With the help of the Opta supercomputer, we provide our Championship match predictions for every fixture on matchday of 2025-26.
Championship football is back.
We’ve already given you our Championship season predictions from the Opta supercomputer, plus the new players we think you should be watching and our case for the league being the most exciting to follow in Europe.
Now our focus shifts to the opening matchday of the 2025-26 campaign and how the supercomputer predicts each game will go across the first weekend of action.
The Championship is a notoriously hard league to predict, but the Opta supercomputer will have a go anyway…
Matchday 1 Predictions
After a 76-day wait for Championship football, the competition returns for a new season on Friday night with Birmingham City facing Ipswich Town under the St. Andrew’s floodlights.
Both teams are tipped by many to be among those battling it out for promotion from the Championship this season, despite being two leagues apart in 2024-25.
Ipswich were relegated from the Premier League with just 22 points last term– their worst tally in a league season in their entire history, while Birmingham City romped to a League One title, breaking an English Football League points record along the way (111).
This will be the second time Birmingham have hosted Ipswich on the opening weekend of a league season. The last occasion was in 1995-96, when the newly promoted Blues beat newly relegated Ipswich 3-1 – a strikingly similar context to this year’s curtain-raiser.
The Opta supercomputer is backing Ipswich to get some revenge for that opening-day defeat 30 years ago. Kieran McKenna’s side won this game 46.4% of the time across the 10,000 pre-match simulations, with Birmingham collecting all three points just 29.1% of the time.
Amazingly, that is the only away win predicted by the Opta supercomputer across the whole of MD 1 in the Championship.
All 11 of the other fixtures see the supercomputer favour the home side, with Southampton and Leicester City – both relegated from the Premier League last season – being given the greatest chances of success.
In fairness to the supercomputer, home advantage mattered more in the Championship than in any of England’s top four tiers last season, with 253 of 552 matches ending in home wins (46%). None of the matchdays saw as many as 11 home wins, though – the most coming on MD 22 in December (10).
Southampton host Wrexham on Saturday. The Welsh club, famously backed by Hollywood stars, are returning to the second tier for the first time in 43 years and 86 days. That is the longest gap between matches in England’s second-tier since Doncaster Rovers returned in 2008 (50 years, 105 days).
Wrexham may be unbeaten across their last 10 league matches, but coming up against Southampton will be a different proposition. Will Still takes charge of Saints for the first time in a competitive fixture, and the supercomputer is giving them a 62.8% chance of victory at St Mary’s this weekend.
The only team to win a higher proportion of the pre-match simulations on MD 1 were Leicester City, who host troubled Sheffield Wednesday in the only Championship match to be played on Sunday.
Facing Leicester away from home could be one of the hardest games for any club this season, but for Sheffield Wednesday it could prove to be even more difficult.
The Owls, who find themselves under several EFL embargoes for breaching financial rules and currently unable to sign players for a fee until January 2027, might struggle to get a starting XI of senior players together for this fixture.
Martí Cifuentes takes charge of Leicester for the first time in the league, having joined from QPR. The supercomputer gives his side a 63.0% chance of victory.
Elsewhere, Saturday’s other early kick-offs see Charlton Athletic play their first Championship match since July 2020 as they host Watford and Frank Lampard’s Coventry City look to get over more play-off heartache with a strong start against Hull City.
Both home sides are favoured in the simulations, though Watford were given a 29.3% win chance as Paulo Pezzolano looks to get off to a positive start.
Across Saturday’s 3pm kick-offs, every home team won at least 40% of the pre-match simulations by the supercomputer, but Middlesbrough (48.6% vs Swansea City) and West Bromwich Albion (47.6% vs Blackburn Rovers) are deemed the most likely winners.
QPR vs Preston is the match that saw the most pre-match sims end in a draw across MD 1 (26.9%), while if any away side are to be victorious on the opening Saturday of Championship action it’ll be Portsmouth, who won 31.7% of the pre-match simulations against Oxford United – just ahead of Millwall’s win rate in the simulations at Norwich City (31.5%).
Saturday’s late kick-off sees Sheffield United attempt to get over their play-off final defeat to Sunderland in May with a home meeting against the team that they destroyed over two legs in their play-off semi-final tie, Bristol City.
Bristol City’s away form was poor last season, winning just one of their last 15 away games (D7 L7) in the Championship regular season before losing 3-0 against the Blades at Bramall Lane in the second leg of their play-off semi-final.
Including those play-off matches, Sheff Utd are unbeaten across their last eight matches versus Bristol City in league competition (W6 D2), and the supercomputer is siding with them in this clash too. Rubén Sellés is expected to start life as United manager with all three points, with them winning 58.6% of the 10,000 pre-game supercomputer simulations.
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