Revisited: 72 Things I Wanted To See In The EFL This Season
Did any team secure a perfectly average season? Did a centre-back win player of the month? Was it an EFL season for the ages?
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.
72 Things I Want To See In The EFL In 2025/26
From sock sponsors to Steel City drama, centre-backs winning Player of the Month to 50-goal-contribution seasons, Huw Davies lays out 72 gloriously specific, occasionally serious, and always heartfel…
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…
1) I want there to still be 72 teams at the end of the season. The off-field situations at Sheffield Wednesday, Hull and a few other clubs are providing plenty to worry about. So: nobody go bust.
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!
3) More goals, please. The EFL had 395 fewer goals last season than it did in 2023/24.
We had a 156-goal increase on 2024/25, providing a solid average of 2.60 goals per game. Tick! Sort of.
4) How Luke Molyneux takes to League One after dominating League Two.
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.
6) The Championship’s automatic promotion race to feature at least one club without parachute payments.
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.
11) A wake-up call for Wrexham.
