MIDDLESBROUGH, England (Reuters) -Burnley secured automatic promotion to the Premier League with seven games to spare after Friday’s 2-1 victory at Middlesbrough ensured Vincent Kompany’s side will finish in the second-tier Championship’s top two.
Burnley will return to the Premier League after one season, having been relegated on the final day of the 2021-22 campaign, in which they finished third-bottom.
Promotion can be worth over 300 million pounds ($372 million) over five seasons, if a club survives their first season in the Premier League – according to last year’s Deloitte Annual Review of Football Finance.
The three points helped Burnley secure promotion after third-placed Luton Town drew 0-0 at Millwall earlier in the day. Luton sit 19 points behind the leaders with only six games left.
The Lancashire club, coached by ex-Manchester City defender Kompany, top the Championship standings on 87 points after 39 games.
The top two in the division are promoted to the Premier League while the teams that finish third to sixth go into the playoffs to fight for the final spot.
A 66th-minute Connor Roberts strike guided Burnley to the win, after Ashley Barnes’s first-half goal was cancelled out by a Chuba Akpom penalty.
“This is a season’s hard work. From the beginning of the season a lot of people wrote us off, no one said we’d be up there,” Roberts told Sky Sports.
“We’ve shown them and hopefully going into next season we can maintain good performance levels and who knows what can happen.”
Burnley’s next objective will be to win the Championship title. They are 11 points clear of second-placed Sheffield United, who have 76 points.
($1 = 0.8056 pounds)
(Reporting by Manasi Pathak in Bengaluru, additional reporting by Aadi Nair, editing by Pritha Sarkar)
