Animosity endures despite diverging fortunes of Sunderland and Newcastle

The San Siro-bound Milanese metro carriage was uncomfortably overcrowded and the handful of locals on board looked distinctly uneasy as visiting Newcastle fans chanted three words at full volume.

“We hate Sunderland,” they chorused with some emphasising the point by thumping empty beer bottles against the train’s ceiling. “Why?” a thoroughly bemused Italian eventually inquired.

The answer will become apparent at the Stadium of Light this lunchtime as the first Tyne-Wear derby since 2016 starts.

Much has changed in the intervening eight years, most notably Newcastle’s Saudi Arabian-led takeover in 2021 and Sunderland’s plunge into the third tier in 2018. The Wearsiders are now Championship residents but, whereas their current squad cost about £20m to assemble, more than £500m has been spent on Newcastle’s.

It dictates that what once ranked as a clash of near equals would normally appear an embarrassing FA Cup third-round mismatch. Yet given Eddie Howe’s visitors are scarred by a run of seven defeats in eight games and have not beaten their local rivals since 2011, a distinct nervousness permeates the Tyneside air.

Four months after that Champions League draw at Milan and a little over three weeks since the Serie A side extinguished Howe’s European hopes in the return, the rise in tension is almost palpable. Police have deemed the inter-club enmity so dangerously intense that the 6,000 travelling Newcastle fans have been barred from using the local metro.

They must avoid all conventional forms of public and private transport and traverse the 14 miles separating the cities on a convoy of free buses flanked by heavy-duty police escorts. No one will be handed a match ticket until they reach Wearside.

The idea is to avoid a