Ryan Deeney

Every season, National League clubs lose players to the EFL. Last year was no different. From Kain Adom (Gateshead to Burton Albion) and Jack Taylor (Sutton United to Stevenage) to Tiernan Brooks (Gateshead to Charlton Athletic) and Beck-Ray Enoru (Tamworth to Notts County), there’s still a pipeline for non-league talent - just wait and see what happens with Lorent Tolaj this summer.

Today I’m going to scout out three more who might not only be ready for EFL football but are also readily available if the right suitor comes calling.

Edon Pruti (CB)

Sutton United

Someone honk the left-footed centre-back klaxon.

Edon Pruti joined Sutton United in the summer of 2025 on a two-year deal and impressed enough to be a mainstay in the middle of an ever-changing backline. The London-born former Albanian youth international started 35 league matches, a rare presence of stability for a team that used a whopping 43 footballers last season.

However, the picture has changed.

Manager Chris Agutter has spoken openly about wanting to achieve more in 2026-27 and believes adding experience to the group is important. He has been true to his word, signing both Will Nightingale and Jordan Moore-Taylor to complement a group that also includes Pruti, Junior Eccleston, Alex Kirk, Toby Byron and Hayden Muller (should he sign the deal on offer to him).

Pruti’s position could be the one most threatened, and having already recieved the Pete O’Rourke treatment, a move might benefit all parties.

Last year, Louorns wrote about the return of the big, powerful number 9. How do you deal with a big one of those? You get yourself a big, powerful centre-half. Just look at the size of the starting centre-backs for promoted Coventry, Millwall, Hull, Lincoln, Bromley and MK Dons.

Edon Pruti has enjoyed a meandering career path, playing academy football at both Burnley and Brentford, spending time with the likes of Hanwell Town and Loughborough University, having a brief spell in the EFL with Hartlepool United and bouncing around the higher echelons of non-league with Slough Town, Farnborough and now Sutton United.

Now 24, he stands at around six feet three inches and has reached an age where his body has properly filled out. He’s an imposing figure and one who uses his size to good effect, defending on the front foot and outmuscling opponents to attack the ball in the air, whilst also being happy to give a bit back when opponents engage in some shithousery. Those qualities saw him occasionally wear the captain's armband last season. In short, Pruti seems to love defending.

As can be expected of a National League centre-back, there are rough edges to his game. Pruti can be heavy-footed at times, preferring to defend with the game in front of him. In possession, he gets by rather than thrives and is generally best served leaving the more technical elements to teammates. And in terms of conditioning, his manager has highlighted fitness issues across the squad, meaning Pruti could probably do with a strong summer of work to prepare him for another full season.

However, it’s important to emphasise that 25/26 was only his second full season of men’s football and his first as a professional. All things considered, Pruti is developing very nicely and as a left-footer, his chances of a rise up the ladder increase.

Should he leave, Edon Pruti’s destinations are likely to fall either in the National League or League Two. Given this is an EFL piece, it’s the latter we will explore.

When Pete O’Rourke sent his tweet in April, he mentioned two clubs with relatively opposing aspirations last season: Crawley Town and Grimsby Town.

Both clubs have a track record for taking on talent from the National League, with the former a nice fit from a location point of view - Pruti was born in West London - and the latter a strong fit for Pruti’s career ambitions given their upward trajectory.

Elsewhere, Accrington Stanley are amongst the clubs that are happy to give opportunities to non-league talent and don’t currently have a natural leftie amongst their centre-back options, while from a location and stylistic point of view, Swindon Town and Colchester United represent teams that wouldn’t turn their nose up at a dominant, left-sided centre-half.

Keenan Appiah-Forson (CM)

Southend United

A non-league Ngolo Kante? I’m not budging on that.

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Daryl Dike

Sam Parry: An injury-ridden spell at West Brom has drawn a medical curtain around the doubtless talent of Daryl Dike. Yes, this is a classic “if fit” scenario, though we have to wonder whether there is still a devastating Championship striker waiting to reappear.

West Brom know only too well that too many injury-prone players can become a perfect storm. It was not that long ago – January 2026, in fact – that Daryl Dike and Josh Maja started together for the first time despite both being at the club for two and a half years.

No longer under contract, Dike is very available while also coming with a very large question mark around his availability. But given that he has just turned 26 and at least showed signs of recovery by playing 719 Championship minutes last season (the 3rd-most minutes of his EFL career to date), appearing in matchday squads consistently after the opening months, there should be clubs willing to gamble on the American putting a hamstring tear, a thigh tear and two Achilles tendon ruptures behind him.

Age: 26

Height: 187cm

Preferred Foot: Right

Status: Free Agent

Position: Striker

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Bargain hunt, anyone?

Today we are publishing the list of the 500+ EFL players to be released from their contracts (or those who are in discussions). Huge thanks to Jack Shoemark for collating the list.

Tomorrow we will publish the first in our SCOUTING series, listing the best freebies on the market, including a deep dive into three of our favourites. Sign up now to get full access to all our summer transfer content. And don’t forget, we’re doing things slightly differently this summer — you can read all about that below.

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HOW TO USE THE EFL FREE SIGNINGS TABLES

➡️ Click through the list for each league using the arrows in the top right

🔍 Filter teams, players, positions or status using the search box

Championship

League One

League Two

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Sam Parry

Transfer coverage has been at the heart of NTT20.COM ever since we started out on Substack.

Back then, we had a pretty simple conviction: the EFL transfer window lacked proper, detailed coverage. It wasn’t ignored, exactly, but it was rarely treated with real depth or seriousness. So, we decided to do something ambitious, possibly ridiculous: cover every single signing in the EFL.

For five windows, we stuck to it. Every club. Every move.

The instinct wasn’t wrong. EFL clubs deserved better copy than players “looking forward to a new challenge” and managers “very excited to bring him in”. And our subscribers deserved a place where the whole thing was taken seriously.

We do take it seriously. That’s why we’re changing the way we cover the window.

More signings don’t mean more success

If you read my recent article on set-pieces, you’ll remember that Coventry, Lincoln and Bromley — the three 2025/26 league champions — all scored the most set-piece goals in their respective divisions. You could add another line to that list of shared characteristics.

Coventry, Lincoln and Bromley all signed fewer players than their respective league average in the summer of 2025.

Average number of summer signings in each league

Coventry, Lincoln and Bromley contradict the drumbeat we have built up in our transfer coverage, which unconsciously suggests that the clubs who are doing the most are the clubs doing the best work. That is something we absolutely do not believe.

Case in point:

• The average number of signings per EFL club last summer was 11

• Among the clubs that went on to finish in the play-off places or better, 13 of 19 signed on or below the all-EFL average.

• Only 6 of those clubs signed more players than the average, and in almost all cases, by the barest of margins. See:

Instead, we know that good squad building and smart recruitment are about much more than volume, high or low. By covering every deal individually, we sometimes gave the most attention to the noisiest clubs rather than the smartest ones. We were tracking movement, when the better question was what the business for each club actually meant when applied to their specific context.

So, this summer, NTT20.COM is changing its approach – not to cover less, but to cover better. The rhythm of the transfer window on NTT20.COM will now be built around four regular strands, and we’re buzzing to get cracking.

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What’s changing?

#1 Rebuild Series

Some clubs enter the summer with a squad. Others don’t. Our Rebuild series will focus on the latter caucus, providing a club-by-club deep exploration of the biggest rebuilds in the EFL.

🚨 Coming up

• REBUILDING: Sheffield Wednesday

• REBUILDING: Middlesbrough

• Let us know who else you think needs covering

#2 NTT20 Scouts

The best part of the transfer window isn’t necessarily the done deal; sometimes it’s the player you keep hearing about. The one whose numbers jump out. The one who looks ready for the next level. The one who fits the gap you know a club has, or else is just a bloody bargain.

NTT20 Scouts will focus on players who are worth knowing about before they move. Instead of starting with a club’s new signing and working backwards, this time we will start with the player and move forwards: scouting out choice individuals and suggesting which profile of clubs should take a look at them.

