By Tom Hancock
The semi-finals kick off this Friday, with Millwall facing Hull City and Southampton taking on Middlesbrough over two legs for a place in ‘the richest game in football’: the final at Wembley on May 23.
Here, we assess each of the play-off semi-finalists’ campaigns up to now and their chances in the English second tier’s great annual post-season show.
Millwall
Millwall have already enjoyed their best campaign since relegation from the old First Division in 1990, falling one point short of automatic promotion, but head coach Alex Neil knows their “unbelievable season” could get a whole lot better.
The only manager in these play-offs who can attest to what it takes to win them – having led Norwich City to the Premier League 11 years ago (and taken Sunderland up from League One the same way in 2022) – Neil certainly has experience on his side – and the Scot’s know-how has evidently stood Millwall in good stead up to now.
In the Championship play-offs for the first time in 24 years, Millwall will doubtless hope to draw on the famously vociferous atmosphere of The Den – though it’s on the road where they truly excel, finishing with the best regular-season away record of 41 points, with their 11 away wins including a 3-1 triumph at semi-final opponents Hull in March.
But Millwall are more likely to shut a team out than blow them away, as they proved by keeping a division-high 18 clean sheets and conceding the third-fewest goals behind the top two (49). That’s testament to the Lions’ tenacious defending, built around the centre-back partnership of Caleb Taylor and captain and Player of the Year Jake Cooper – the former of whom they’ll be hoping is fit for the play-offs, having missed the last two games with a foot injury.
At the other end of the pitch, winger Femi Azeez and striker Josh Coburn are Millwall’s form men, the former scoring three goals in the last three regular-season games – including both in the 2-0 final-day win over Oxford United – and the latter five in the last 10. As with Taylor, though, the Lions are sweating on the fitness of Coburn after he was forced off with a hip problem against Leicester City two weeks ago.
Southampton
The form team heading into the play-offs, Southampton didn’t lose a Championship game between mid-January and the end of the regular season – not to mention upsetting Premier League leaders Arsenal in the FA Cup quarter-finals then leading Manchester City before eventually succumbing to defeat in the semis.
Rewind six months, though, and the Saints didn’t look anything like a play-off team. After just two wins from their first 13 Championship fixtures, a second successive relegation looked the likelier prognosis for the side who propped up the Premier League table last term. Then along came Tonda Eckert.
Initially named interim head coach following the sacking of Will Still at the start of November, U21 coach Eckert instantly transformed Southampton’s fortunes and was soon handed the first-team job on a permanent basis. By mid-March, the Saints were in the top six, and they were still in contention to go up automatically until their penultimate game.
Despite their early-season struggles, Southampton went on to finish with the third-best home record in the Championship, losing only three times at St Mary’s. As Arsenal discovered last month, it’s a tough place to go – and the Saints can lean on home advantage in the second leg of their semi-final against Middlesbrough.
Southampton are also the division’s second-highest scorers in 2025/26 behind champions Coventry; they’re more than capable of overpowering their way to Wembley. Seven Saints players have notched seven or more league goals this term, with Cyle Larin enjoying a purple patch of late: the Canadian international, on loan from Mallorca, struck five times in the final seven games of the regular campaign, including once in each of the last three. Larin and co. are consistently fed by the team’s abundance of reliable creative outlets, with Brazilian winger Léo Scienza – a revelation since joining from German club Heidenheim last summer – chief among them with 10 assists.
Middlesbrough
Like Millwall, Middlesbrough could have snatched automatic promotion on the final day; instead, they go into the play-offs for the third time since relegation from the Premier League nine years ago. And they’ll be hoping it’s a case of third time lucky, having lost in the semi-finals on each of the previous two occasions.
Until early March, Boro looked well on course for a top-two finish – indeed, they occupied second place as recently as April 25 – but a return of two wins from their final 10 regular-season games ultimately put paid to that. Still, they have a shot at promotion amid a campaign of managerial upheaval, Kim Hellberg having succeeded Rob Edwards in November after Edwards left for top flight Wolves.
Despite struggling to keep clean sheets in recent weeks, Middlesbrough boast the Championship’s stingiest defence in terms of Expected Goals (xG) conceded, giving up a league-low total of 44.1 xG at an average of 0.96 per game over the course of the regular season. They’ll need to channel that kind of rearguard rigidity if they’re to thwart a free-scoring Southampton side in the semis.
Key in that regard could be long-serving captain Dael Fry. Never shy of putting his body on the line, averaging a joint Championship-high 1.6 blocks per game in 2025/26, the 28-year-old is Boro through and through and will no doubt be determined to represent his boyhood club in the top flight for the first time.
While they be hoping Fry helps keep the goals out at one end, Middlesbrough’s biggest goalscoring threats come in the form of forwards Tommy Conway and David Strelec, who have found the net 21 times between them this season – both doing so in each of the last two matches.
Hull City
Another side who were in the hunt for automatic promotion earlier in the campaign, Hull appeared to have blown their play-off hopes after going six games without a win in April. But the Tigers went into the final day knowing they still had a chance with sixth place up for grabs – and their comeback victory over Norwich City, coupled with Wrexham and Derby County dropping points, saw them into the Championship post-season for the first time in a decade.
By both points total and form, Hull are the play-off outsiders: they finished seven points off fifth-placed Boro and won only three out of 12 games between the beginning of March and the end of the regular season, losing 3-1 at home to Millwall during that period. History isn’t on their side in one respect either: no team finishing sixth in the Championship has gone on to win the play-offs since Blackpool in 2010.
However, history bodes well for Hull in another sense: they have a 100% second-tier play-off success record, earning promotion to the Premier League via that method in 2008 – when they reached the top flight for the first time in their history thanks to Dean Windass’ thumping Wembley volley against Bristol City – and 2016, either side of automatic promotion as Championship runners-up in 2013.
Manager Sergej Jakirović – hoping to end his first season in England in glorious fashion – can also call upon one of the Championship’s leading goalscorers in 17-goal Oli McBurnie. Only Golden Boot winner Žan Vipotnik of Swansea City found the net more times during the regular campaign than McBurnie, who helped Sheffield United to promotion to the Premier League three years ago.
Hull have struggled to keep the goals out in recent months, managing a solitary clean sheet across 12 games in March and April (though that was against champions Coventry), but they can depend on one of the Championship’s best goalkeepers. Ivor Pandur – who earned his first senior Croatia call-up in November has made some big saves this season, recording one of the highest Goals Prevented tallies in the league (3.7).
(Images from IMAGO)
You can follow every game from the EFL on FotMob – with in-depth stat coverage, including xG, shot maps, and player ratings. Download the free app here.
Add FotMob as a preferred news source on Google by clicking – here.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.