Sunderland are fifth in the Premier League following their promotion. Here, we look at the numbers behind their impressive start to life back in the big time.
Nobody could have seen this coming.
After consecutive seasons of all three promoted teams going straight back down, the expectation was that this year’s contingent would struggle with the step up to the Premier League as well. At least to begin with, anyway.
And if anyone was going to be ready for their return to the top flight, it was surely going to be Leeds or Burnley, the two teams who stormed to 100 points in the Championship last season. Not the side that finished 24 points behind those two, scored just 58 goals in their 46 games – fewer than eight other teams in the league – and required injury-time winners to get through their victories in both the play-offs semi-final and the final.
But Sunderland are surpassing all expectations with their start to life back in the big time.
Six games into 2025-26, they have won three games and have 11 points. They are flying high in fifth place in the table. Theirs is the best start any newly promoted team has made to a Premier League season since West Ham in 2012-13 (also 11 points). No promoted side has picked up more points since Nottingham Forest got 14 from their first six games in 1994-95.
Remarkably, they have a better Premier League record in 2025 than each of Leicester City, Ipswich or Southampton, despite the fact those teams played 19 games this year before relegation at the end of last season. Sunderland, of course, have played just six.
They don’t look like those relegated teams, though. They look like they belong here. They are making a mockery of the idea that the gap between the first and second tiers in England is too big.
What makes their start so impressive is how great the turnover was in personnel over the summer, and how, in spite of that, they have such palpable team spirit. Fourteen new players have come in, but they look like they have been playing together for years.
“It’s so important,” manager Régis Le Bris said this week. “The togetherness is non-negotiable. If you don’t work hard for the squad, you can’t be in the squad.
“Even now, that is contagious. With the new players, I think we recruited really well because their personalities match really well with our squad.”
The challenge of managing such significant player turnover should not be underestimated. As well as the difficulties of ensuring new players settle, Le Bris also has to keep the overall feeling in the squad positive, when so many key players in their promotion season have now been cast aside.
Of the 30 players who featured for them in the Championship in 2025-26, only nine have played in the Premier League for them this season, and of those nine, two have now left the club, and another, former club captain Dan Neil, has only played for the duration of second-half stoppage time against Aston Villa. Neil played more league minutes than any other Sunderland player last season, but their summer recruitment has rendered him very nearly surplus to requirements.
On top of that, 10 players in Sunderland’s current first-team squad played for them last season but have not got a single minute of game time in the Premier League this term. Naturally, none of them will be entirely happy about their lack of action, so Le Bris needs to make sure no discontent creeps in.
So far, there is no sign of that happening. Those who are playing are fighting for each other as well as any other team in the league, something that was encapsulated perfectly in their 1-1 draw with Villa a couple of weeks ago.
That day, Sunderland were reduced to 10 men after only 33 minutes after Reinildo saw red for lashing out at Matty Cash, and yet they were the better team for much of the 90 minutes.
Villa haven’t been at their best this season, but they are still a formidable team, and when they went a goal up – while already a man up – on 67 minutes, Sunderland faced a huge challenge to get anything from the game. At that point, the Opta supercomputer gave Villa an 89.2% likelihood of victory. And yet, Le Bris’ side defied those odds to rescue a point.
In doing so, they became the only team who have come from behind in a Premier League game this season to get a result while a man down. Only one team managed to do so in the whole of last season, too, and that was eventual champions and the best team in the country, Liverpool (who did it twice – vs Fulham and Crystal Palace).
Clearly, coming from behind after having a man sent off is a very, very difficult thing to do, and not something you’d expect of a newly promoted team.
While there has been a great deal of upheaval at the Stadium of Light, Le Bris insisted in his press conference on Thursday previewing the trip to Manchester United that he has also gone to some effort to maintain consistency.
“We [didn’t] start from scratch this season, the identity is always there,” he said.
Part of that club identity, and something that Le Bris has always insisted on, too, is having a young team. Sunderland had the youngest average age of their starting XIs in each of their three seasons in the Championship between promotion from League One in 2021-22 and promotion to the Premier League, and this season, only Chelsea (24 years, 143 days) have fielded younger teams than them (24 years, 346 days).