🚨 Coming up

• Favourite Frees

• League One Striker Special

• Premium EFL Talent

• National League Special

#3 Done Deals

We are not abandoning completed transfers. Far from it. Done Deals will be our regular round-up of every move, with write-ups of our favourite deals.

🚨 Coming up

• Every Friday morning between July and deadline day

#4 DAG Summer Transfers Pod

And because some of the best transfer-window thinking happens in conversation, the DAG Summer Transfers Pod will run throughout the summer….

🚨 Coming up

• Ali and George joinining from the USA and England Pod duty

• We’ll hit paid subscribers up for questions

That’s it right there. The (sight and) sound of the start of your summer.

Huw Davies: Last July, I declared what I was hoping to witness in the 2025/26 Football League season. You can read the full list through the link below to have a good old laugh at my naïveté.

With subjects varying from breakthrough seasons to basic administrative competence, the vibe wasn’t so much ‘stone tablets on Mount Sinai’ as ‘megaphone on the High Street’. Someone must have listened, though, because a few prayers or predictions came true.

And, of course, many didn’t. Presenting: some of the highlights and lowlights…

I’d say my plea for there to be no clubs liquidated in 2025/26 cleared its very low bar, but points deductions for three of the Championship’s bottom four is a pretty bleak situation. At least things turned out all right for Hull in the end. “Plenty to worry about”? Pah!

We had a 156-goal increase on 2024/25, providing a solid average of 2.60 goals per game. Tick! Sort of.

The Donny boy did pretty well for a guy playing with a double hernia “literally all season”. Eight goals and seven assists from the wing is a good return in a promoted side. Doncaster Rovers may be fighting off interest in the 28-year-old this summer, provided the hernia surgery doesn’t put off suitors.

How about three? Coventry won the title, and Middlesbrough and Millwall were both in with a mathematical shout (AKA a ‘eureka’) of automatic promotion on final day. They lost in the play-offs but only because another non-parachutey team, Hull City, upset the odds to beat both.

Meanwhile, Ipswich were the division’s only parachute payment club to meet their target, finishing 2nd, whereas Southampton ended the season in disgrace, Sheffield United in the bottom half and Leicester in League One, where they’ll join a Luton side who didn’t make the most of their own payout. Maybe someone replaced the parachutes with weighted backpacks.

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The music was on. The medals had been collected. The trophy had been lifted. The champagne had been sprayed. In amongst the jubilant scene of a victorious dressing room, Hull captain Lewie Coyle, a boyhood Tigers fan who joined his hometown club from Leeds in 2020, paused his celebrations.

Coyle’s father, Chris, passed away in 2022. Coyle Snr was a familiar figure to the people of Hull. Not only did he have four sons who were or still are professional sportsmen, but he also owned a fruit stall in the city.

After leading Hull to promotion and a return to the Premier League after a nine-year absence, Lewie spoke of the guilt that he still feels following his father’s tragic passing.

A couple of days later, lifelong Notts County fan James Belshaw was in goal for the Magpies as they beat Salford 3-0 in the League Two Play-Off Final. The 35-year-old, who was a mascot for Notts when he was six, described the experience as a ‘dream come true.’

Belshaw was released by Notts in 2006, aged 15, when the club closed its centre of excellence as part of cost-cutting measures. A few years later, he went to Duke University in the US, before returning to the UK and making his way up through non-league.

Belshaw’s big break in the EFL actually came at the expense of his beloved Notts: he was in goal for the Harrogate side who beat the ‘Pies 3-1 in the 2020 National League Play-Off Final. However, more than 20 years after being forced to leave his club, the shot-stopper returned in January. Belshaw’s Dad, Paul, has been watching matches at Meadow Lane for over 60 years. He sits in the Kop behind the goal that his son now protects.

While we can’t all win promotion at Wembley, it struck me that, for many of us, a father is our why – they’re why we fell in love with football and they’re why we support the clubs we do.

When I was six, my Dad took me to Selhurst Park for the first time. Since then, we have been to hundreds of games together, including last year’s FA Cup Final and Wednesday night’s Conference League Final. His Dad – my grandad, Colin – introduced him to Palace in the late 1960s. Thirty years later, my Dad repeated the trick.

My son, Logan, is only 11 months old but he has already been papped in a Palace shirt, and he’s seen the FA Cup more than he has seen some of his more distant relatives. He even starred in a TNT Sport montage aired prior to the Community Shield. It remains to be seen whether or not Logan will continue the Watts family tradition by attending his first game before the decade is out, but the seeds are already being sewn.

Of course, this mythical figure who introduces you to football and decides which club your mood is bound to until the end of your days doesn’t have to be your father. It could be your mother, your uncle, your brother, your sister or anyone. Or maybe nobody. We should also acknowledge that some people never had this figure; they fell in love with football because of a TV show, a video game, a sticker book or that kid in the playground who could do an ‘Around the World’. Nevertheless, in time, they will likely become that influential figure to their children, and thus the cycle continues.

A collective resolution, then, for those of us lucky enough to still share these moments, on the pitch or in the stands, with our fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters and friends: to appreciate not just the football itself, but the people and shared history that comes with it.

Sam Parry

The British obsession with discussing the weather finds its match in football. Over three broiling afternoons, where pitchside temperatures rose above 35 degrees, two great pastimes converged over a strip of grass 105 metres long by 68 wide.

Thousands of supporters now will be occasionally looking down and catching a glance of tan lines that tell of victory or defeat. The sun may not have ‘won’ these play-off finals, but according to a recent study, it is likely to have played a bigger part in all three ties than we might expect.

When academics looked into elite footballing performance at the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, they found that higher temperatures reduced performance levels. Within that, the most marked influence was age. The older the player, the less they ran at all speeds when temperatures were high. Those speeds spanned sprints and jogs; the sorts of running that come when carrying the ball, closing it down, tracking runners, or moving a defensive unit up and down the pitch.

In three EFL play-off finals, each split into quarters by two drinks breaks, the ability of teams to play the conditions may just have changed the course of promotions. This wasn’t the first year that a heatwave has hit during the biggest matches of the season – the mercury at Wembley touched 41 degrees during Blackpool v Cardiff City in 2010 – so it begs a question: are there lessons that teams can learn for the next time?

Hull 1-0 Middlesbrough

If you were in any doubt of the heat’s significance, recall that Hull put Middlesbrough under the sun in the first half, turning the teams around – a rare sight at Wembley. Oli McBurnie’s eventual winner would be celebrated beneath a sea of head-clutching red.

The turnaround was a choice. It was a tactic in a different category to substitutions but perhaps no less significant, and undoubtedly interrelated.

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Sam Parry

Long before Oli McBurnie scored the goal that changed everything, fans of two clubs descended the steps from Wembley Park station and filed along Wembley Way.

“This is an alcohol-free zone.”

As the tannoy tried to impose order, it was greeted with groans, time-hurried final sips, and still-weighty cans being tossed into large black bins.

Inside the stadium, Tommy Conway hunched over his crutches and spoke into a microphone in front of the Middlesbrough end. “BRING THE F***ING NOISE.”

When it came, it was deafening.

On the other side, Hull’s supporters were boxed into the sun, hands covering eyes, bleaching in the heat. Then the whistle went, and perhaps only with hindsight did the first collision seem to suggest where this final was going.

As Boro worked the ball back to Aidan Morris from kick-off, Oli McBurnie barrelled into him, even though the ball was long gone. Morris and McBurnie became the game’s two protagonists. Boro tried to run the final through the former. Hull found their footholds through the other.

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Middlesbrough

Sam Parry

I want to turn away from the circus that brought Middlesbrough to this point. Trouble is, even with our backs to it, you can already feel the debate that would follow a win at Wembley. Promotion in these circumstances would come with baggage. It would also come with costs. We know about those. In turn, what that might mean for a club who, like a certain spy, have undergone a costume change of their own is fascinating.

