The club was originally founded in April 2015 by Phillip McGuire and Joanne Campbell when Sunderland City Juniors joined the Russell Foster Youth League. Since then the values of our club haven’t changed. We’ve always wanted to encourage our young people to get involved in grassroots football. It’s a great way to keep fit and active, improve their social skills, technical ability as footballers but most importantly, we want them to enjoy themselves, have fun and to forge bonds and long lasting friendships with their team mates.

When we started back in 2015, we had one team, SCJ Porterfield (pictured). In fact, one member of that very first team, Lewis Selbie, still represents our club with SCJ Bennett U17’s. This was quickly followed by our Gabbiadini and Montgomery teams. The club continued to grow, adding seven more teams; Phillips, Arca, Horswill, Quinn, Defoe, Ball and Raich Carter. Moving forward to June 2023, we introduced our first all girl teams; Houghton and Scott, as well as our mixed teams; Quinn and Ball, along with our Disability Team, SCJ Comets. As of September 2024, we are delighted to announce our newest junior team, SCJ Gabbiadini and for the very first time in our short history, we now have a senior men’s team, Sunderland City FC. 

We are constantly welcoming new young footballers of all abilities to our Mini Kickers, Wildcats and Squad Girls sessions, all in the hope that we can help to inspire our young people to become better players.