'It's all so constipated' - Major change awaiting Stoke City and rivals assessed

CommentsSportopinionPeter Smith Stoke City reporter07:00, 08 Mar 2026The Championship will undergo a major change next season as the play-offs are expanded to include six clubs.

Sides who finish fifth and sixth will host one-off ties against the sides who finish eighth and seven respectively, with the winners progressing to two-legged semi-finals against the teams who finish third and fourth and promotion then decided at Wembley.

Championship football reporters have been assessing a landmark vote by EFL clubs and what impact it might have on Stoke City and their rivals.

Brian Dick (Midlands football reporter): My starting point on issues such as these tends to be ‘If the Premier League are against it, it’s probably good for the Championship’. Play-off expansion fits perfectly within that mindset.

The biggest existential problem facing the second tier is the lack of mobility between the Championship and the top flight.

Three go up, three come down. Maybe not every year, sometimes you get an outlier like Sunderland who might stay up for a couple of seasons, once a generation there’s Brentford who go up and stay up.

More often than not it’s Burnley, Ipswich, Southampton and Leeds using parachute payments to get out of the Championship but not well enough to stay in the Prem. It’s all so constipated.

What expanding the play-offs to six teams does is increase the pool of contenders who have access club-changing riches.

If Preston finish eighth next season, get promoted at Wembley and then come down with a record low points total, for me that’s fine – at least they’ve had a season of PL money and two years of parachute payments, imagine the improvements they could make to their infrastructure with that.

The PL would moan about them not being competitive – but the PL can look after itself and seems to have no interest in looking after anyone else.

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Pete Smith (Stoke City reporter): If you look at how it’s panned out in the National League since their expansion in 2017/18, it looks like it is going to be pretty rare that the team who squeezes into the play-offs in eighth actually goes on to win promotion. The National League play-off winners have finished second (three times), third (twice) and then fourth, fifth and sixth once.

In fact, it probably makes it more favourable to finish third or fourth and have one fewer game to play than your rivals. It’s worse if you finish fifth or sixth and have a game more but, if you finish fifth or sixth, you’re perhaps pretty lucky to still be in the promotion mix anyway.

From a Stoke perspective, the latter stages of the seasons since returning to the Championship have either been nervous battles to avoid relegation or just flat. The dull finishes are better than the relegation scraps but they can be tedious.

The initial reaction from some Stoke fans has been to suggest that they are prepared to be martyrs to tedium in order to only reward clubs who have a genuinely decent season. But I’m interested to see how it pans out in reality on atmosphere and motivation. It’d be a thrill to go into March with a chance of something exciting happening, never mind April or May.

Plus if it can help make a dent in the Premier League being a closed shop, while we wait in vain for the redistribution in finances that football desperately needs, then that’s got to be worth trying.

Leigh Curtis (Derby County reporter): There are a lot of aspects of the game that we should feel enraged by, but this isn't one of them.

The Championship has been skewed by the parachute payments clubs receive when relegated from the Premier League which gives them an unfair financial advantage.

If handing out two extra playoff places helps address that imbalance then why should we not be in favour of it? I've read a lot of comments saying this is a money-making exercise, but let's be real, two extra games in the schedule isn't going to be worth that much is it.

Rewarding mediocrity has also been a phrase that has been used frequently but last season just two points separated sixth to eighth. That's not a huge chasm and the Championship, by its very nature, is extraordinarily tight.

And is the Premier League really going to suffer if a team that finishes eighth ends up being promoted? Southampton were pathetic last year. Wolves have almost been as equally as bad. And look what is happening at Spurs.

If, hypothetically, Derby were to go up after finishing eighth, then David Clowes makes his money back that he spent in rescuing the club from administration. Why should his ambitions be limited? The fact remains that if you want to finish in the top two you have to spend huge sums. Clubs have chased that dream and nearly gone bust doing so. Derby know that all too well. But to get to eighth, then, fiscally, it becomes a much more achievable objective. Traditionalists will be upset by it, but there are greater problems with today's game than just two extra playoff places.

Andy Turner (Coventry City reporter): Like Frank Lampard, I’m fairly indifferent about the change although there are probably more pros than cons to having a more competitive division to the end.

That’s not coming at it from a lofty position at the top of the Championship, you understand. After all, anything could happen in the last 10 games and no one of a Sky Blue persuasion is putting the Champagne on ice just yet.

The second tier is generally so tight – as it is this season – that anyone from ninth to 18th at this stage of proceedings would still be in with a shout of a top eight finish which would bring an end to effectively dead rubber fixtures where a team enters the final few weeks of the season safe in the knowledge that they won’t go down, while too far off making the play-offs.

As Lampard put it, it would bring a lot of “jeopardy” to teams right until the end of the season by extending the possibility of a late stab at promotion via the back door. It would also give fans something to get excited about and rather than settling for mid-table mediocrity, they could find themselves on a late charge to Wembley and that has to be a good thing.

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