That age is being kept down by talented young players like Noah Sadiki (20) and Habib Diarra (21) in central midfield, Trai Hume (23) at right-back, Chemsdine Talbi (20) on the wing and in goal, Robin Roefs (22), who has just been nominated for the Premier League Player of the Month award for September, after conceding just one goal in his three games.
Roefs has prevented more goals with his saves (2.6) than any other goalkeeper in the Premier League this season.
He is nominated alongside Erling Haaland, Daichi Kamada, Yankuba Minteh, Martín Zubimendi, and teammate Granit Xhaka, who has been equally revelatory in the north east, but is the one player in the Sunderland team who is dragging the average age up.
Now 33, eyebrows were raised in the summer when the former Arsenal man chose to leave the Bundesliga title race and Champions League football with Bayer Leverkusen to return to the Premier League for a near-certain relegation battle.
One possible explanation was that he felt he had a point to prove, and he is doing a good job of proving his doubters wrong so far.
Xhaka is a brilliant technical midfielder who excels with the ball, but he has had to adapt to playing in a team who don’t see much of it. Sunderland have had just 43.2% possession on average so far this season.
That means doing a lot of grunt work. Only seven players have run further in the Premier League this season than Xhaka (66.0 km), and he is at least three years older than any of those seven players ahead of him. He is one of only two players in the top 25 for distance covered who is the wrong side of 30, along with Bruno Fernandes.
Xhaka also ranks in the league’s top 15 players for interceptions (seven) and for total possession regains (28). Meanwhile, excluding defenders, he has made more clearances (26) than any other player in the top flight, which shows just how deep he is doing a great deal of his most important work.
That can’t be where Xhaka really wants to be spending so much time, but these solid foundations are giving Sunderland a platform to go out and win games at this level. Only Arsenal and Palace (three each) have conceded fewer Premier League goals in 2025-26 than Sunderland (four).
“We started with a specific identity,” Le Bris said on Thursday. “To defend well and suffer together because this league is difficult. If these foundations are strong, we can then start to express ourselves.”
Xhaka has been crucial to Sunderland taking advantage of the relatively rare opportunities they do get to attack – when they can express themselves. They haven’t dominated territory in their games very much at all.
So, when they do get forward, they have had to be ruthlessly efficient. They have seven goals from just 5.7 xG this season, and have had fewer shots on target (15) than any other team in the top flight.
Xhaka has assisted each of Sunderland’s last three Premier League goals, meaning only Jack Grealish (four) has more assists than him in the competition this season. The Swiss international’s efficiency is epitomised by the fact that his three assists have come from just eight chances created, and 0.63 expected assists.
Perhaps their overperformance across the board – in front of goal, Xhaka’s creativity, and in Roefs’ shot-stopping – should be a concern. The expected points table says that Sunderland actually deserve to be 13th based on the quality of the chances they’ve created and conceded. Perhaps this is all a sign that their impressive recent form won’t continue.
But for as long as they are this high up the table, they should enjoy it. After winning at Nottingham Forest on Saturday, Sunderland ended a day in the top four of the Premier League after at least five games of a season for the first time since 30 March 2001. Their 11 points from their opening six Premier League games this season is their highest points total at this stage of a top-flight season since 1967-68 (converting to three points for a win).
In an era when promoted teams consistently struggle, it is only right that Sunderland get all the praise they deserve.
And perhaps they are solid enough at the back that this will continue. When you concede as few goals as they have done, you don’t need much to go your way at the other end to get results.
Le Bris’ fine work has been recognised by a second successive nomination for manager of the month, but he won’t start taking anything for granted.
Survival is surely, just as it was at the start of the season, still the main aim. After the start they have made to their return to the Premier League, Sunderland have a very good chance of achieving something that very few expected them to.
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Youth, Team Spirit and ‘Suffering’: How High-Flying Sunderland Are Defying Fate as a Promoted Side Opta Analyst.
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