Ten years ago, Middlesbrough were promoted to the Premier League. After conceding the fewest goals in the Championship during promotion in 2015/16, Aitor Karanka’s team spent a single unsuccessful season in the top flight playing rope-a-dope.

They conceded the tenth-fewest goals in the division that year – a great chin for pain, yes. But they could not throw enough jabs, despite spending close to £50m on players and assembling an absurd variety of attacking options: Álvaro Negredo, Rudy Gestede, Cristhian Stuani, Adama Traoré, Gastón Ramírez, David Nugent, Jordan Rhodes and Patrick Bamford.

Other names feel surreal in hindsight. Marten de Roon. Víctor Valdés, whose honours list runs beyond my word count.

What I find strange, looking back, is how it all’s so unlike today’s Middlesbrough. The personnel echoed previous Premier League swings involving Juninho, Emerson and Ravanelli. Stylistically, though, it feels alien now.

If football, like politics, had its own horseshoe theory, Middlesbrough have spent a decade travelling around it.

They’ve gone from hyper-defensive to hyper-attacking; pragmatism to idealism; traversing the third way, the right way and, many times, the wrong way. Yet amid all that movement, Boro may finally have stumbled upon something unusual: change that appears to have nailed it from both standpoints.

On that imaginary horseshoe, Kim Hellberg may actually sit closer to Karanka than Neil Warnock – not stylistically, but in ideological purity. Through control and attacking patterns, rather than defensive shape, his side reduces opponents to very few opportunities at all.

Since Kim Hellberg’s appointment, Middlesbrough have had more touches in the box than any other Championship team whilst conceding the second-fewest.

Of course, Hellberg inherited a very good Championship team, but he has succeeded in making it considerably more threatening. Possession is rarely used as decoration, but domination; attacking threat so considerable that opponents struggle to commit bodies forward. There are caveats: Boro don’t have the natural goalscorers to consistently finish the volume of chances they create, nor the squad depth to maintain such relentlessness over 90 minutes.

Therein lies the practical question that promotion raises.

The Premier League is punishing. Control becomes harder to impose. Space shrinks. Missed chances become losses. Mistakes become goals. Hellberg, whose teams produce wonderfully watchable football, would need either to revise elements of his approach or spend heavily and smartly to even attempt to bridge the gap.

Last time they were in the Premier League, you could characterise Boro’s squad-building as a collection of has-beens and could-bes. Newly promoted clubs always recruit with one eye on survival and another on the possibility of immediate relegation. They always have to balance what succeeded in the Championship with what can survive in the top flight.

Promotion could mean a significant change to the Hellberg blueprint. More fascinating would be if it did not, and instead, promotion meant building on the blueprint at the highest level. Or else, selfishly, enjoying more Hellberg football in the Championship with two fixtures against a nascent nemesis.

Stockport County

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Sam Parry

Spygate will cast a long shadow over Southampton Football Club. Not because the punishment was wrong or even especially harsh, but because the crime was self-evident. It is much easier for football to respond to a visible act of cheating with a visible act of punishment than to confront the many other hypocrisies it tolerates elsewhere.

Had the EFL defined a clear penalty for spying after Marcelo Bielsa admitted to sending a member of staff to watch Derby County train in 2019, the deterrent effect might have prevented all of this. Had the media not brimmed with enthusiasm before lurching so quickly into hand-wringing, the moral argument about whether spying is fundamentally worse than other forms of cheating might not have become so inflamed. But most importantly, had Southampton not spied—had they not cheated—there would be no great argument at all. That in itself tells a story.

When Middlesbrough first made a complaint to the EFL, the first leg (a 0-0 draw) had not taken place. Ahead of the second leg, where Southampton won 2-1, the appetite for the harshest punishment seemed weaker. What might have happened had Southampton lost that tie? Would the same moral certainty have followed? Football is rarely short of hypotheticals, but this case has produced more than most.

Having admitted to three charges of spying, it seems reasonable to suspect these were not three entirely isolated incidents. It also seems reasonable to wonder how many similar episodes, between Bielsa’s Leeds being caught in the act and Southampton’s own misconduct, have passed unnoticed. What cost Southampton, beyond the act of spying itself, was getting caught.

But caught they were, and it is a false equivalence to compare spying with diving, VAR controversies, professional fouls, Henry’s handball against Ireland or financial rule-breaking. Southampton must have seen a sporting advantage in cheating, otherwise they would not have done it. Even so, the speed and certainty of their removal from the play-offs must stick in the craw of anyone who looks at football’s greater ills and asks why justice is so rarely administered with the same efficiency.

Southampton do not deserve leniency simply because football has larger problems. But in the swift meting out of punishment, the question left hanging is obvious: where is the same urgency elsewhere?

Part of the answer lies in the story itself. Spygate, with its costume changes, covert behaviour and named characters, has a natural drama. It was an easy scandal to narrate and an irresistible one to moralise. It became loud very quickly, perhaps noisier than Arsenal winning a league title, because it had the shape of a caper as well as a crime: villains and heroes, battles and battlegrounds, on the pitch and in the courtroom. The ‘done by’ and the ‘done to’.

Other, more corrosive footballing offences are not always so vivid. They happen behind closed doors, in balance sheets, ownership structures, legal correspondence and careful delays. Such wrongdoings are short on drama, short on characters and often short on immediate or meaningful consequence; their victims too are diffuse. They are harder stories to tell. But Spygate reminds us that those are precisely the stories that need telling, because it offers two clear lessons.

The first is that cheating is cheating and will not be tolerated. The second is that cheating is cheating and will be tolerated. That paradox, notwithstanding the tickets bought and hotel rooms booked, is why it is possible to feel for Saints fans without pretending their club deserves anything other than exclusion from the play-offs.

Those involved should not be made convenient pariahs for a footballing environment punctuated by sportswashing, financial breaches and FIFA Peace Prizes. Of course, they have been and not without reason: justice has to be seen to be done.

Anyone who cares about football should want more of the same. It might not be as simple as saying the sport has a selective appetite for justice. But I can forgive any Southampton fan who feels that way. That isn’t whataboutery — it’s about what now, what next, and when?

Hull

Huw Davies

Firstly, if you’ll forgive the flippancy, promotion would be a satisfying middle finger to Hull’s doubters. After many – myself included – predicted pain, they’ve spent all season having their wins dismissed as either freakish or fun but unsustainable (funsustainable), then their play-off final preparations heavily disrupted. Even now, some are gloomily/gleefully saying they’ll break Derby’s record low points tally if promoted to the Premier League, having glanced at xG data without important context:

Undeniably, though, they would need a busy summer. Hull’s mish-mash squad has some underrated players but few who’d fit right into the world’s most brutally unforgiving division.

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DAG is back. Your questions are back. And thank you for every single one of them. Plenty get answered here, a few have already sparked plans for future episodes, and one received the gloriously straightforward response: “Chelsea.”

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Written by Sam Parry

1. Are we talking more about set pieces for a reason?

Theoretical considerations have always interested me. Logical reasoning too, which is why I was grateful to Opta Analyst for furnishing one suspicion with evidence: football in 25/26, if not the game itself, is played for considerably less than ninety minutes.

You need only watch the miraculously recovered goalkeeper getting to his feet and two sets of eleven players returning to their pitch from the touchline to recognise that time in football is never dead space and nearly always tactical.

In League Two, delays last longer than the ball is on the pitch. Goals. Goal kicks. Throw-ins. Corners. Free kicks. Injuries. A whole heap of miscellaneous interruptions besides; they all add up. And the best delays lead to goals.

Remember set pieces?

Sourdough predates sliced bread by centuries, and that hasn’t stopped an increasing number of people rediscovering the pleasures of airborne yeast. Not dissimilarly, set pieces have become a rising point of discussion, and like all good hipsters, we were talking about them before they were cool.

