Sunderland A.F.C.
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Full name : Sunderland Association Football Club
Nickname(s) : The Black Cats, The Mackems
Founded : 1879, (as Sunderland District Teachers)
Ground : Stadium of Light
(Capacity 49,000)
Chairman : Niall Quinn
Manager : Roy Keane
League : Premier League

Sunderland
--------------------------------------------------------------------    Sunderland Association Football Club is a professional association football team based in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, in North-East England. They play in the Premier League and are one of the most successful clubs in English football, having only won six First Division titles and two FA Cups. They moved to the Stadium of Light in 1997 after 99 years at Roker Park. The Sunderland fans were recently voted the loudest windgers in the Premier League following a survey which was carried out at every ground in the league.
   Before the Second World War, Sunderland were league champions six times - in 1892, 1893, 1895, 1902, 1913, and most recently in 1936, when they became the last team wearing striped shirts to win the league. They were elected into the football league in 1890, becoming the first team to join after the league's birth in 1888. Sunderland stayed in the top flight until 1958, a record which only Arsenal have bettered since, in 1992. The club won their first FA Cup in 1937 with a 3-1 victory over Preston North End.
   Sunderland's major triumph post World War II was the club's second FA Cup victory in 1973, when the club secured a 1-0 victory over Leeds United thanks to an Ian Porterfield goal and a terrific double save from Jimmy Montgomery (who has the record number of appearances for Sunderland).
   They have a long-standing and fierce rivalry with local team Newcastle United. The Tyne-Wear derby between Newcastle United and Sunderland has been played since 1898.
Nicknames
--------------------------------------------------------------------    In 2000 following a poll on the official Sunderland A.F.C. website, Sunderland confirmed the football club's traditional nickname of "The Black Cats".
   There is a long historical link between Black Cats and Sunderland; including the "Black Cat Battery", a battery gun based on the River Wear, according to Sunderland A.F.C.. This link is reinforced by folklore in which the black cat is said to bring luck.
   Raine's "Eye Plan" of c.1785-90 shows two of the (ultimately four) gun batteries on the south side of the Wear which guarded the rivermouth during the Napoleonic wars. This battery site would later evolve into Militia Barracks during the course of the nineteenth century . An annotation to the 1984 published version of Raine's Eye Plan states that one of the two batteries was named the John Paul Jones Battery after the American naval hero who sailed down the English East coast in 1779 with a squadron of warships intending to disrupt the coal trade. In 1805 the battery was manned by local militia, the Sunderland Loyal Volunteers, one of whom was a cooper by trade named Joshua Dunn. He, it was said, "fled from the howling of an approaching black cat, convinced by the influence of the full moon and a warming dram or two that it was the devil incarnate". From that point onwards the John Paul Jones Battery was known as the Black Cat Battery.
   As well as the "Team of All Talents" at the turn of the 20th century, Sunderland was also known as the "Bank of England club" during the 1950s. This was due to the club's huge spending on the transfer market at the time, which saw the transfer-record broken twice.
   At the beginning of the 2006-07 season, the purchase of the club by the Irish Drumaville consortium, the appointments of Niall Quinn and Roy Keane to their respective roles as chairman and manager, as well as the relatively large number of Irish players in the squad (nine players out of 34) led some fans to jokingly dub the team "Sund-Ireland".