The Championship play-off final has come and gone, and the Premier League’s new faces for the 2025-26 season are confirmed. Coventry City, Ipswich Town, and Hull City are heading up, while Wolverhampton Wanderers, Burnley, and West Ham United have been relegated.
The stories behind this season’s promoted and relegated sides are worth telling, and they have not gone unnoticed by followers of the game or by a major name in sports betting. A quarter-century wait ended at one club, an extraordinary disciplinary scandal reshaped the play-offs at another, and a final-day relegation battle produced one of the most painful exits in recent Premier League history.
Here is a closer look at each club’s defining talking point.
Coventry City – 25 years in the waiting
Frank Lampard’s Coventry City ended a 25-year absence from the top flight after a 1-1 draw at Blackburn Rovers confirmed their return. The Sky Blues had last been in the Premier League in the 2000-01 season, meaning an entire generation of supporters had grown up without top-flight football at their club.
Lampard inherited a side with real quality and built on it, guiding them to automatic promotion with a title-winning campaign. For a club that had spent years grinding through the lower reaches of the Championship, returning as champions rather than scrambling through the play-offs made it all the more significant.
Ipswich Town – back-to-back seasons in the top flight
Ipswich Town secured automatic promotion alongside Coventry, completing consecutive seasons in the Premier League after their return to the Championship last year. Under a settled squad and clear identity, the Tractor Boys confirmed they are no passing presence in the top flight. Their first season back ended comfortably clear of the relegation zone, and a second successive promotion underlines just how far the club has come in a short space of time.
Hull City – sixth-place finish and play-off victory
Hull City’s promotion was arguably the most dramatic of the three. They only qualified for the play-offs on the final day of the season, but eventually became the first team since Blackpool in 2010 to be promopted despite finishing sixth. They beat Millwall 2-0 across two legs of the semi-final before facing Middlesbrough at Wembley.
The final itself arrived on the back of one of the most chaotic disciplinary episodes in EFL history. Southampton had beaten Middlesbrough in the original semi-final, but were subsequently expelled from the play-offs after being found guilty of filming Boro’s training session ahead of the first leg. Their analyst was photographed near Middlesbrough’s Rockliffe Park training ground, and Southampton admitted multiple breaches of EFL regulations, which resulted in them being removed from the final entirely.
Middlesbrough were reinstated, but despite only having a few days to prepare for their new opponents, Hull won the final 1-0, with Oli McBurnie scoring a stoppage-time winner. The Tigers have now won all three of their Championship play-off final appearances, adding this to victories in 2008 and 2016.
West Ham United – the cruelest of exits
West Ham’s relegation from the Premier League was confirmed on the final day of the season in the most painful circumstances imaginable. Going into the last round of fixtures, the Hammers needed to beat Leeds United and rely on Tottenham Hotspur losing to Everton. They did their part, winning 3-0 at Elland Road, but Spurs did not. A 1-0 victory over the Toffees at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, via a first-half goal from Joao Palhinha, was enough to send West Ham down.
West Ham finished with 39 points, which is the highest total a relegated Premier League side has accumulated in 15 years, since Blackpool went down with the same tally in 2010-11. It is a damning reflection of how tight the bottom of the table was this season, and how little margin there was for error.
Burnley – a quick return to the second tier
Burnley’s relegation confirmed a pattern that has become familiar for the Clarets at this level. They had gone up the previous season and were unable to sustain their form against Premier League quality, winning just four times all season.
Despite moments of promise during the campaign, too many dropped points at home, and a failure to find consistency in attack ultimately condemned them to an immediate return to the Championship.
Wolverhampton Wanderers – a long-running decline reaches its conclusion
Wolves had been treading water in the lower half of the Premier League for some time, and this season the weight of that finally told. A squad that had been largely dismantled over successive windows, combined with managerial instability, left the club unable to compete consistently at the top level. Having gone winless for their first 19 games of the season, their relegation was not a surprise by the end of a difficult campaign, but it does bring the curtain down on a seven-year stint in the Premier League.