Two years ago, Ali Maxwell described set pieces through the lens of Snakes and Ladders: “Having set-piece quality is like landing on a ladder.” He was right about that. And clearly EFL clubs have sought out the ladders; in each league, set pieces have trended upwards, accounting for a greater proportion of goals year-on-year since 20/21.

All EFL set-piece goals from 2020/21 to 2025/26
Percentage figures show the proportion of total goals scored from set pieces

Ali’s board game analogy wasn’t suggesting teams rely on a dice roll but instead that dead-ball situations can provide decisive advantages in tight games. Most games are tight. And within them, set-pieces provide the most direct route to goal during the most static moment of play, making them capable of creating an edge.

In the time since that article was published, the edge has become sharper, and the harsh upward slope of the graph above reminds me of a quote by Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s long-time deputy, who said: “Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” Football works neatly in reverse. Show me a league title, and I’ll show you the incentive.

2. Do set pieces win titles?

In the EFL, where financial gaps can be significant and squad quality varies, small margins on a game-by-game level can decide promotions and relegations. The graph below plots the top seven teams in each EFL division against the number of set-piece goals they scored.

In the top right sit three neatly aligned spheres: orange, grey and pink planets lining up behind Coventry, Lincoln and Bromley. Three champions. Three teams that topped their division for set-piece goals. Three tallies, which when added up, give each a share of 90 set piece goals.

Correlation is not causation, and the dead ball is not magic. Coventry, Lincoln and Bromley won their divisions based on many factors I won’t discuss in detail: all of them scored a greater share of non-set piece goals, whether from open play, direct free kicks or the penalty spot, and that’s before mentioning the defensive work to stop the opposition in the same situations.

Still, when each EFL title winner scored 30% or more of their goals from set plays, it’s worth asking how and why, especially when you consider none of the champions are newly promoted or relegated sides, and none were amongst the top 3 highest spenders in their respective league.

Throw-ins and corners haven’t suddenly become football’s cheat code. But because set pieces are more controllable than open play, more rehearsable, more repeatable, more coachable, and compared with signing a pricy striker, relatively cheap, it stands to reason that they are an attainable advantage available to all teams.

Whatever the ambition of a football club, being good in both boxes from dead-ball situations is a huge incentive. Sometimes the gains are incremental. Sometimes, as in 25/26, they are transformational.

3. League Two | Bromley

Every team is different. Styles create attacking pressure in different ways. Some teams build territory patiently. Some cross early and often. Some move the ball forward quickly. Some press high and turn possession into chaos. Some do a hybrid.

But is there actually a recognisable set-piece identity? Do certain styles naturally create more dead-ball chances? And does that change from league to league?

League Two feels like the natural place to start. If the EFL has a stock image for a “set-piece side”, it probably lives here (and it is probably Bromley).

But first, here is the division through a set-piece lens.

The stereotype writes itself. Good set-piece teams are supposed to be physical, direct and permanently one throw-in away from marching both centre-halves into the opposition box.

Bromley fit that image rather neatly. Much of their attacking output came through Mitch Pinnock, who recorded more accurate crosses per 90 than any League Two player this season (per FotMob). The same Pinnock who takes corners and free kicks. The same one who takes long throws. The guy who never actually gets himself in the box but is responsible for getting it in there. It’s almost like they recruited smartly.

Mitch Pinnock (LM/LW) Heat Map (SofaScore)

Does that cross-heaviness have a bearing on set-piece output? For Bromley it seems to; they get in those areas through wing play.

Overall, there is a relationship here, but a fairly baggy one. Cross-heavy League Two teams do tend to score more set-piece goals, though the trend is far from overwhelming. More interesting is the shape of the league itself. League Two appears to carry a broader preference for crossing and early delivery.

That does match the eye test. Lower down the pyramid, football often becomes a little less about patient possession and a little more about getting the ball forward and asking questions later.

The relationship becomes slightly stronger when we move from crossing toward direct speed: a measure of how quickly teams progress the ball towards goal. Or, in less technical terms, the “gerrit forward” metric.

From crossing to direct speed, and also (below) possession, teams broadly trend toward or away from the Bromley model. Andy Woodman’s side were simultaneously the outlier and the archetype: move the ball forward quickly, find a wide player, wang it into the box and generate dead-ball pressure from the resulting chaos.

If Mitch Pinnock’s heatmap reflected a partial image, Omar Sowumni’s completes the picture. Perhaps nothing captures Bromley better: active in both boxes, but if anything, more heavily involved in the opposition’s.

#2 Omar Sowunmi (CB) heat map (SofaScore)

That is where they diverge from our other two champions; Bromley conceded the 7th-most set-piece goals in League Two. Their edge was all about attacking set pieces. Their success points toward a familiar conclusion: direct teams, crossing teams and transition-heavy sides appear more likely to generate set-piece value.

Which sounds rather neat. Much too neat. Because all of this still leaves one assumption untouched: Does creating more set-piece opportunities actually guarantee more success?

The answer is no. What matters more than anything is execution.

4. League One | Lincoln

While Bromley looked like football’s stock image of a set-piece side, League One starts to ask slightly different questions.

The strongest teams here succeeded in very different ways. Lincoln generated elite dead-ball output. Cardiff finished second despite producing relatively little of it. The profile feels messier. Less obvious.

Let’s start with the third-tier round-up.

Lincoln stand out immediately. Last August, Chief Executive Liam Scully explained the club’s thinking to Sky:

“Our aim is to find the biggest points of difference. It is knowing where we can shift the dial, make the biggest impact, get the biggest bang for our buck. Set-pieces, for example? We set out to be the best in the division at it. We managed to be the best in the country.”

They had delivered on that ambition in 24/25 with set-piece coach Scott Fry moving to Rangers in November off the back of their success. His departure didn’t stop them from continuing that success in 25/26 where, like Bromley, the rest of the league tends to trend away from or towards their success profile: less possession, fewer crosses, more direct speed.

With familiar ingredients, Lincoln are slightly different. Per FotMob, 10 of Lincoln’s 30 set-piece goals came from throw-ins this season, aided by Tom Hamer and one of football’s rarest pleasures: a long throw with actual end product.

With height, delivery and targets in the box, Lincoln appear to confirm with a classic set-piece recipe. Which is why what comes next feels slightly strange. Because Lincoln’s 30 set piece goals may not actually be what they seem.

What counts as a set piece goal?

Opta define set-piece goals as those beginning from a dead-ball situation — corners, free kicks, or throw-ins — that result in a shot before the phase of play has broken down into open play. In the liminal space between set-piece and open-play is where Lincoln excel.

In the second phase, clearances become loose balls. Recycled crosses create chaos. Pressure is sustained, but differently. And this creates an entirely new defensive problem. When the first ball is delivered, defending is relatively ordered. Players know their assignments. Markers are matched to runners or zones. Space has been rehearsed. Movements have been studied on the training ground.

But once the ball breaks loose, structure begins to dissolve. Defenders are caught between stepping out and holding their line; between closing down a crosser and protecting the space behind them. The rehearsed becomes situational and, dare I say it, transitional.

Gary Neville once described holidays as “mini-retirements”. The second phase of set pieces feels more like a mini-transition. The first phase is organised; the second is reactive. Players are no longer anticipating rehearsed movements but responding to uncertainty. Today, the best set-piece teams may not simply dominate the first ball. They are more likely to dominate what comes next.

Lincoln have, according to our research, scored from 10 second-phase goals — the most in League One.

5. Championship | Coventry

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Well, hello.

Our xG form guides for the EFL have been updated 👇

Words: Sam Parry

We started publishing xG form tables for all three EFL divisions back in October 2025, after the opening 10 games of the season. Expected goals data across the EFL, particularly in League One and League Two, remains relatively limited, so we hope this provides something that supporters and analysts can’t easily find elsewhere. We’re planning to build on that foundation over the summer, with home and away splits set to be added for next season — and maybe more!

