How Does Premier League Promotion Work?

**TL;DR: **Three clubs are promoted to the Premier League each season. The top two finishers in the Championship go up automatically. Teams finishing third to sixth play off across two-legged semi-finals and a single final at Wembley to decide the third promotion spot.

Promotion is one of the most lucrative achievements in English football. A single promotion is worth well over a hundred million pounds in TV money and Premier League prize funds, which is why the Championship is one of the most fiercely contested leagues in Europe. Here is how the process actually works.

The two automatic promotion places

Promotion is decided by the Championship table, which is the second tier of English football. The team that finishes first wins the league and goes up. The team that finishes second is also promoted automatically. That is it for the guaranteed places.

• 1st place: Championship champion, automatic promotion
• 2nd place: automatic promotion
• 3rd to 6th place: enter the play-offs
• 7th to 21st place: stay in the Championship next season
• 22nd to 24th place: relegated to League One

The Championship is a 24-team league with 46 matches per season, more than the Premier League's 38. That extra workload is part of what makes the second tier so brutal. We touch on this in our piece on how to predict promoted teams if you want a deeper feel for how clubs build promotion squads.

How the play-offs work

The play-offs are a four-team mini-tournament played at the end of May. The third-placed team plays the sixth-placed team, and the fourth plays the fifth. Each tie is two legs, with the higher-placed team playing the second leg at home. The winners on aggregate go to the final.

The final is a one-off match at Wembley Stadium. Whoever wins is promoted to the Premier League. Whoever loses spends another season in the Championship, which is brutal because they are usually within minutes of a Premier League payday.

This is often described as the richest single match in football, because of the financial gulf between the two tiers. We look at how that money shapes the entire promoted-team experience in promoted teams Premier League history.