Category: Championship League

• New manager ready to helm ‘ambitious project’

• Wilder expresses ‘great regret’ at his departure

Sheffield United have appointed Rubén Sellés as their new manager after Chris Wilder expressed “great regret” over his departure from Bramall Lane. Sellés was swiftly named as Wilder’s successor on Wednesday evening with the Spaniard signing a three-year deal at the Championship club.

The 42-year-old former Southampton, Reading and Hull manager said: “When we first heard about the possibility of coming here, it was a no-brainer for us to join a club with this kind of history and with a mission to move forward and try to be even more competitive. This is a very powerful and ambitious project. It was very important at the start of the conversations that everyone is on the same page.

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• Former Luton manager in line to succeed Michael Carrick

• Steve Cooper and Danny Röhl were also in the running

Rob Edwards is poised to take charge at Middlesbrough after impressing the owner, Steve Gibson. Only an unforeseen 11th-hour hitch will prevent the 42-year-old former Luton manager being in charge when Boro’s players start pre-season training at the end of June.

Edwards will replace Michael ­Carrick, who was sacked when the team finished a disappointing 10th in the Championship, after seeing off strong competition from the former Nottingham Forest and Leicester manager Steve Cooper and the Sheffield Wednesday head coach, Danny Röhl. It is understood Edwards ranked high on Gibson’s shortlist in 2022 when Carrick took over.

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• Head coach had been in charge since October 2022

• Decision taken on Teesside after post-season review

Michael Carrick has been sacked by Middlesbrough after two and a half years in charge. Although the former England and Manchester United midfielder was liked and admired by Boro’s owner, Steve Gibson, his failure to lead the team out of the Championship ensured his first managerial posting ended in disappointment.

Carrick led Boro into the playoff semi-finals in 2023 but they missed out on top-six finishes in the past two seasons. The 43-year-old has become the 17th Championship manager to have lost his job since last August.

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• Manning arrives after leading Robins to the playoffs

• Sheffield Wednesday charged over late payment of wages

Norwich have appointed Liam Manning as their new head coach after the club triggered the release clause in his contract at Bristol City.

Manning impressed after leading the Robins to the Championship playoffs for the first time in 17 years and Norwich quickly identified him as their No 1 target to succeed Johannes Hoff Thorup, who was sacked after a disappointing end to the season. Norwich, who were relegated from the Premier League in 2022, finished 13th last season

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Tom Watson’s last kick as a Sunderland player was a dramatic injury-time winner that secured promotion to the Premier League

For far too long playoffs have felt impossibly high altitude for a Sheffield United side who have never won promotion this way, losing four finals. Wilder has addressed theproblem by reminding his players that the Wembley air is really not all that thin and maintaining that history is bunk.

His hopes of avoiding another demoralising repetition of the past should be enhanced by Gustavo Hamer’s presence. Two years ago the Brazil-born attacking midfielder scored for Coventry against Luton at Wembley and, as the Championship player of the season, he possesses the confidence and class to alter the Blades’ playoff story.

What’s trigonometry got to do with it?

During Le Bris’s teenage years in the western Breton village of Pont-l’Abbé, he devoted his spare time to completing an in-depth analysis of Arsène Wenger’s tactics as Monaco’s manager. As an adult, he spent holidays touring clubs across Spain and England – Arsenal, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Everton and Leeds included – to watch their coaches. “He’s not someone who shouts at you,” the Sunderland striker Wilson Isidor says, “but he makes you understand things really, really thoroughly.” The winger Patrick Roberts agrees. “He’s efficient,” he says. “He’s brought us new ideas and he’s capable of changing our play depending on the opponent. He’s modern.”

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Blades have come up short in their four previous attempts to gain promotion via an end-of-season showpiece final

When the half-time whistle blows at Wembley on Saturday afternoon, Tom Lockyer will temporarily replace Sheffield United and Sunderland as the centre of attention.

It is two years since Lockyer collapsed on England’s most famous pitch after experiencing atrial fibrillation during Luton’s Championship playoff final win against Coventry and almost 18 months since he had a cardiac arrest and almost died while playing for the club at Bournemouth.

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• Premier League: 10 things to look out for on the final day

• Fixtures | Tables | Sign up for Football Daily | Email Luke

The latest omission of Jack Grealish isn’t a surprise. Grealish is a bit-part player at Manchester City these days and wasn’t used in last weekend’s FA Cup final defeat by Crystal Palace. The match winner in that game, Eberechi Eze, is included. The Palace duo of Marc Guéhi and Adam Wharton miss out, presumably due to injury (although it should be said Tuchel hasn’t seemed entirely convinced by Guéhi).

Tuchel has not been able to name Marcus Rashford because of injury; West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen misses out after failing to take his opportunity last time. Newcastle’s Dan Burn gets another go.

