Few things in football can compare to the EFL Play-Offs, with its high stakes, melodrama and unpredictability making it one of the most enjoyable spectacles in the sport.
In the run-up to Sunday’s Championship Play-off final between Leeds United and Southampton, there has been the usual focus on how much victory would be worth to either side. Reaching the Premier League can be extremely lucrative, which is why owners of second tier clubs risk blowing a shed load of their cash on getting there.
They call it the £170 million game, a figure calculated through television and prize money the winning side can be expected to earn just from being in the top division. (The number is £140m for today’s sides due to parachute payments.)
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It is a transformative figure for a football club, especially when compared to the relatively paltry amounts of money on offer in the league below. As Nick Harris pointed out ahead of the 2019 final between Aston Villa and Derby County, West Ham United’s win over Blackpool in 2012 exemplifies this better than just about any other playoff final in recent memory.

One can easily argue the Sliding Doors fixture of the 2012 Championship play-off altered the course of both clubs’ history. Here’s the ‘proof’: we now know, all these years later, the 2012 Champ play-off wasn’t worth £90m to West Ham, but more than £1bn. pic.twitter.com/YFYTUCdBx1
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