The image of the weekend was Liam Millar at Wembley, Canadian flag in hand, celebrating Hull City’s promotion to the Premier League. A coach pulled him aside after the final whistle and said the words out loud: you’re going to the World Cup and you’re in the Premier League. Millar put his hand over his face. The crew watched the clip and felt it.

Canada has a Premier League player again, and the squad announcement is four days away.

Liam Millar’s Promotion and What It Actually Means

The Championship playoff final is worth an estimated £250 million to the winning club if they stay up. That number gives a sense of the pressure that had been building all season. Millar carried that with him, and then the result came through and the release arrived all at once.

The personal journey behind the moment made it land harder.

Millar has come through an ACL, a hamstring injury on return, the kind of recurring physical setbacks that have become an unfortunate pattern across Canada’s men’s national team. He moved to England as a young kid, family pulling up roots and replanting them, and has been working his way back toward the biggest stages ever since.

“He obviously still has ties and Canada is still so important and meaningful for him.”

A video the Footy Prime social team shared showed his coach delivering the news. The crew compared the emotion to Craig Forrest’s reaction when Canada qualified for the 2022 World Cup. That particular kind of overwhelming, where it’s collective and personal at the same time, is what Millar’s face showed at Wembley.

Liam then flew straight to the Canada camp and missed Hull’s promotion parade. World Cup training duty calls, after all

While a few people on social media were calling Millar the first Canadian ever to play in the Premier League, supporters of Footy Prime jumped in quickly to correct, dropping names including our Craig Forrest and Jimmy Brennan, plus Paul Stalteri and Tomasz Radzinski. Much appreciated.