As much as I always want outliers, anomalies, and teams breaking the model, we continue to place a huge amount of faith in expected goals as a clear indicator of underlying team quality. So, for the final Not The Top Table write-up of the season, I wanted to ask two questions:

1. Are those assumptions well-founded?

2. Who are the biggest outliers?*

*Answer: Hull, West Brom, Lincoln, Cardiff and Doncaster Rovers

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Let’s answer Question 1 right away.

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The graph below plots the league finish of all 72 EFL clubs against each team’s share of expected goals (xG Share) across the 2025/26 season. The overall shape of the chart is strikingly clean: teams with the highest xG shares overwhelmingly occupy the top half of the table, while sides with lower xG shares cluster toward the bottom.

Importantly, this visual does not measure whether a team over- or underperformed its underlying numbers. Instead, it examines how closely xG share aligns with long-term league outcomes.

The clearest takeaway is that there are very few big anomalies. Across all three EFL divisions, teams that consistently controlled a higher share of xG generally finished where their underlying process suggested they should.

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Championship anomalies

The first thing I want to look at is a simple head-to-head between West Brom and Hull, who were separated by 15 places, with startlingly different underlying numbers. Our comparison table shows how Baggies’ process has allowed for a substantially higher share of xG than Hull over 5-game, 10-game and season-long periods.

It’s easy to see why there is this disparity in the data when you look at the number of shots faced and taken by each club. Hull have a per-game shot deficit close to 4, whilst West Brom have a net positive of almost 3 shots per game over their opponents.

If you scan across every team, the logic holds that teams who consistently outshoot their opponents are more likely to be teams finishing higher up the table.

That said, there is evidently a wrinkle in xG models in how they underrate the performances of clubs that give up territory and shots to their opponents by dint of style or strategy. Earlier in the season, I wrote a deep dive on why Hull look not just bad but woeful in the data (and why I thought they’d win the play-offs – a prediction that’s still alive). At the time of writing, Hull were tracking at 2.10 points per game over 20 matches.

In their final 20, it was down to 1.45 PPG. While xG may not perfectly capture some context behind Hull’s success, it was ultimately a fair predictor of their regression. Had Wrexham won on final day, the Tigers would’ve lost their play-off place having once had a lead of eight points over 7th.

League One anomalies

The two automatically promoted sides lead the way as overperformers. In many ways, that shouldn’t be a great surprise. Lincoln and Cardiff went up in 1st and 2nd place for quite different reasons. The former were defensively solid, and rank amongst the best sides in the country for set-piece goals. The latter were the most possession-heavy side in the league, and sustained incredibly strong attacking output over the whole season. Ultimately, goals against triumphed over goals for in that mini-battle.

Per xG ratio, Donny were just 2% behind Lincoln, who had the 2nd-highest share in League One (Bolton had the highest). Yet they finished 14th.

I think it’s fair to say that player quality made a dramatic difference, as a newly-promoted side. After they signed Hakeeb Adelakun and Elliot Lee in January, good underlying processes came up trumps. From 1st February, Rovers took the 6th-most points in League One – more than Bradford, Stockport and Bolton.

Only Lincoln (34) scored first in more games than Donny (26, joint-second with Cardiff). Rovers were one of 11 teams in the division with a net positive shot tally, and the only one in that group to finish in the bottom half. They are massively on my radar as a team to watch over the summer.

League Two Anomalies

What stands out in the fourth tier is the sheer conformity with shot totals and league position. The only team with a net shot positive to finish outside the top half was Crawley. And what we’re really seeing is the diminishing possibility of huge outliers the further down the leagues you go.

There seems to be a far greater disparity in player quality between the best and worst teams in Leagues One and Two than in the Championship, which instead has a bigger gap between the best sides and the next-best sides.

In League Two, the teams with a distinct overperformance were all top-half, and the sides with a distinct underperformance were all in the bottom half. More to the point, the top-half sides shown below were all serious candidates for promotion throughout most of the season, while the bottom-half sides were, with the exception of Gillingham, involved in the relegation battle for most of the season.

Perhaps what this should tell us, heading into next season, is that we can count on under/overperformance being sustained in League Two more than we can in the Championship. If a team is scoring more goals or conceding fewer than their xG data would indicate – whilst posting still-decent numbers – then we can probably place trust in their greater player quality over the season.

The inverse is also true. If teams are scoring fewer goals and conceding more, even though their xG implies they should be performing better, we can probably have faith that their lack of quality is going to hurt.

Thanks for reading. See you next season.

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Huw Davies

When I think of a famous failure to convert a penalty, my mind goes to Paul Bodin in 1993, obviously, but then almost as immediately to Roberto Baggio, Chris Waddle, Diana Ross, Gareth Southgate and John Terry. They’re such powerful visuals, it doesn’t matter that I was only three and seven years old respectively during Italia 90 and USA 94. And five of those six have something in common: they were actual, genuine misses.

Whether it’s due to those examples, or the language of football declaring that an accurate penalty that’s saved is nonetheless a ‘penalty miss’, we tend to associate spotkick failures with efforts blazed over the bar or hitting the woodwork rather than penalties that are saved. It’s not an age thing: I asked around and other football fans’ memories conjure up images of David Beckham skying his kick at Euro 2004, or Asamoah Gyan hitting the bar in 2010, or Harry Kane missing his second penalty of the game against France in Qatar. (The fact that it’s so often international football is a whole other subject.)

That’s probably why, as I was sitting watching EFL highlights a few months ago, it suddenly occurred to me: nobody’s missing penalties any more. Anecdotal evidence, at least, suggested they were all being scored or saved; any failures to score seemed to be when the goalkeeper parried or even held onto a tame effort, perhaps following a slow run-up that’s almost as excruciating as the resulting embarrassment several seconds/hours later. So, I went looking through every penalty taken in the EFL this season.

And imagine my shock at what I found. Then imagine my consternation as I continued to keep track and the pattern remained.

In all, there have been 310 penalties across the Championship, League One and League Two in 2025/26. Of those, 229 were scored, 73 were saved, seven hit the woodwork and one missed the whole thing altogether.

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MINI LEAGUE

• First leg: Sunday 10th May, 3pm — Blundell Park

• Second leg: Friday 15th May, 7.15pm — Peninsula Stadium

No team have secured more points in the second half of the season than Grimsby (47). Chalk some of that up to how they’ve consistently fashioned chances from close range. One in seven of their total goals – and one in three scored by their four leading scorers, Jaze Kabia, Kieran Green, Charles Vernam and Andy Cook – have come from inside the six-yard box. No side has scored more from such close range.

The question, better put, might be: “How won’t they score?” Given they’ve outscored opponents by 2:1 over their last 23 games, it seems inconceivable that, over two legs, Grimsby’s box-flooding waves won’t crash in at least a couple of goals. The most likely? It has to be Kabia, who has grabbed 9 goals in 10 games.

Salford will look to squeeze both ties, break the flow and capitalise on set-pieces.

Part of me didn’t want to write that. But sometimes a trend is so compelling, you cannot diverge from its path. For Salford, it is difficult to ignore the plain reality that one in every four goals they score comes from a set-piece, rising to one in three across their last 10 games. Still, sometimes it pays to stare logic in the face and say: boo. So how about a fruity pick?

Having taken 40 shots this season, Rosaire Longelo can count himself unfortunate not to have doubled, trebled or even quadrupled his return of a solitary goal. Some 62% of his shots have come in his last 17 matches, suggesting there’s plenty of shot hunger (getting on for two shots per game), if too little output. Cutting onto his favoured left foot, Longelo has hit the post twice and forced several excellent saves. Grimsby left-back Reece Staunton likes to get up there, which could leave a gap.

The reason I bring up the admittedly unlikely prospect of a Longelo Shot, if you will, is that Salford may need a bit of magic to progress.

While Grimsby find many routes to goal, Salford go direct. In fact, they have completed the most direct attacks this season: 16 more than long-ball champs Bromley, but with a return of 7 goals compared with Bromley’s 12. It’s not a strategy that is going to have Mariners running scared. From inside their own half, Salford will happily knock it long, and whether they win or lose the second ball, the worst-case scenario will be that Grimsby simply have to start again. That could be frustrating. Equally, there could be no frustration at all; hence, magic needed.

