EFL set to confirm date for vote on finishing 2019/20 season

A date for voting on how to finish the 2019/20 season is expected to be confirmed on Wednesday following another meeting of the EFL board.

Following the indicative vote between League Two clubs nearly two weeks ago, Cobblers have been stepping up their preparations to face Cheltenham in the play-offs as they wait for official confirmation from the EFL.

Players and staff will be tested for coronavirus on Thursday before their anticipated return to training next Monday. But the schedule is tight with the play-offs needing to be completed by July 1 when hundreds of EFL players will become free agents.

The chief reason behind the delay to the formal vote has been due to a split in League One where several clubs, including Peterborough and Sunderland, have pushed for the season to continue while others are desperate for a swift conclusion to avoid huge financial losses.

League Two is more united with an overwhelming number of clubs in favour of immediately curtailing the campaign and keeping promotion in place, including the play-offs.

Clubs will be given two proposals when an official vote eventually takes place: either to finish the season now and decide tables using PPG or play out all remaining fixtures. Leagues one and two are expected to vote for the former while the Championship looks set to restart next month.

Meanwhile, Stevenage chairman Phil Wallace has warned his club face multi-million pound losses from relegation, which is expected to be enforced in League Two.

Stevenage are currently bottom of the division although could yet be displaced by Macclesfield Town if the Silkmen suffer further punishment for failing to pay their players on time in March.

“You would suffer an immediate £500,000 loss, then another £500,000 the next year and the year after that,” said Wallace. “The value of the club is cut in half as a non-league club is not as valuable. All the players’ values would be cut in half.

“You would take away the academy which you spend nearly £3 million on and worked on for seven or eight years. Everyone loses their job and you lose all the kids you’ve coached for the last eight years. You lose them all after investing years in them.

“If that all happens after 46 games, that’s fine. We understand the rules when we started but you cannot change them halfway through and assume we’re only going to win 0.6 points per game from now. It’s just ridiculous.”

“What is wrong with adding clubs to the EFL? Why are we fixated with 72 clubs? Why aren’t we saying 73 or 74 or 75 and we work it out over the next years? The word integrity is doing my head in, where is the integrity in saying ‘you’re expelled’. This is completely wrong. It doesn’t matter about Macclesfield, it is the principle of it.

“If you want to encourage excitement in the league and fulfil obligations to TV, by all means let’s establish play-off clubs by points-per-game. To apply that to expel a club from the EFL who could have reasonably got out of trouble would take away all your league money. That is completely wrecking a club. Nobody can tell me that’s right.”