The inside story of Sunderland AFC’s most influential fan podcast

The Stadium of Light ahead of a Wear-Tyne Derby.

From back-bedroom banter to global Netflix exposure – and standing up for the truth regardless of the consequences – the Wise Men Say podcast has documented over a decade of Sunderland AFC’s highs and lows.

Joe Burton reports…

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Long before football podcasting became a slick, multi-million-pound industry, a group of Sunderland fans spotted a gap in the market.

In 2013, they set out to build a proper, professional voice for supporters, unaware they were about to become wrapped up in one of the most turbulent decades in the club’s history.

For Stephen Goldsmith, a recent University of Sunderland graduate working on the Sun FM news desk, the podcast medium was an exciting new frontier. After appearing as a guest on Liverpool FC’s ‘The Anfield Wrap’, he realised Sunderland needed a high-quality equivalent.

“I was only really just starting to become aware of podcasts, so obviously they weren’t a new thing then, but they were quite niche in terms of the general audience and general public,” he said. “When I was listening back, I thought it was quite cool, like ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could do one of those for Sunderland?’ – and it wasn’t easy to do then!”

That was putting it mildly. Back then, a football podcast usually meant a couple of lads shouting into a terrible microphone in a back bedroom.

But Goldsmith wasn’t deterred.

 

 

“People were trying to do amateur ones from home and the sound quality was terrible” he said. “You had to be a proper tech geek to even get your head around how you could broadcast that kind of stuff. You needed a certain element of equipment, and if you listen back to ones where they tried to do it like that, it just didn’t sound very professional. 

“Because I was at Sun FM, I had access to the studio. Gareth Barker – the other lad I started it with – his degree is in media production, so he knew all that side of it. I knew how to record and use basic software but in terms of publishing it, I didn’t have a clue!”

 

I always appreciate the love, it’s always great. It never ceases to amaze me

 

The initial aim was legitimacy.

A real step up came when Sun FM noticed Wise Men Say building a serious audience and wanted a piece of the action, bringing former Sunderland player Michael Proctor into the equation.

“We were a bit uneasy at first because we understood they wanted a footballer for credibility, but we didn’t know anything about him or if he was going to be any good. Once we spoke to him a couple of times, we realised that actually, he’s really, really, really good and really insightful, and it worked.”

The podcast reached professional-sounding heights, becoming a polished voice for supporters. But this was Sunderland, and the polished Premier League era wasn’t destined to last.

 

Down in the dumps…

When the club was relegated in 2017, the landscape shifted. Proctor stepped back to take a coaching role at the Stadium of Light, which he still holds to this day. As the team spiralled into the Championship, the previous serious BBC-style analysis felt redundant. The podcast pivoted, shifting its tone to match the mood inside the Stadium of Light.

“By the time we were relegated it was very much self-deprecating by that point,” Goldsmith admits. “I think it was very much a case of ‘You’re going to laugh or cry’ about the situation we were in.”

Abandoning the ‘shiny radio’ format, the podcast leaned into gallows humour, becoming a vital release valve for Goldsmith and the supporters.

By 2018, following Sunderland had become a punishment.

 

 

“No fan of any other club has been through what we go through week by week. It’s like a recurring nightmare you can’t wake up from,” he told listeners after a miserable 2-0 defeat to Preston North End in March 2018, in which midfielder Darron Gibson had been arrested hours before kick-off after drunkenly crashing his car.

He urged fans to pat themselves on the back for simply turning up, signing off with a message to the outsiders nationally who had pointed and laughed at the team’s collapse: “All the wider media who think it’s fun to just look and mock us, go f**k yourselves!”

“It was therapy,” he says plainly. “It sounds corny but it really got me through those dark days, because I instantly had a platform and an outlet to get stuff off my chest, to talk about it.”

This misery made for excellent television.

In 2018, Netflix released ‘Sunderland Til I Die’, documenting the ill-fated Championship relegation season. Cameras filmed across the club, including inside the Wise Men Say studio.

“It was surreal once it aired. Once the filming was going on, you got used to it and you just took it in your stride, to be honest,” Goldsmith says. Since Sun FM regularly brought guests into the studio anyway, having random people watching wasn’t entirely unusual.

If credibility was the aim, it had certainly been achieved. When the series aired, the intro snippet ‘Welcome along to the Wise Men Say Podcast’ became a regular fixture for viewers globally, and the podcast’s social media following skyrocketed.

But the hardest test of their journalistic credibility came when it finally looked like Sunderland were being saved.

 

The toughest test…

When Stewart Donald and Charlie Methven bought the club in 2018, independent fan media were granted unprecedented access to senior figures.

“Charlie Methven’s rationale initially was to think that it’s different now to when we were in the Premier League,” Goldsmith says. 

“In League One we were getting a paragraph in each of the national papers, so why shouldn’t they give their energy to those outlets where they’d got some prominent fan media? It was great, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I totally got what his idea was for and it was great to speak to Jack Ross and get all of that stuff.”

They were even given a slot performing in the club’s fanzone on a matchday.

But things shifted when contributor and finance expert Chris Weatherspoon looked deeper into the new ownership.

“He cottoned onto something that most people wouldn’t, any standard person. I wouldn’t have a clue about finances,” Goldsmith admits. “He had to persuade us. We weren’t on board at first, we thought he was being really negative, but then he broke it all down into layman’s terms for us and we were like ‘Look, I think you’re right, this is probably not all it seems’ – and it went quite quickly downhill from there.”

It left the podcast with a tough decision.

“We had a choice to make – to sacrifice all that access we were getting for speaking out about what we thought was right,” he says. “We sat down and said that obviously, if we do this, that’s probably something we’re going to lose. And it was very much like ‘Can we have a word please, gentlemen’, and we knew what was coming.”

They lost their fanzone slot and the behind-the-scenes access dried up, but their integrity remained intact.

“It’s the bigger picture, and you want to be on the right side of history,” Goldsmith states. “I think the bigger picture is the Sunderland fans; we just want the best for the club first and foremost and that should always be the driver. That’s why we went in on that.”

Fast-forward to today, and the picture is vastly different. The old ownership is gone, and the club is back in the top flight, playing in Europe for the first time in half a century. The podcast is still there, navigating the current era just as they did the dark days.

“It’s good because we’ve never plateaued at a place of indifference, have we?” he laughs. “It’s always been a crash downwards and a sharp increase upwards.”

Despite the fluctuations on the pitch, the core focus remains the same after almost 15 years.

He says: “I’d always want people to think that we’re normal fans who have the back of other normal fans, and we don’t position ourselves too seriously or try to present ourselves in a way that makes us different from anyone else. 

“I would hope that people just enjoy listening to us probably because of how long we’ve done it – and I always appreciate the love, it’s always great. It never ceases to amaze me.”