What has repeatedly rescued Karl Robinson’s side this season, on top of set-piece goals, is their 11 strikes (18% of total goals) from outside the box – a figure that no side in the division can better.

Well, almost no side.

Grimsby can match it. But whereas Salford often survive on moments, the Mariners arrive with an attack overflowing with chances in the here and now. Yes, they had a rough patch in October and November. But they have scored 2.4 goals per game across their last 10 matches, including 14 goals in their last five at home. Salford, by contrast, averages just 1.1 over the same span.

The Mariners are fishing in different waters entirely, and I think they just might blow Salford out of theirs.

Jaze Kabia (Grimsby), No scorer (Salford)

Prediction: Grimsby to progress 3-0 on aggregate

• First leg: Sunday 10th May, 6pm — SMH Group Stadium

• Second leg: Friday 15th May, 8pm — Meadow Lane

As anyone who played FIFA in the halcyon days of the 2010s can attest, the deep dribble into the box followed by a cut-back is incredibly difficult to stop. If I were to play as a League Two team on FIFA, I know who I’d be picking.

Chesterfield are at their best when they can isolate opposition full-backs and drive to the byline before pulling the ball back across goal. Dilan Markanday and Armando Dobra are the pair to watch. Among players with more than 2,000 League Two minutes in 2025/26, both rank inside the division’s top 10 for turning carries into shots.

The Spireites are patient in possession. They’re happy to circulate the ball until one of their premium dribblers receives it 1-v-1. Once isolated, either Markanday or Dobra is the favourite to beat his man before driving towards goal or waiting for an overlapping run, most likely from Lewis Gordon.

The final delivery tends to come from inside the box; it is part cross, part pass. It relies less on static forwards wrestling centre-backs and more on runners either attacking space early or arriving late beyond their marker. Drilled cut-backs and low balls that are flashed across the six-yard box tend to generate high-quality chances, and Chesterfield are very, very good at creating them.

What of the tactical match-up?

Unless we see a tweak, the clash between County’s 3-4-2-1 and Chesterfield’s 4-2-3-1 surely gives the Spireites a slight advantage. Martin Paterson simply cannot allow Jodi Jones (#10) to vacate spaces for Markanday (#24), Mandeville (#7) and Bonis (#10) to exploit.

As a result, Chesterfield will pin Jones deeper than Notts would ideally like, which matters because no League Two side favours left-sided attacks more heavily than County (39%). I can see the game becoming one of two sides that are both happiest when shuffling the ball around a horseshoe — LB - CB - CM - CB - RB — and Chesterfield seems to me the more likely to fashion chances through their wide players if that is the case.

It’s marginal stuff, though.

Notts County are also patient in possession. They are one of two sides in the league to have made more than 20,000 passes. The other is Chesterfield, and the crucial difference here is that a much bigger proportion of Notts County’s passes occur in the first two-thirds, whilst Chesterfield keep more possession (10% or 2,000 passes more) in the final third.

All of that is to say that County’s best opportunities are unlikely to come from breaking down a settled defence. With a quality central operator in Tom Iorpenda, a ball snapped into Alassana Jatta may offer them their clearest route to goal if Chesterfield commit one body too many forward.

But my bigger vibes-based take is around a late-game route to goal after a 0-0 first half.

Admittedly, it’s dependent on a few ‘if’s, but the thesis is as follows:

• Notts County have scored the 3rd-most goals from counter attacks;

• 7 of the last 30 shots conceded by Chesterfield have been fast breaks;

• The longer the game is level, the more likely I think it is that County score from this method;

• Tyrese Hall has come on as a sub in his last 8 County appearances;

• Hall has scored 7 goals from 4.16 xG, and four of those were off the bench;

• Two of them have come from counter-attacks;

So, Tyrese Hall to score late on the break is the vibesy take.

Liam Mandeville (Chesterfield), Tyrese Hall (Notts County)

Prediction: Chesterfield to progress 3-2 on aggregate - but there ain’t much in it

Thanks for reading. If you’re left asking yourself what happens if these ties, or Wembley fixtures, go to penalties - fear not, we’ll be looking at that next week.

MINI TABLE

• First leg: Saturday 9th May, 3pm — Broadhall Way

• Second leg: Wednesday 13th May, 8pm — Edgeley Park

Up until four weeks ago, this would have been easy. “Stockport County will score when Josh Dacres-Cogley receives the ball on the right touchline. He sets it back to Ollie Norwood, who has drifted into the right half-space. His deep, whipped cross is headed home by Kyle Wootton as he holds off Charlie Goode.”

After all, Stockport have scored five more headed goals (20) than any other team in League One. But Wootton, the second-top scorer in League One, is now County’s starting centre-back. So, how will Stockport score against this obdurate Stevenage side?

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MINI TABLE

• First leg: Friday 8th May, 8pm — MKM Stadium

• Second leg: Monday 11th May, 8pm — The Den

Oli McBurnie is Hull’s assassin, battering ram, Swiss Army knife and nuclear weapon.

He can receive the ball with his back to goal and hold it up or spin his marker. He’ll drift wide, forcing defenders to vacate a space for Kyle Joseph, Joe Gelhardt, Mohamed Belloumi or Matt Crooks to exploit. He wins aerial duels (81% percentile among strikers). He takes half-chances (17 goals – the second-most in the Championship – from just 12.3 xG). He created Hull’s last goal against Millwall by flicking on a long pass while being marked by three players. If Millwall can effectively sit on him this time, they’ll improve their chances tenfold.

Much has been made of Hull’s overperformance in attack, desecrating the sacred Underlying Numbers, but a part of that is down to their approach. Though it’s true they’ve been clinical, they don’t spam shots from distance, which can overinflate xG figures through sheer volume. Their plan is to get the ball into the best possible position from which to score, before shooting. That’s why they have scored the joint-fewest goals from outside the box in the league this season, a mere two, while topping the charts for goals scored between 6 and 18 yards.

Take their final-day win over Norwich. While Hull had only eight shots in the game, all eight were from very central areas inside the box, and only two were off target. This is McBurnie’s shot map – five shots, all on target:

They also won 3-1 at The Den in September, when Kyle Joseph converted two low crosses and Femi Azeez was sent off (the referee from that game, Gavin Ward, is also taking the first leg of their play-off encounter). Hull won’t fear the occasion.

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It’s been a minute since the last DAG.

And all of a sudden, it’s that time of year again. Welcome to the third Annual NTT20 1–24 Roast.

Join Ali and George as they look self-flagellation dead in the eye and say: “yes please.” Rewinding back to August, they revisit their Championship, League One and League Two predictions to work out what they got gloriously right, but more importantly, catastrophically wrong.

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Championship

⚽ SCORES

✍️ BIG STORIES

Matt Watts

For the second time in three seasons, Ipswich have finished 2nd in the Championship. The Tractor Boys beat QPR 3-0 to make it three promotions in four seasons under Kieran McKenna. Town ended the intrigue surrounding the second automatic promotion spot, dashing the hopes of Millwall and Middlesbrough in the process, at approximately 12:40pm. In the opening ten minutes of their game, Ipswich had five shots, four on target and they scored twice through George Hirst and Jaden Philogene. Kasey McAteer added a third late on before yet another pitch invasion at Portman Road and yet more scenes of Ed Sheeran leading a celebratory singalong in the changing room. Ipswich’s class of 25/26 might not have set hearts racing like the class of 23/24, but some of that is by design, and the circumstances are very different. After relegation from the Premier League, a summer of squad churn and a season of expectation, Kieran McKenna can reflect on a job well done.

