, even on a limited budget, could have been attracted. It wouldn’t be the same squad. Observe too the achievements of Brighton and Brentford.

Just as we remember spectacularly wrong suggestions that “relegation might do us good”, the Echo’s Facebook page received a message that “only an idiot would want promotion this season”.

The presumed preference is to wait a year or two, then go up at an optimum time. Job done. Champions of Europe 2026-ish. Gettin.

A minor, or more accurately, gigantic flaw in this “plan” is that choosing when to be promoted is not like choosing when to go to Lanzarote. Any chance of promotion must be seized.

Do those who feel promotion would have been disastrous think that, if Sunderland were to have contested the play-offs, their best option would have been to deliberately lose? That doesn’t sound much like the way forward in the upper levels of professional sport.

I understand the concomitant fears of competing with clubs being bankrolled by the world’s wealthiest psychopaths. But surely the only attitude should be “bring ‘em on” and relish the underdog status.

All this is academic, given the unlikelihood of promotion. Sunderland have three games remaining and need a hat-trick of wins, something they haven’t achieved all season, just for a possibility of the play-offs.

Here’s to mindless optimism. Club and city need it.