There are few joys in soccer greater than promotion -- especially promotion to the Premier League. Coventry City fans wept and waved signs saying "We're Back" after their team clinched this spring. There were bus parades as if the team had won the Champions League. And the celebrations were immense on Saturday after Hull City won what is famously the most lucrative single game of the year, the promotion playoff final at Wembley.
At some point, the euphoria of the moment gives way to great anxiety. Because reaching the Premier League and remaining in the Premier League are two completely different things.
In both 2023-24 and 2024-25, every promoted team that came up... went straight back down. Two of those six doomed teams produced particularly dire point totals -- Southampton managed just 12 points in 2024-25, while Sheffield United had 16 in 2023-24 - but none of the six generated more than 26. It was pretty dire.
In 2025-26, two clubs offered hope. Leeds United played genuinely high-quality ball for much of the season, and despite poor finishing numbers, they will finish somewhere between 11th and 15th in the league; it's comfortably their second-best Premier League season of the last 20-plus years.
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Sunderland, meanwhile, have topped even that. Despite plenty of roster questions, they stormed out of the gate, losing just two of their first 11 matches and spending most of the season in the top half of the table. They head into Sunday's final matchday with a chance at both a top-half finish and their first finish above rival Newcastle United in 10 years.
Granted, it wasn't all good news for newcomers: Burnley, a yo-yo club for the 2020s, has made it five straight years of either getting promoted from the second division or getting relegated from the first. Still, two promotion success stories is more than we've gotten in a while.
Are there lessons to be learned, not only from Leeds and Sunderland but from the seven other clubs from the last decade who made the jump and remain in the Premier League? And what might those lessons mean for Coventry, Ipswich and Hull City?
Survival stories Brighton & Hove Albion Promotion year: 2017 Consecutive years in the Premier League: 9 Respective finishes: 15th, 17th, 15th, 16th, 9th, 6th, 11th, 8th, 7th (to date)