Millwall beat Oxford 2-0 to finish 3rd on 83 points - a single point behind Ipswich - thanks to a brace from Femi Azeez, who won’t be playing in the Championship next season, whatever happens over the weeks ahead. Alex Neil’s side will face Hull in the play-offs, after the Tigers came from behind to beat Norwich 2-1. Oli McBurnie’s brace, coupled with Wrexham’s 2-2 draw at home to Boro means that, despite being winless in six heading into final day and significantly out-performing their underlying numbers all season, Sergej Jakirović’s men still have a shot at promotion. Was McBurnie’s winner offside? Quite possibly, but the Tigers’ luck was in. As for Wrexham, despite a phenomenal free-kick from Josh Windass, their run of successive promotions will have to stop at back-to-back-to-back. The poor things.

Boro will take on Southampton in the other semi-final. Tonda Eckert’s charges beat Preston 3-1 to make it 14 wins (and no defeats) in their last 19 league games. The Saints really are marching into the post-season.

There was a time on Saturday afternoon when it looked like Derby might crash the play-off party. A tap-in from Sammie Szmodics gave the Rams the lead at home to Sheffield United and, with Hull and Wrexham either losing or drawing, Derby were 6th in the live table. However, second-half strikes from Tom Cannon and Sydie Peck saw the Blades come from behind to win 2-1. Thankfully for Derby, Oli McBurnie’s winner at the MKM Stadium meant that their somewhat feckless performance after the break wasn’t the reason why they missed out on a play-off berth. Nevertheless, like Wrexham, those of a Derby persuasion can point to the fact that their final position would have been good enough for a shot at the play-offs next season.

How about some news from the beach to finish? Champions Coventry signed off in style with a 4-0 victory over Watford, who have since parted company with Ed Still. An Ellis Simms hat-trick and a trademark Victor Torp banger from range took the Sky Blues to 95 points and 97 goals scored. Roy Hodgson won his final game in charge of Bristol City - and, potentially, the final game of his illustrious managerial career. The Robins beat Stoke 2-0 - in part due to Viktor Johansson’s blunder in the opening minute. The curse of the new contract video prank? Quite possibly. August Priske scored the equaliser for Birmingham in their 1-1 draw against Portsmouth at Fratton Park. Priske’s father, Brian, played for Pompey 20 years ago.

Last and by no means least, we need to talk about Sheffield Wednesday. After a long and tumultuous season, the Owls saved by far and away their best day of the 25/26 campaign for final day. Their new owner, David Storch, was introduced to the Hillsborough faithful pre-match. Using a countdown on the big screen, they revealed that Wednesday will start next season on 0 points, without a 15-point deduction. Speaking of zero points, Henrik Pedersen’s side beat West Brom 2-1 to secure their first home win of the season and finish a campaign where they were deducted 18 points on… 0 points!

📊 STATS

🔁 Straight back up — Ipswich are the 30th side to go straight back up to the Premier League after being relegated the previous season.

💪 Minute men — Alongside Cameron Burgess, Dara O’Shea was the only outfield player to play every minute of the Championship season. Remarkably, the Ipswich captain didn’t receive a single yellow card.

⚽️ Sky Blues strike — Coventry are just the fourth side to score 97+ goals in a single Championship season after Reading in 2005-06 (99), Bournemouth in 2014-15 (98) and Fulham in 2021-22 (106).

⛔️ Wallwall — No team kept more clean sheets in the Championship this season than Millwall (18), their most in a single season since 2017-18 (19).

😩 Pottered about — Since being relegated from the Premier League, Stoke have finished 16th, 15th, 14th, 14th, 16th, 17th, 18th and 17th.

📺 HIGHLIGHTS

1. A couple of bangers from the Champions!

2. Josh Windass putting his free-kick ‘top bins’.

3. Introducing Leo Walta.

4. The moment when Sheffield Wednesday fans found out that they will start next season on 0 points.

🧮 LEAGUE TABLE

League One

⚽ SCORES

✍️ BIG STORIES

Huw Davies

There were 47 goals in League One, very nearly four per game, but a 1-0 is the only place to start. Three points for Stevenage would render all other results irrelevant in the play-off battle, and in the end, they got over the line. Mostly.

There’s understandable debate about Dan Sweeney’s winner, after 91 minutes in which Wigan came closest to scoring when Harrison Bettoni’s shot hit the underside of the bar – although Sam Tickle also made a miraculous save at 0-0, and arguably did so again for the goal. It’s completely unreasonable to criticise the officials: there is no goal-line technology in League One and the incident is impossible to judge in real time, because we can’t even agree based on slo-mo, pause and alternative angles. But the facts are these:

1. All of the ball must be over all of the line.

2. There is no definitive angle showing it is or isn’t. This, below, is probably the best we can get – a screenshot taken at the exact moment the ball hits the goalkeeper and bounces out – though some Stevenage supporters prefer this angle.

   

3. Considering the position of the goalkeeper’s leg as it stops the ball at its furthest point towards/into the goal, and considering where his foot is placed in relation to that, and considering what we know about the size and shape of a football, it isn’t physically possible for all of the ball to have crossed all of the line.

That’s my reading, anyway, and if that is the case, then Luton can consider themselves unlucky. They’d come from behind to beat Bolton 3-2 in stoppage time of a thrilling encounter, and even had a penalty saved after that. It didn’t matter. It mattered for Bolton, though, who slipped carelessly to 5th after Steven Schumacher had expressly said they wanted to secure 3rd or 4th. Giving up seven big chances at home doesn’t bode well for their play-off hopes, either, even if they can look irresistible going forward.

There was more shuffling as Bradford climbed to 4th and Stockport to 3rd. They beat Barnsley 3-1, yet this viewer’s highlight was an astonishing Corey Addai save that promises more play-off shenanigans from the big fella (even if Adam Phillips did tap in the rebound on this occasion).

Plymouth narrowly missed out on the top six despite winning 3-2 from 2-0 down at Northampton, who were reduced to 10 men at 2-2. Brendan Wiredu’s winner could have been a moment of redemption after his Argyle career began with own goals, red cards and penalty concessions, but it wasn’t to be, largely because Argyle were still in the relegation zone on New Year’s Day; averaging more than two points per game across the subsequent half-season just wasn’t enough.

Michael Jacobs scored a peach for Cobblers but their defeat rounded off a miserable 2025/26 in which they were extraordinarily inept for a third of the campaign:

You may have noticed that Exeter aren’t in the first table. Losing 2-1 to Bradford on Saturday relegated them but the writing was on the wall before that – failing to have a single shot in the first half of a must-win match just added the final arrgghhhh.

Exeter had 39 points with 16 games remaining when Gary Caldwell left with their blessing to join Wigan on February 16th. The points tallies required for survival in the past five League One seasons were 47, 40, 45, 44 and 46. Those at the club wouldn’t have been so blasé as to say it, but two wins would surely be enough. They managed one. It took just 40 days and 40 nights for the Grecians to fall into the relegation zone, and there they stayed.

MEANWHILE…

Mansfield beat Cardiff 5-4, scoring inside two minutes, leading 3-0 after 30 and romping into the final five minutes 5-2 to the good. Louis Reed had a hand in creating four goals for a team having tremendous fun in the sun. Brian Barry-Murphy gave debuts to a couple more teenagers, with Paul Moreno becoming Cardiff’s youngest ever player in a league fixture, as the Bluebirds ended the season having scored more goals than runaway champions Lincoln, which is the real quiz. Lincoln were busy setting a third-tier record by going a 29th consecutive match unbeaten, with a 2-0 win at Port Vale. Show-offs.

Billy Sharp hit a hat-trick in his final Doncaster appearance, a 3-1 win over Peterborough, 21 years after scoring his first EFL treble for Rushden & Diamonds against a Boston United side managed by Steve Evans with Jason Lee in attack. Sharp had a fourth (rightly) disallowed that would’ve taken him to 300 career goals.

And we’ll leave it to Richie Wellens to sign off the regular League One season for 2025/26. This is the message he gave his Leyton Orient players after Exeter’s defeat saved them from relegation, one year on from being in the play-off final:

📊 STATS

👴 Generational talent — Billy Sharp, has now scored an English Football League hat-trick in his teens, twenties, thirties and forties.

