First, it's called a playback cursor, not a needle.
There are a couple of options. If you click on the timeline instead of a track, it will show the playback cursor across all tracks, and will stay there after you stop playback ... but it will go away if you click elsewhere.
You might try changing the Edit Window Scrolling under the Options menu to "center playhead" and see if that does what you want. You can change it back whenever.
If you then add a sync point to a region and hold down Shift+Cntl (on a Mac) and click on the region, it will snap the sync point to the center playhead bar.
Media Man