With Liverpool as favourites to win the League, Sunderland are favourites to go straight back down.
Liverpool are currently the favourites to win the Premier League this season. The Reds may have lost the Community Shield on penalties against Crystal Palace, however it remains a fact that they have the most balanced side in the league and are proven winners.
With that said, there will also be eyes on the three promoted sides to the Premier League this season- namely Burnley, Leeds and Sunderland. Will the trio survive? That will be a question on the mind of many Premier League die-hards going into the new season
The last two seasons will not give the three promoted sides much inspiration. During the last two consecutive seasons, the three promoted sides went straight back to the Championship. The victims last season were Leicester City, Ipswich Town and Southampton.
Things don’t especially look good for Sunderland. Granted, the Black Cats journey back to the top of English football after a rather troubled last decade which saw them relegated from the Premier League and into League One has been inspirational but surviving in the top-flight of English football in the current day and age is another matter altogether. The Black Cats gained promotion via the Championship playoffs as they finished fourth in the Championship last season. They were not even favourites to win the playoffs as third place Sheffield United had 90 points and 14 more than them.
Recent history does not do Sunderland’s chances of avoiding the drop any good. In the last 11 seasons, the team that has won the Championship playoffs has been relegated back to the second tier of English football seven times. Brentford have been the most successful of the teams to win the playoff in recent years. They have established themselves as a solid Premier League team and also picked up a respectable 46 points in the 2021-22 season after they were promoted.
But with former Brentford manager Thomas Frank having now taken charge of Tottenham and the Bees under the management of the untested Keith Andrews, there are also question marks over how they will perform this season.
These days, a team needs not just Premier League experience but quality Premier League experience if it wants to stay up. Sunderland have shown that they are intent on trying their best to preserve their top-flight status by bringing in the likes of Granit Xhaka and Arthur Masuaku. Xhaka is a class talent who is best remembered for his time with Arsenal while Masuaku previously had a seven year spell with West Ham and clocked over 100 Premier League appearances in that time. Both Xhaka and Masuaku were decent Premier League players at one time and while they will add much needed depth and experience to the Black Cats squad for the new season, they are both above 30 and well above their prime.
Given their situation as well as the dynamics of the modern-day Premier League, you can bet that Sunderland are currently the favourite side to finish last this season and go straight back to the Championship. Then again, football sometimes does have a habit of springing out surprises.
