Who will win promotion to the Premier League? Who will make the play-offs? Who will suffer relegation to League One? We look at all the key Championship predictions ahead of the 2024-25 season via our trusty Opta supercomputer.
Championship 2024-25 Predictions: The Quick Hits
Favourites for Automatic Promotion: Leeds United and Middlesbrough
Top Six Dark Horses: Coventry City and Hull City
Relegation Favourites: Cardiff City, Plymouth Argyle and Oxford United
We tasked the Opta supercomputer with simulating the 2024-25 EFL Championship season 10,000 times to see how it believed the campaign may pan out. Predicting the Championship is a tough job, with the English second tier being one of the most unpredictable and exciting leagues around.
To show the potential craziness of the Championship season, 23 of the 24 teams won the title at least once in the Opta supercomputer’s 2024-25 simulations – Plymouth Argyle the only team failing to do so (it must have something against Wayne Rooney) – while Leeds United were the the only side to never finish bottom. Compare this to our current Premier League season predictions, where our projections see only nine teams win the title at least once across the 10,000 simulated seasons.
An essential thing to understand is that these projections are based on what the Opta supercomputer knows today. Essentially, if every game in the Championship was to be played today, this is how the model sees the league finishing. Of course, these projections will change throughout the season, thousands of times, based on real-life data powering the seasonal simulations.
Nevertheless, these pre-season projections provide an early look at what certain teams might be realistically aiming to achieve in 2024-25. You’ll have seen various 1-24 predictions by publications this summer and you’ve probably made your own, too; see this as a more unique projection without opinion and instead powered by data.
So, without further ado, we run you through the key results of the current Opta supercomputer Championship 2024-25 simulations.
Who Will Win Automatic Promotion from the Championship?
Leeds United may have been one of the most unfortunate sides in Championship history after failing to win promotion to the Premier League in 2023-24. Losing to Southampton in the play-off final at Wembley in May, they became the first team to win as many as 90 points and not be promoted from the second tier since Sunderland in 1997-98.
Like Sunderland back then, they won exactly 90 points, finished third and lost in the play-off final. They’ll hope to keep up the similarities with promotion this season, just like the Black Cats did back then with a league title win in 1998-99.
The Opta supercomputer is backing Leeds to do just that. As things stand, they won the league 45% of the time and earned automatic promotion to the Premier League in 63.4% of simulations. Last season, the supercomputer was far less committed to a single team, with Middlesbrough (19.9%) and Leicester City (17.2%) the pre-season favourites to win the title.
Daniel Farke is still in charge at Elland Road and he’s a manager who has always finished inside the top three and won at least 90 points in all three of his previous seasons as a Championship coach, including two previous league titles at Norwich City in 2018-19 and 2020-21.
Unlike Leicester and Southampton, who won promotion back to the Premier League at the first time of asking, Leeds are having to go through a second campaign of Championship action. There have been a few recent examples of teams taking two seasons to make it back to the Premier League after relegation from the top-flight: Sheffield United did this in 2022-23, as did Bournemouth in 2021-22 and West Brom in 2019-20.
As previously stated, Middlesbrough were last season’s pre-season favourites for the title, but their early season form saw them fall away quite quickly. Astonishingly, Boro won just two points from their opening seven league games of 2023-24 and sat bottom of the Championship. Michael Carrick’s side ended 2023-24 in strong form, however. Their 25 points in their final 12 games was more than any other side in the Championship, while no team scored more goals than they did (24) across this 12-game spell.
The Opta supercomputer projects them as the next most likely side to win the title (13.0%) and gain automatic promotion (27.5%) in 2024-25, ahead of a chasing pack of four clubs given more than a 10% chance of finishing inside the top two.
West Brom (17.2%) and Norwich (14%) are both contenders for automatic promotion having lost in the Championship play-off semi-finals last season. Since the inception of the competition in 1992, both of these clubs have won promotion to the Premier League the most often (five times) alongside Leicester, so they have pedigree.
Both Burnley (18.5%) and Luton Town (16.7%) came down from the Premier League last season and have been given a good chance of finishing inside the top two. Luton still have Rob Edwards in charge, but Burnley have lost Vincent Kompany to Bayern Munich, and it’ll be interesting to see how replacement Scott Parker does. He’s won promotion from the Championship before, with Bournemouth in 2021-22, but his most recent managerial stint at Club Brugge in Belgium was disappointing, winning just two of his 12 games and being sacked three months into the job.
Sheffield United were also relegated from the Premier League last season, with Chris Wilder looking to get his side back to the top flight at the first time of asking. The Opta supercomputer makes them ninth favourites for automatic promotion (5.8%) behind both Coventry City (8.9%) and Hull City (7.9%).
