Hull City are one game from the Premier League after reaching the Championship play-off final and will face Middlesbrough at Wembley on Saturday at 3.30pm. This time last year they were one game from dropping into League One.

It is a turnaround few in the division would have forecast, and the numbers make it look even starker. Hull became the first sixth-placed team to reach the play-off final since 2019, even though the data suggested they should have gone down. Expected Goals figures say they should have finished second-bottom, 13 points worse off than they were, and around 16 goals weaker at the back.

Instead, they survived on goal difference last season and then built a run to Wembley despite conceding 66 goals in the regular season. Only three teams in the bottom half of the Championship conceded more, and Hull also faced the second-highest number of shots on target in the division. Their goalkeeper, Ivor Pandur, posted a save percentage of 69.2 per cent, but the bigger story was what happened in front of him: opponents kept missing.

The list of wasted chances runs through the season and explains why Hull kept climbing. Josh Sargent missed a sitter when Norwich drew 0-0 at Hull in November, before the Tigers beat Norwich 2-0 after that missed chance. In December, Hull beat Wrexham 2-0 and Kieffer Moore passed up two golden opportunities that totalled around 0.9 xG. In January, Swansea lost 2-1 at Hull after Zan Vipotnik somehow missed an open goal. In April, Hull drew 1-1 with Oxford United after Mark Harris failed to score from close range in stoppage time.

There was more. Isaac Price blazed over an open goal in Hull’s 1-0 win over West Brom, and opponents have now failed to convert 10 chances in which they had at least a 50 per cent chance of scoring against them this season. That is not the whole explanation for Hull’s run, but it is the one that matters most today: they have spent the season defying both logic and the data, and now they are 90 minutes from promotion.