Brilliantly and beautifully, Sunderland are in Europe.
A club only promoted to the Premier League via the play-offs last year, who have not graced the European landscape since 1974, and whose opening scorer here in Trai Hume cost £200,000 when he was signed in 2022 while they were still in League One.
Embarrassingly and extraordinarily, Chelsea are not, this singular afternoon at the Stadium of Light summing up their entire season as they ticked all of their wretched boxes.
An utterly unserious attitude? Tick – save for Levi Colwill, Chelsea’s defenders appeared as if they had already checked out of this campaign. A defensive disasterclass? Tick – Hume’s opener involved a simple long ball and header on, and Malo Gusto’s strange own goal gave Sunderland their unassailable lead. Dire discipline? Tick – Wesley Fofana fouled Wilson Isidor when he was already on a yellow to leave the visitors down to 10 men while trailing 2-1, becoming their 10th red card of 2025-26, or 11 if we count the one shown to previous manager, Enzo Maresca.
It was only after an agonising 10 minutes of added time that Sunderland’s fans deservedly got to light their red flares in the stands.
Chelsea plunged to even greater lows with an embarrassing and entitled display at Sunderland
The Black Cats profited at Chelsea’s expense to secure a spot in the Europa League next year
The celebrations were wild, those in attendance knowing this is a historic achievement, a generational triumph. Their players played like they knew that, too.
Chelsea’s did not. They carried a sense of entitlement, and that is not how football works. The players will have known their incoming manager Xabi Alonso was watching from afar, and yet they hardly ever appeared to give much of a damn, with this season finale overseen by their interim, Calum McFarlane.
Fofana may be among those that Alonso would not mind selling this summer. He is unlikely to be the only one.
Without European football, you wonder whether a mass exodus will now need to happen at Chelsea. Not only because a few of their players may think they still deserve to be at a club in the Champions League, but because a bloated squad is no good when you only have the Premier League and two domestic cup competitions troubling the calendar.
Whatever add-ons are received for Kai Havertz and Noni Madueke winning the Premier League and potentially the Champions League with Arsenal – and they are nowhere near the made-up £30million and £20m figures claimed online respectively – it will not cover the cost of this collapse. We are not talking peanuts, but certainly nowhere near a sudden injection of £50m.
What a waste of a season it has been for Chelsea, who will now watch Sunderland in Europe next term instead.
IS ENZO CITY BOUND?
After full-time, Chelsea’s players trudged towards their away fans.
Joao Pedro apologised, Marc Cucurella applauded, and Enzo Fernandez waved. Whether that was goodbye for the summer from the Argentinian or for good remains to be seen.
Maresca likes having the odd familiar face in his squad after taking signings with whom he had already worked to each of the three clubs he managed. There was Adrian Bernabe to Parma, Callum Doyle to Leicester, Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall to Chelsea, to name a few.
Maresca is now set to succeed Pep Guardiola at Manchester City, and he and Fernandez had an especially close relationship at Chelsea.
Enzo Fernandez apologised to supporters at the end as links to Man City continue to intensity
Cole Palmer scored but his lack of consistency is exactly why he is not going to the World Cup
The 46-year-old Italian liked Fernandez – enough to hand him the captain’s armband barely a month after the Argentinian, now 25, was accused of singing a racism song following their 2024 Copa America triumph. Described him as his version of Declan Rice or Ilkay Gundogan. Called him a leader. Believed he was world-class.
While there has been overwhelming online noise surrounding Fernandez’s situation heading into this summer – inevitable considering his own agent, Javier Pastore, admitted they will ‘explore other options’ if an appropriate contract extension is not forthcoming – Chelsea sources claim there is no concrete update from their side and that they remain only rumours.
The speculation that City are determined to snap him up could yet prove true, of course. Fernandez considers himself an elite player, worthy of those competitions that City will be competing in whereas Chelsea will not.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD FOR PALMER
When Cole Palmer was announced as a Coca Cola ambassador last month, true to brand, the company’s PR team were fizzing to tell us how he would be fronting campaigns including during the upcoming World Cup. The ‘coldest link-up yet’, they called it.
Slightly awkward now that Palmer has been excluded from Thomas Tuchel’s England squad, along with a fair few others who you imagine will have been checking the availability of villas in Ibiza this last week.
Palmer scored a cracker from 25 yards here, but he struggled to dictate this contest overall.
Not since the Club World Cup final win over Paris Saint-Germain have we seen what we might describe as a ‘proper Palmer performance’. The type where those in attendance walk away thinking, oof, he is one the world’s best.
