Man, I never thought I’d spend three days of my life digging through the complete historical record of West Brom versus Sunderland. Why did I even bother? Because of a stupid, pointless argument I had with my brother-in-law, Gary, last week. The bloke drives me nuts.
We were watching the highlights from the last time they played, and Gary—a massive Sunderland supporter—was going on and on about how Sunderland historically owned the rivalry. I’m a neutral observer, but I hate when someone makes sweeping claims without proof. So, right there, I challenged him. I said, “You reckon? Let’s actually pull the numbers and see who has the better overall record. Loser buys a round of the expensive stuff.”
The Messy Start: Kicking Off the Data Hunt
I figured this would be a simple Google search. Boy, was I wrong. I opened up my laptop the next morning, coffee in hand, and typed in the obvious query. What I got back was a bunch of fragmented information. One site gave me the Premier League stats. Another gave me the FA Cup history. A third had some ancient records from the 1920s, but they looked dodgy. It was a complete patchwork.
I realized quickly I couldn’t trust any single source. If I was going to beat Gary and claim that expensive whiskey, I had to build my own damn database. That meant going old school and cross-referencing everything.
My first move was to identify the most reliable archives. I started hitting up historical football data platforms, focusing on sites that catalogued Division One, Division Two, and the modern equivalents. I had to manually filter and isolate every single official competitive match between West Bromwich Albion (WBA) and Sunderland A.F.C.
I spent hours scrubbing data. You wouldn’t believe the inconsistencies. Sometimes the date was off by a day, or the competition name was slightly different. I fired up a simple spreadsheet and started plugging away, creating columns for:
- Date of Match
- Competition (League, FA Cup, League Cup, etc.)
- Venue
- WBA Score
- Sunderland Score
- Result (WBA Win, SAFC Win, Draw)
I committed to only counting official competitive fixtures. No friendlies, no testimonials. That was a firm rule I set down to keep the integrity of the data.
The Grind: Compiling the Head-to-Head Totals
Once I had what looked like a solid, clean list—which involved verifying hundreds of historical entries, going all the way back to their earliest meetings in the late 19th century—the real fun began: the calculation.
I ran the numbers through the spreadsheet filters. I was looking for overall supremacy. Gary thinks in absolutes, so I needed an absolute winner.
The total number of competitive matches was higher than I expected—over 150 encounters. That’s a serious rivalry history, spanning over a century of English football.
I broke the analysis down into stages, because just saying ‘total wins’ isn’t enough to settle an argument with Gary. You need the nuance. I pulled separate totals for:
- Overall Wins (The big one)
- Total Draws
- Overall Goals Scored (A good tiebreaker)
- Cup Competition Head-to-Head (FA and League Cup)
- League Competition Head-to-Head
This process of filtering and verifying took up most of my Saturday. My wife kept asking why I looked like a crazed historian staring at ancient documents. I told her, “This isn’t history, this is about principle and expensive booze.”
The Reveal: Settling the Score
After all that hammering away at the keyboard and squinting at historical league tables, the final totals emerged. And they were surprisingly close, but one team definitely edged it. This is what I discovered and tallied up:
Total Matches Played: X (I won’t give the exact number, but it’s high)
Overall Wins:
The total win column was the shocker. Historically, across all competitions, WBA held a slight but distinct lead in total match victories. It wasn’t a landslide; they were maybe five or six wins ahead in the grand scheme, but it was enough to settle the bet.
The Nuance Breakdown:
Interestingly, when I isolated the records, Sunderland actually had a slight upper hand in total league wins, especially during some dominant eras they had pre-WWII. However, WBA completely cleaned up in the cup competitions. They were historically much stronger when they met in the FA Cup or League Cup. The cup wins WBA racked up were the critical difference makers that pushed their overall total over the line.
So, the overall verdict I reached and cemented with cold, hard data was clear: West Bromwich Albion has the better overall record in competitive fixtures against Sunderland A.F.C.
I printed out the entire spreadsheet, walked over to Gary’s place that evening, and just dropped the pile of paper on his kitchen table. I didn’t need to say a word. I just pointed at the overall win column and then looked at him with a smirk. He spent twenty minutes arguing about why pre-war data shouldn’t count, but rules are rules. He challenged the premise, I delivered the facts.
He grumbled and complained, but eventually, he conceded. Tonight, I’m getting that expensive whisky. Sometimes, proving a point is worth the hours of messy data work.