👶 Rambo IV — Paul Moreno (16y 111d) became Cardiff City’s youngest ever player in a league fixture, a few months after Rob Tankiewicz (16y 117d) and then Axel Donczew (15y 234d) became Cardiff’s youngest in any fixture, meaning that Aaron Ramsey’s record from 2007 has been surpassed three times in a single season.

☁️ Cloud nine — With nine goals, Mansfield 5-4 Cardiff was the highest-scoring match in the EFL this season.

👣 39 steps to success — Mansfield’s 10th-place finish in the third tier is their highest for 39 years (1986/87, also 10th)…

🙌 Boro’s time — …and Stevenage’s 6th-place finish is their joint-highest in history, level with 2011/12.

⁉️ Wait what — Can anyone explain how Wycombe’s success in BOTH halves did not translate over the season?

📺 HIGHLIGHTS

1. The satisfying crunch of a Jacobs cracker

2. Jack Holmes scores his first (and then his second) EFL goal in style

3. Corners are easy, Bolton-style

4. Headers and volleys, Burton-style

🧮 LEAGUE TABLE

League Two

⚽ SCORES

✍️ BIG STORIES

Sam Parry

It wasn’t simply a Ronan Coughlan overhead kick for Fleetwood that cost MK Dons the title. Almost 300 miles away, where Kent meets South London, Bromley met Walsall and Andy Woodman named an attacking XI to win at all costs – four at the back rather than three, Ben Thompson in, and two wingers.

But it wasn’t Bromley that cost MK, either. It wasn’t Ben Thompson’s hammer-struck beauty, nor Mitch Pinnock’s second-half bobbler, nor an archetypal Omar Sowunmi header. What cost MK was a ragged performance, as they cancelled out Coughlan’s goal but failed to improve upon it. And Bromley, unbeaten at home, did what champions do: they won, won well, and took the League Two crown.

In the battle for the final automatic spot, Cambridge had a chance to take their rivals out of the equation with a penalty against Crewe. Ben Knight missed it. And if Crewe goalkeeper Ian Lawlor was the U’s chief antagonist, producing point-blank saves late on to preserve the 0-0 draw, he could well have become an unlikely hero for Salford or Notts County – a win for either and 3rd place would have been theirs.

The most perverse shock of final day, perhaps, is that neither managed it. At Meadow Lane, there were penalty shouts at both ends before Nicholas Tsaroulla put Notts County ahead and into the top three. They had chances to extend the lead, too, before Bristol Rovers levelled through Ellis Harrison. If not for an offside flag following Jacob Bedeau’s tap-in, Notts would have done it. But they didn’t.

Salford, meanwhile, were battering away at Crawley. The Ammies hit the bar twice, missed glaring chances and watched as a bang-to-rights penalty went unawarded. It somehow remained 0-0, which meant Cambridge survived the wobble and chalked up an impressive promotion back to League One at the first attempt.

Those results confirmed the top five. Grimsby looked nailed on for 6th: already assured of a play-off berth, they led relegation-threatened Tranmere through a slick passing move finished emphatically by Justin Amaluzor. There was a loser, though, or rather another draw, as Tranmere found a fourth-tier foothold at just the right time to avoid relegation. Grimsby finished 7th – so who took 6th?

A straight shootout between Swindon and Chesterfield kept the permutations simple. Dilan Markanday missed a sitter and Ryan Stirk ballooned another chance over, but the Spireites eventually broke through when a fortunate slip-shot assist teed up Lee Bonis. Late in a half that Chesterfield dominated, Swindon hit back through Ben Middlemas after a brilliant solo run by Aaron Drinan, which jack-knifed the situation heading into a nervy second half.

Swindon gained momentum but allowed the tie to skid away as Armando Dobra, producing his own silky assist, squared to Markanday to put Chesterfield 2-1 up. A draw wouldn’t be enough for Swindon, who duly pushed for goals but met with too much resistance – so, 2-1 it finished.

Paul Cook’s side head into the post-season having beaten each of their play-off rivals twice, with an aggregate score of 11-3. How it looks:

And finally, the toughest chapter of the season. At times, relegation seemed inevitable for all five candidates for the final drop. Tranmere collapsed after a promising start, but one win in the last five under Pete Wild (W1 D1 L3), including a final-day draw, was enough to save them. Crawley never found rhythm under Scott Lindsey but Colin Kazim-Richards’ seven-game tenure returned nine points (W2 D3 L2), including a death-defying 0-0 against Salford, where one goal conceded would’ve meant relegation.

Barrow were sliding even before Andy Whing’s departure and then came freefall under Paul Gallagher, then Dino Maamria, then Sam Foley. They required goals on final day against Newport to have any sort of chance. That left Harrogate and Newport as the only real climbers; the sides that started badly, but whose late-season form offered a glimpse at both sides of hope.

If hope looked slim for Harrogate when Barnet scored early, it soon flickered when Simon Weaver’s side converted a penalty to level the game. They had further chances. Shawn McCoulsky shrugged off his marker, drove towards goal and saw his shot brilliantly tipped onto the post. Another opening followed when McCoulsky slipped Tobias Brennan through one-on-one, only for his lob attempt to go horribly wrong. Yet hope remained because, at half-time, Barrow were beating Newport 1-0.

Not only that, but a minute into the second half, Barrow won a penalty. Jordan Wright dived left, the spotkick was drilled centrally, and he somehow saved it with a dangling, relegation-busting boot. It woke Newport up. Not long after, Bobby Kamwa crashed one against the crossbar after darting inside. Then came chaos, as a mix-up gifted an equaliser that Tom Davies took with happy calm. Newport were safe… unless there was a goal at Harrogate. Which there was.

But not for Harrogate. Having missed the chance to take the lead, the Sulphurites allowed Phillip Chinedu, just off the bench, to put Barnet ahead and extinguish all remaining hope. As it turned out, a draw wouldn’t have been enough anyway because back in Barrow-in-Furness…

Lights. Kamwa.

Same angle. Same action.

This time, no crossbar. Saviour Bobby Kamwa smashed home a Hollywood finish for a fifth goal in his last eight starts, all in winning matches – one, an equaliser in a win, and four the actual winners themselves. If he’s the main character of this Newport story, Christian Fuchs has been the auteur director. What a job he has done. What an achievement. And what a tough day for Harrogate and Barrow, who came so close, took it so late, and almost escaped the gravity of the pyramid pushing down.

📊 STATS

🏆 Ravens soar — Bromley are League Two champions in just their second-ever EFL season.

📈 MK Dominance — No League Two side spent longer in front than MK Dons, who led for 46% of all minutes played this season.

🎟️ Mariners in the mix — Grimsby Town have finished in the League Two play-off places for the first time since 2005/06, when they also finished on 78 points.

🎯 Double-double Vernam — Charles Vernam is the only League Two player to record 10 goals and 10 assists in 2025/26, hitting both marks exactly.

⚡ ColU in a hurry — Colchester United scored three first-half away goals in an EFL game for the first time since May 2019 — also the final game of that season.

🛟 County survive — Newport County came from behind to beat Barrow and avoid relegation, winning back-to-back league games for the first time since February.

🎉 U’s go u’p — Cambridge United’s promotion-winning 82 points represent their best tally since winning the Third Division in 1990/91, and they did it conceding just 33 goals – the fewest of any team in League One since Shrewsbury 11 years ago.

📊 Draw ‘specialists’ — No side in League Two drew more games (16) or won fewer (8) than Crawley Town this season.

⏱️ Slow starters — Gillingham lost the opening 10 minutes of matches 10-0 on aggregate.

📺 HIGHLIGHTS

1. Basking Bromley lift the trophy

2. Neil Harris’ speech after Cambridge won promotion

3. The goals that kept Newport in League Two

🧮 LEAGUE TABLE

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