North East leaders have vowed to leave old Tyne-Wear rivalries behind and use the region’s football feelgood factor to attract more tourists.
Next season will be the first time since 2016 that both Newcastle and Sunderland have been together in the Premier League, after a joyful few months that has seen the Magpies win the Carabao Cup and secure Champions League qualification and the Black Cats win a promotion back to the top flight in a dramatic play-off final at Wembley.
And the growing tourism industry surrounding the world’s most-watched football league is one of the areas politicians are keen to capitalise on as they bid to double the number of visitors coming to the North East over the next decade.
Latest figures estimate that 68.4 million people came to the region in 2024, slightly down from 69 million the year before.
While tourism is worth over £6.6 billion a year to the North East, it has the lowest number of both domestic and international visitors of anywhere in England.
North East mayor Kim McGuinness told council leaders and other senior figures on Tuesday that the region had not been “good enough in shouting about the North East and marketing ourselves to the rest of the world”.
Speaking at a meeting of the North East Combined Authority (NECA) cabinet in Durham, Ms McGuinness reiterated her calls for new powers that would allow her to impose a tourism levy to generate extra revenue and her ambition to bring the Olympic Games to the North of England.
Sunderland City Council leader Michael Mordey highlighted football as a key area that the North East could use to “really drive forward” tourism with two teams back in the Premier League.
As the cabinet agreed a £1.55 million investment to reconfigure inward investment agency Newcastle Gateshead Initiative (NGI) into a new body that will promote the entirety of Tyne and Wear, Northumberland, and County Durham, Cllr Mordey added that it was a “brilliant step forward for the region to speak with one voice”.
Ms McGuinness, a Newcastle fan, joked that only one of the region’s teams was in the Champions League and that “hopefully one day we might even make that two”.
Image: Newcastle City Council
Newcastle City Council leader Karen Kilgour said she and her Wearside counterpart had agreed to “keep the rivalry to football”.
She added: “It does demonstrate just how strong our region is… the sport we have from cricket, to football, to hosting rugby, the Women’s World Cup. Our cultural offer is second to none.
“This is the region people want to come to, we have demonstrated that time and time again. We did it with the MOBOs, we are doing it again with the Mercury Prize. People want to come here because they can see what an exciting region it is.”
There has been caution about ambitions to boost tourism, with complaints of travel chaos and locals being priced out of their own areas in popular destinations on the Northumberland coast over recent years.
However, Gateshead Council leader Martin Gannon said that the North East was nowhere near the kind of problems faced in “over-exploited” places like Barcelona, where there have been major anti-tourism protests.
He commented: “We read a lot about regions of the world that are over-exploited in terms of tourism, these hotspots like Barcelona, etc. But we are a long way from that, we have a long way to go.”
