Don’t listen to anyone who says the football league playoffs are agony, they’ve got their emotions all confused. The playoffs are only agony if you don’t like to see your club competing in a match with something at stake. For many, they’re the closest thing to being involved in the final stages of a major trophy.
If you’re fortunate enough to make it to the final, you get to watch your team in a vast stadium, with all the ceremonial fanfare you might expect from the Champions League. The teams are led out by their managers, accompanied by deafening music, and there are fireworks and streamers and everything else. To top it off, the winners get to lift a trophy at the end. Winning the playoffs is better then finishing second, no doubt about it. Second place is first loser in comparison to this hyped up monster.
Sadly, this has resulted in the Championship playoff final being dubbed ‘the most lucrative game in the world’, which suggests the only motivation for success is Premier League TV money. While this may be true for the owners, it’s a very cold assessment. It means more than that for the fans. Unless you support one of Europe’s elite clubs, you will probably spend most of your football supporting life enduring prolonged periods of interminable dullness. Seasons pass and nothing ever happens. Maybe you’ll finish in the top half, maybe in the bottom, but in the end, nobody cares. That’s why the playoffs matter.
People say they’re unfair on the team that finishes third, but if you can’t finish in the top two of the Championship then you’re on weak ground trying to stake a claim for Premier League football. The beautiful thing about the playoffs is that in any one season around half the teams in the Championship have usually got a chance of getting promoted. How else could Nottingham Forest – on their third manager this season – retain a realistic hope going up? And, where the hell did Bolton come from? Barely mentioned all season, they are the form team in the top six, which makes them a huge threat in the playoffs, regardless of their early season struggles. At the other end of the form table, Watford (18th) and Crystal Palace (20th) are losing momentum at the worst possible time, although not quite as badly as Leicester (23rd) who have dropped out of the playoffs altogether.
It’s clichéd to say it, but form is everything now as the finish line looms ahead. Looking at the squads of the sides in and around the top six, it is impossible to say that one has a clear advantage over the others. The importance of form means it’s possible to get promoted almost by mistake. My first experience of the playoffs was in 1999, when Watford finished the season with some inexplicably good form, and surged from mid-table into the top six during the last eight games. In the semi-finals they edged past Birmingham on penalties (one of the longest penalty shootouts I’ve ever seen, I nearly threw up on several occasions).
In the final, they defeated Bolton Wanderers at the old Wembley Stadium. It was just brilliant. Without warning, a team that was in the third tier the previous season, and with pretty much the same side, had won promotion to the Premier League. The following year I saw them get ripped to pieces by the European Champions at Old Trafford. Promoted by mistake? Yes, almost certainly, and by the end we were almost happy to be going back down. But, clubs like Watford will always struggle to get a foothold in the Premier League, and that day at Wembley stands alone as one of my favourite memories from football. I’m sure it always will.
It’s fair to say that expectations are generally low for the team promoted via the playoffs. They’re expected to get taken apart, but they might also be disadvantaged by the late finish to their season. The regular season ends on 4 May. At this point, the teams in first and second can begin summer recruitment secure in the knowledge that premier league TV money is coming their way. The eventual winners of the playoffs won’t have that confirmed until almost a month later. I’m not sure if this hinders their efforts in the transfer market, but it can’t help.
Even so, in recent seasons, Swansea have shown that the playoffs needn’t be a curse; West Ham have looked comfortable this season; Bolton lasted for a decade; and, even Hull managed to survive the first season, if not the second. Granted, pretty much everyone else was brutally gunned down on sight, but at least they have the moment that got them there to remember. For many clubs this is as good as it’s going to get.
I was going to end with a video of that ’99 final, but if anything epitomises the playoffs at their best, it is the final from the previous season, when Charlton played Sunderland in a 4-4 epic that was decided on penalties. A ridiculous game.
