Southampton admitted spying on Middlesbrough before the first leg of the play-off semi-final, along with Oxford United at Christmas and Ipswich Town last month.<\/p>\n
When Saints hosted Ipswich on 28 April the two teams were in direct competition vying to finish second and earn automatic promotion. The game ended 2-2.<\/p>\n
Southampton have no further right of appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.<\/p>\n
The Championship play-off final will now go ahead at Wembley on Saturday between Hull City and Middlesbrough (15:30 BST kick-off), with a place in the Premier League on the line.<\/p>\n
The fixture is dubbed as the most lucrative game in world football, with promotion worth a minimum of \u00a3200m in broadcast revenue and parachute payments.<\/p>\n
“A league arbitration panel has dismissed Southampton Football Club’s appeal against the independent disciplinary commission’s sanction following the admittance of multiple breaches of EFL regulations,” the EFL said on Wednesday evening.<\/p>\n
Saints called the ruling “an extremely disappointing outcome”.<\/p>\n
It added: “While we fully acknowledge the seriousness of this matter and the scrutiny that has followed, the club has consistently believed the original sporting sanction was disproportionate, a view that has been widely shared by many in the football community over the last 24 hours.”<\/p>\n
Hull, meanwhile, are unhappy they will have to face different opponents at short notice, with owner Acun Ilicali suggesting the club could take legal action if they lose the final.<\/p>\n
Ilicali told Sky Sports he was not happy with the situation, but there was no other option “in order to finish this mess”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Southampton admitted spying on Middlesbrough before the first leg of the play-off semi-final, along with Oxford United at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439384,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-460023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}