The biggest game in football is right around the corner and Benjamin Bloom is back to preview everything you need to know, with odds from Betfair throughout.
The media are prone to bouts of exaggeration, but surely there’s one game per season that it is difficult to fall into hyperbole when describing. That game is the Championship play-off final, a fixture so transformative for the winner that the ‘richest game in football’ tag isn’t actually that ridiculous.
Of course, the play-off final is on the same weekend of the Champions League final and that game will draw more revenue and a bigger TV audience. It’s a sensational achievement to win the European Cup but will Liverpool or Real Madrid be that different depending on the outcome? Not really; they’ve already won it 19 times between them and next season they’ll both still be there as gigantic superclubs at the very top of the world football pyramid.
For Nottingham Forest and Huddersfield Town the situation is vastly different and the consequences of Sunday’s game will be far more severe to their status. English football is littered with cliff edges and surely the most lethal is the financial gap between Premier League and Championship TV money. I won’t get bogged down in the exact numbers but it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that victory in this game will multiply the amount of broadcast money the winner will receive next season tenfold. Furthermore, even a quick drop back down from the Premier League isn’t the end of the world as the minimum two years of parachute payments received by relegated clubs puts them in a vastly superior income bracket to any normal Championship team.
There are two sides to this, though, and losing play-off finalists in the past few seasons include Reading, Derby and Sheffield Wednesday. Admittedly all three flew too close to the sun spending wise but the uncomfortable truth is that winning one more game would’ve immediately wiped the slate clean. All…
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