EFL Season Preview: Leicester in League One, Expanded Playoffs
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- English Football League enters the 2025-26 season with 72 clubs across the Championship, League One and League Two, where promotion and relegation create week-to-week tension absent from American sports leagues
- West Ham, Wolverhampton and Burnley all dropped into the Championship from the Premier League; West Ham retained Jarrod Bowen while Wolves re-signed Raúl Jiménez on a free from Fulham after his Mexico World Cup run
- Leicester City will play in League One just a decade after their 5,000-to-1 Premier League title, becoming only the fifth club to suffer back-to-back relegations into the third tier, with the source noting almost no EFL club turns a profit and parachute payments drive the spiral
- Championship playoffs have been expanded to include teams finishing third through eighth, with the final promotion spot worth an estimated $275 million over multiple seasons to the Premier League
- Southampton begin the season with a four-point deduction from the Spygate scandal that saw them expelled from last season's playoff final, while Sheffield Wednesday emerge from an 18-point deduction after American owners rescued the club in May
- Three Welsh clubs — Cardiff City, Swansea City and Wrexham — will play in the Championship, with no Welsh club having reached the Premier League since Cardiff went down in 2018-19
- USMNT pipeline to the Championship continues with Max Arfsten and Sebastian Berhalter joining Middlesbrough, Patrick Agyemang at Derby County (sidelined by an ACL tear after 10 goals in his debut season), and Kristoffer Lund at Tom Brady-owned Birmingham City
Why it matters: The expanded eight-team playoff format means roughly a third of the Championship can end the season pointing to some form of success, keeping more clubs and fanbases invested deep into spring and reshaping what 'survival' looks like across 46 matches. For American viewers, the growing USMNT presence — Berhalter, Agyemang, Lund — combined with Paramount+ carriage makes the Championship the most accessible on-ramp to England's promotion-relegation system.
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