Fans of all 24 Championship clubs can dream. The pre-season Opta supercomputer projections saw every team finish in the top two at least 10 times across the 10,000 simulations, with even the three promoted sides – Oxford United (58), Derby County (92) and Portsmouth (96) – doing so nearly 250 times between them.
Promoted teams have done relatively well in recent years. Of the 30 to come up from League One over the previous 10 seasons, just eight have gone straight back down, while five have finished in the top eight. Of course, Ipswich Town secured back-to-back promotions last season – it’s unlikely Portsmouth, Derby or Oxford will manage to repeat that feat, however.
Who Will be Relegated from the Championship?
It may come as a surprise to some to see Cardiff City as the most relegated side from the 2024-25 Championship based on the pre-season Opta supercomputer projections. The Welsh club were relegated in 49.6% of simulations run today, which is just under 15 percentage points higher than any other club.
Last season saw Erol Bulut lead his side to a 12th-place finish with 62 points, and they ended 12 points above the relegation zone. So why the negative projection? Well, they did have a propensity to lose matches, which is never good; only bottom-of-the-league Rotherham (29) and Sheffield Wednesday (23) lost more games than they did.
Cardiff also conceded 70 goals, which was only better than three sides, while their expected goals against total of 71.0 was the third-worst in the entire division. Their own expected goals total in attack (44.3) was also the third-worst. Put those two metrics together and you have a worrying performance at both ends of the pitch. Overall, only Rotherham (-48.1) had a worse expected goals differential in the division than Cardiff (-26.6).
That underlying data in both defence and attack powers our expected points model. This model simulates the number of goals scored by every side in each match based on the expected goals (xG) value of every shot taken. It then uses the simulated number of goals to determine the match outcome (win/draw/loss). Each match is simulated 10,000 times. The expected points for each team in each match can then be calculated based on the proportion of simulations they win/draw/lose.
This is of course not an exact science, as expected goals data doesn’t account for many factors such as game state and dangerous periods of possession that don’t lead to shots. Nevertheless, it’s still a decent barometer for how teams performed over a season.
Cardiff may have won 62 points in the real Championship table, but they overperformed more than any other side in the league based on the Opta expected points model, with their 45.8 points on average across the simulations being 16.2 below their real tally. Only Rotherham, who finished adrift at the bottom of the league, performed worse in 2023-24.
Cardiff are followed by Plymouth Argyle (34.9%), who survived relegation by a single point in 2023-24, and League One play-off winners Oxford United (27.9%). Just three of the last 10 teams to come up to the Championship via the play-offs have been relegated, though, and all three of those have been in the final relegation spot.
Sunderland’s projected relegation chance of 24.1% will surprise many, but the supercomputer model can’t factor in a change of manager. Régis Le Bris has arrived and will hope to add some stability, which wasn’t there last season. Tony Mowbray was sacked in December, eventually being replaced by Michael Beale – who lasted 12 games – before caretaker manager Mike Dodds finished the campaign in the dugout. Sunderland’s projection will have been impacted by their awful end-of-season form in 2023-24, when they won just nine points from their final 15 games – only Rotherham (8) accumulated fewer.
Opta-Simulated Championship 2024-25 Table
After simulating the Championship 2024-25 season 10,000 times, we’re able to average the points total of every club across those simulations and therefore rank teams positionally. Here’s the Opta supercomputer results from those simulations:
1st: Leeds United – 81.6 average points
2nd: Middlesbrough – 73.9
3rd: Burnley – 71.4
4th: West Bromwich Albion – 71.1
5th: Luton Town – 70.9
6th: Norwich City – 69.9
7th: Coventry City – 67.4
8th: Hull City – 66.4
9th: Sheffield United – 65.3
10th: Bristol City – 63.9
11th: Swansea City – 62.6
12th: Sheffield Wednesday – 61.6
13th: Stoke City – 60.6
14th: Millwall – 59.8
15th: Watford – 59.6
16th: Blackburn Rovers – 59.1
17th: Portsmouth – 58.6
18th: Preston North End – 58.2
19th: Derby County – 58.1
20th: Queens Park Rangers – 57.5
21st: Sunderland – 56.2
22nd: Oxford United – 55.5
23rd: Plymouth Argyle – 53.7
24th: Cardiff City – 50.6
How Does the Opta Supercomputer Model Work?
- Opta’s League Prediction model estimates the likelihood of teams finishing in each position in the competition. We can therefore see how successful a team’s season is likely to be, whether it’s their relegation or title chances.
- The model estimates the probability of each match outcome (win, draw or loss) by using betting market odds and the Opta Power Rankings. The odds and rankings are based on historical and recent team performances.
- The model considers the strength of opponents by using these match outcome probabilities and simulates the remaining fixtures in the competition thousands of times. By analysing the outcome of each of these simulations, the model can see how often teams finished in each league position to create our final predictions.
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