Up in Newcastle, the region's biggest club is ostensibly on the rise, sitting pretty in the Championship promotion spots and reinvigorated by the presence of Rafa Benitez in the dugout. But zoom out and the trajectory is far less rosy: two relegations in a decade for a club that, 20 years ago, were fighting for the right to be called the best in the country.That was the same time that Juninho began his fling with Middlesbrough – one of English football's great recent tales – lighting up the Riverside along with Fabrizio Ravanelli and Emerson. Two years later, Kevin Phillips was firing Sunderland to the first of successive seventh-place finishes, his 31 league goals making him not just the top scorer in England – edging ahead of Newcastle's Alan Shearer – but the whole of Europe.READ MORE: Has Football Developed an Unhealthy Obsession With Grief?
Even with the evergreen Jermain Defoe in the side, Sunderland look doomed to relegation this term // PA Images
Equally stark of late has been the region's economic state. Historically, of course, the north-east was an industrial heartland: coal mining fuelled the entire region, while Middlesbrough was built on iron and steel production, Sunderland on ship building and glass works, Hull on shipping and fishing.READ MORE: The Rise and Fall of Mido, the Man Who Outgunned Zlatan
The Sunderland experience has not been pleasant for David Moyes // PA Images
The sense of abandonment is nothing new. "My heritage is the time of the miners' strikes and I don't think my generation will ever lose the feeling of being up against it," says Caulkin. "There is that feeling of being left to rot, to get on with it, without enough help from central government. That was a long time ago of course – although what happened on Teesside recently was a reminder of that."READ MORE: What the Development of Kit Sponsors Tells Us About the Premier League
Once Premier League title aspirants, Newcastle have become a yo-yo club in recent years // PA Images
Think about how the 1990 World Cup saw a north-east quartet of the highest calibre – Bryan Robson, Paul Gascoigne, Peter Beardsley and Chris Waddle – in an England team managed by Bobby Robson, while at the Euros last summer the region's representation began and ended with Jordan Henderson and Fraser Forster. The correlations are neither simple nor perfect – Humberside's most prosperous years saw Hull City languishing in English football's fourth and fifth tiers, for instance – but they do exist.It's not all bleak, however. Optimism may only ever be cautious on Tyneside but Newcastle are almost certainly coming up, and will do so as "a slightly different club," says Caulkin. Why? "Benitez has brought back a sense of purpose, of striving to compete with the best – that old-fashioned idea of being a big club." The city's forecasted economic growth over the next decade is second only to Manchester among northern cities.In Sunderland, a £42m manufacturing park is being built on the town's outskirts, while a long-derelict city-centre site is being redeveloped after two decades. Both will bring jobs. Hull's City of Culture status has brought genuine change, companies having invested over £1bn in the city since the announcement and the town even named by a major travel guide as one of the world's top 10 cities to visit. Middlesbrough was recently found to have one of the fastest-growing digital sectors in the country, thanks in large part to Teesside University. These are relative baby steps, though. And, for the moment, any buoyancy is not reflected in the football clubs of any of those three towns.Whether these schemes will develop into something more significant and sustainable, something that north-east football could reap the benefits of, remains to be seen. As it stands, mismanagement only half-explains the rot that has set in among the region's dominant clubs: there's been negligence, yes, but there's been neglect too.When the crises do intermittently hit, it's the players who are labelled bottlers, the managers bunglers, the owners bloodsuckers. All true enough. But as far as north-east football as a whole is concerned, perhaps the biggest parasite is in fact an entire city, 300 miles to the south.@AlexHessREAD MORE: An Ode to Jermain Defore, Football's Great Survivor
