Wembley has never known a Championship play-off final like tomorrow’s. A team beaten over a two-legged semi-final has been given a second chance after Southampton’s expulsion for spying brought the reinstatement of Middlesbrough.But the opponent they will face can tell their own improbable tale in reaching the cusp of the Premier League.Hull City are the Championship’s underdog story of 2025-26. Twelve months after avoiding relegation to League One by goal difference on the season’s final day, a resurgence made all the more unlikely by an EFL transfer embargo has carried them to within 90 minutes of a £200million promotion.“It’s like a dream this final, but maybe afterwards it will be a dream come true,” Sergej Jakirovic, whose appointment last summer sparked the revival, tells The Athletic. “We will do everything to get there. We will try to bring joy to Yorkshire.”Jakirovic attempts the local accent on the final word of that sentence and begins to laugh. He does that a lot; chuckling at the transfer embargo that landed within weeks of his arrival, the culture of spying in Croatian football and his side’s defensive record.“We conceded a lot of goals,” he says with a grin. “Sixty!” Turns out it was actually 66, more than Oxford leaked when relegated to League One. Yet Hull scored 70 of their own in an intrepid season, bettering the return managed in any of the club’s previous three promotions from the Championship in 2008, 2013 and 2016.Jakirovic is not a manager who appears to take himself too seriously, but he has excelled during his first season in English football. The 49-year-old, once an international centre-back with Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a self-confessed Anglophile and says he has modelled his energetic style on former Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp.“I have been following him since Mainz,” he says of Klopp. “He is gegenpressing, and I try to put this style of football into my teams. Especially the reaction after losing the ball.“Klopp did a great job at Mainz with a low budget, Borussia Dortmund, I can say an average budget compared to Bayern Munich. Liverpool, also, compared to Manchester City. He has always been very successful because he can change mentalities. His man-management is perfect.”Those at Hull say similar of Jakirovic. At a club that sacked Liam Rosenior, Tim Walter and Ruben Selles inside 12 chaotic months, its owner Acun Ilicali, the Turkish businessman, has found calm and stability with Jakirovic. The manager is a hugely popular figure with players, instilling cohesion and spirit in unexpectedly challenging circumstances.Hull will face Middlesbrough in Saturday’s final (Harriet Massey/Getty Images)Jakirovic goes back to last summer when signing a two-year contract as manager in the wake of leaving Turkish club Kayserispor. “I started to watch the games where we needed to improve, which players we needed to bring in… then, bang, embargo!”