Bradford City almost had the keys to Championship promotion with Huddersfield Town loanee | OneFootball

Eventual journeyman striker Jordy Hiwula nearly delivered Bradford City promotion to the Championship in the 2016/17 campaign.

Bradford City have gained promotion back to League One this season and the Bantams’ supporters and club as a whole will look back on the 2024/25 League Two campaign with pride and fondness.

They have been in the doldrums of the fourth-tier of English football for seven seasons, so a return to the third-tier is very much welcome and something that they will hope can be built upon.

Eight years ago, though, the season prior to their relegation from League One, Bradford narrowly missed out on promotion back to the Championship for the first time since their relegation from the second-tier in 2004.

One of few teams to have played in both the Premier League and League Two this century, Bradford will look back on the 2016/17 season and one player in particular.

Former Huddersfield Town striker Jordy Hiwula has embarked upon a frustrating journeyman-like career since departing Valley Parade in 2017, but he very nearly handed Bradford promotion back to the top two divisions of English football.

Hiwula’s impact at Bradford

Under the management of club legend Stuart McCall, who played 533 times for the club across two spells as a player, Bradford bounced back from the departure of Phil Parkinson to Bolton Wanderers in the summer of 2016 to launch an impressive promotion challenge.

Having gone second in the League One table with a 4-0 demolition of Rochdale in West Yorkshire in mid-November, Bradford did eventually slip to a fifth-place finish, despite suffering just one loss in their final six games of the campaign.

In fact, only runaway winners Sheffield United, who amassed 100 points over the course of the season, suffered fewer defeats than Bradford’s seven League One losses – with Bradford’s low-scoring and percentage-based style reliant on a point of difference in attack.

That point of difference was often Manchester City academy graduate and Huddersfield Town loanee, Hiwula.

Hiwula finished as the club’s top scorer that season with 12 goals across all competitions, nine of which came in the league, and they were reliant on him throughout the campaign as he chipped in with goals at important moments.

His all-round play allowed the likes of Mark Marshall and Nicky Law to thrive from midfield, as well as Charlie Wyke, who had scored seven goals in 19 League One games, having joined the club in the winter transfer window.

However, Hiwula was an unused substitute at Wembley Stadium in their 1-0 play-off final defeat to Millwall and that decision by McCall may well have cost them promotion on the face of things, with the Bradford boss sticking with the formula that had seen his side into the final after Hiwula played just 21 minutes across two legs against Fleetwood Town in the play-off semi-finals.

Hiwula’s career after Bradford

Following his time at Bradford, Hiwula joined Fleetwood, who Bradford had beaten in the semi-finals of the play-offs in the previous campaign, on loan for the 2017/18 season.

He once again chipped in well with the Cod Army, scoring eight goals in 43 appearances before a move to Coventry City on a permanent basis, where he reached double figures for league goals as Mark Robins’ Sky Blues finished eighth in the third-tier.

Hiwula then found himself struggling for game time at Coventry, though, and ended up enduring short and ineffective stints at Portsmouth, Doncaster Rovers, Ross County and Morecambe.

The former England youth international has been without a club since last summer and there will be a case of “what if” for both Bradford and Hiwula with regards to that day spent on the bench at Wembley.