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The club is expertly run but if Black Cats defeat Sheffield United, commercial concerns could be a headache

It is May 2024 and Illan Meslier, the Leeds goalkeeper, is singing the praises of a former Lorient youth coach whose astute mentoring shaped his career. But who is this left-field thinker who dispatched his young goalkeepers to undergo professional boxing training, spend hours performing acrobatics on trampolines and talk intensely to sports psychologists? Régis Le Bris eventually became Lorient’s first-team manager in 2022 but, after a promising opening season, the Breton team were relegated from Ligue 1 last spring. No matter; a month on from that chat with Meslier in North Yorkshire, Sunderland named Le Bris as their head coach and, now, the 49-year-old is preparing to lead the club out at Wembley on Saturday.

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The concept of an end-of-season tournament to determine the final promotions was borne of trial and error

With the Guardian’s unstoppable rise to global dominance** we at Guardian US thought we’d run a series of articles for fans wishing to improve their knowledge of the sport’s history and storylines, hopefully in a way that doesn’t patronise you to within an inch of your life. A warning: If you’re the kind of person that finds The Blizzard too populist this may not be the series for you.

** Actual dominance may not be global. Or dominant

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• Club escaped Championship relegation on final day
• Spaniard won nine of 27 league games in charge

Hull have sacked their head coach, Rubén Sellés, after less than six months in charge.

The club escaped Championship relegation on the final day of the season on goal difference, having been bottom when Sellés was appointed in December. The 41-year-old Spaniard is the third manager sacked by the Hull owner, Acun Ilicali, in the past 12 months and the club now begin their search for a fifth permanent coach since the Turkish media executive took control in early 2022.

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• Former Valladolid manager is ‘the leader we need’
• Hornets finished 14th in Championship this season

Watford have announced the appointment of Paulo Pezzolano as their new head coach. The 42-year-old Uruguayan succeeds Tom Cleverley, who was sacked on 6 May following the Hornets’ disappointing 14th-place finish in the Championship.

Pezzolano becomes Watford’s 18th permanent manager since Gianfranco Zola left in December 2013.

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For a side with such a horrendous record in the EFL playoffs, the way Sheffield United coasted through their semi-final’s two legs into the Championship’s showpiece game at Wembley did little to suggest they are a team with a hoodoo hanging over their heads.

In many ways, history is stacked against the Blades: nine previous attempts at the playoffs, five semi-final defeats and four heartbreaking final losses. But if there was one crumb of comfort for manager Chris Wilder and his side in missing out on automatic promotion with a couple of games to spare, it was the fact that they had time to regather themselves and prepare for the playoffs.

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Blades made no mistake in the second leg, completing the job and will head to Wembley after a record aggregate scoreline

3 min: Early snap shot from Twine, the ball falling loose after Ahmedhodzic’s touch. This time the forward can’t get enough purchase but a moment to get people wondering.

1 min: It’s a slow start. Tommy Cannon is the straight man to Kieffer Moore, rather than Bobby Ball.

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Régis Le Bris’s side have lost five in a row before meeting with Frank Lampard’s resurgent Sky Blues

Sunderland’s players are unlikely to forget Monday 28 April any time soon. Régis Le Bris’s squad were in Portugal, settling into a pre-playoff training camp when the lights went out as one of Europe’s biggest power cuts plunged the Iberian peninsula into chaos.

Although Le Bris made light of the inconvenience and emphasised that the Algarve sunshine had been “re-energising” no one is quite sure whether he has managed to fix his team’s own worrying electrical faults.

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Zak Vyner joined the club aged eight and as an ever-present this season is vital to hopes of getting past Sheffield United

When Bristol City’s players reconvened on Monday, there was only one place to start in the team meeting: those scenes of euphoria at Ashton Gate after the club secured a Championship playoff spot for the first time in 17 years, and the search party for Yu Hirakawa, who, as the captain Jason Knight puts it, was getting thrown about on the pitch as teammates waited in the dressing room for him to be retrieved. Liam Manning shared with his squad images and videos of supporters to underline the wider meaning, and footage of the Japanese winger crowdsurfing. “It got a laugh from the lads,” says Manning. “He was in a state of shock … I asked him: ‘Would that happen in Japan?’ He said: ‘No, never.’”

Now City, who entertain Sheffield United in the first leg of their playoff semi-final on Thursday, are hoping to enter uncharted territory. The Robins have not played in the top flight since May 1980 and Manning has heard the line about Bristol being the biggest city not to host Premier League football “a million times”. He is not the only one. The defender Zak Vyner, the longest-serving player who joined aged eight, was in the crowd at Wembley, aged 11, for the playoff final against Hull City in 2008, when Dean Windass volleyed in to break City hearts.

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