After nine matchdays in 2025-26, the Championship table is beginning to take shape. How have the Opta supercomputer’s season predictions changed since pre-season, and which teams look likeliest to be promoted to the Premier League and relegated to League One?
Following the second international break of 2025-26, the Championship returns to action this weekend with Coventry City sitting pretty at the top of the table.
Frank Lampard’s side are a point ahead of Rob Edwards’ Middlesbrough, but with 36 matchdays still to play, the Championship will continue to provide the twists and turns that make it the most exciting league in the world for many.
Before the action began in August, we revealed the Opta supercomputer’s pre-season predictions for the Championship. Two months on, we’re checking on the latest projections after some surprise results across the opening 107 games of 2025-26.
The Battle for Promotion from the Championship
Coventry City went top of the Championship in style on 4 October following an emphatic 5-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday at Hillsborough. That came after a 3-0 home win over Birmingham and a 4-0 victory at Millwall, making the Sky Blues the first side in English Football League history to win consecutive matches 3-0, 4-0 and 5-0.
In fact, in climbing to the top of the league, Coventry scratched a 16-year itch. Not since August 2009 had they spent a night in first place in the English second tier.
Lampard’s team are in sensational attacking form this season, scoring 27 goals in the Championship. The last team to score that many in a second-tier season after nine games were Manchester City in 2001-02 (also 27). Should they keep up their three-goals-per-game average, they’d end the season with 138, which would be a single-campaign record for the EFL, eclipsing Peterborough United’s 134 in the 1960-61 fourth tier.
Their lead over Middlesbrough at the top of the table is only one point, but based on the underlying data, Coventry’s performances have been far beyond that of any other team in the Championship this season.
When we look at Opta’s expected points table for the Championship – which uses xG data to assess how each game ‘should’ have finished based on the quality of chances each team created – Coventry should have even more points (21) than they currently do (19) and their lead at the top of the table should be five points.
Nineteen points is actually the lowest total by a team leading the Championship after nine matchdays since West Bromwich Albion in 2019-20. Sheffield United (21 – finished third) and Preston North End (20 – finished 10th) are two examples of teams winning more at this stage in the past two seasons and failing to win promotion.
Nevertheless, the Opta supercomputer is gaining confidence that Coventry can make it back to the Premier League for the first time since being relegated from the top flight in 2000-01.
After the latest 10,000 simulations of the remaining 36 matchdays of the 2025-26 Championship season, Coventry are automatically promoted in 56.7% of them, and they won the league title 38.3% of the time.
Their likeliest challengers are deemed to be Leicester City, who finished in the top two in 28.7% of sims, while second-placed Middlesbrough won automatic promotion 26.6% of the time.
Boro have 18 points from nine games this season, which is their best start to a Championship season since 2018-19 (also 18 points), when they eventually finished seventh and missed out on the play-offs by a point.
Edwards is a manager who has got out of the Championship before, though, guiding Luton Town to an unlikely promotion via the play-offs in 2022-23. That included defeating Coventry at Wembley, so he’ll hope to outfox the Sky Blues again.
After dropping down from the Premier League last season, Leicester have only lost one of their nine games, but four draws in their last five games see Martí Cifuentes’ side sit third. No club have won promotion to the top-flight as often as Leicester (13 times), however, and they will undoubtedly be in contention for the automatic promotion spots this time around.
Under Threat of Relegation to League One
There was understandable outcry in pre-season when the Opta supercomputer didn’t consider Sheffield Wednesday among the favourites for relegation from the Championship.The Owls, who have endured serious off-field issues and lost manager Danny Röhl on the eve of the season, were among the bookmakers’ favourites, but the supercomputer wasn’t able to factor those external issues into its calculations.
Performances haven’t been great through nine games this season, with them winning just six points. However, five points from three games before that 5-0 defeat to Coventry on MD9 provided some confidence that they could still compete.
Arguably the one positive for Sheffield Wednesday this season is that rivals Sheffield United have been the only club worse than them.
They dismissed Chris Wilder as boss in the summer after he led them to the play-off final, replacing him with former Reading and Hull City coach Rubén Sellés. The Spanish coach saw his team lose each of their five opening league games to 2025-26, and that awful run was added to by a League Cup exit to Birmingham City. He was sacked on 14 September, and replaced by a returning Wilder.
Wilder returned but oversaw a late home defeat to Charlton Athletic in his first game back before finally sealing their first win of the season against Oxford United. Since then, however, they’ve lost to Southampton and Hull, leaving them bottom of the league on three points.
The Blades shouldn’t be bottom of the league, though – at least that’s what the underlying data suggests. Their expected points total is 10.2 – more than six other sides – while they’ve seriously underperformed at both ends of the pitch.
Their total of three goals is six below their 9.0 xG, while they have conceded nearly four goals more (16) than their xG against (12.2) suggests they should have. They have underperformed in both metrics to a greater degree than any other club in the league.
It’s Wednesday who are now the supercomputer’s favourites for relegation from the Championship this season, however.
Henrik Pedersen’s side were relegated in 47.7% of the latest Opta supercomputer season simulations, while Sheffield United’s 22.6% was lower than Blackburn Rovers (25.9%), Derby County (26.7%) and Oxford United (37.6%).
How Have the Championship Projections Changed?
The Opta supercomputer’s projections are ever-changing, as (obviously) real-life data, results and form will influence how it predicts the eventual outcome at the end of the season.
Therefore, it will sometimes get some projections quite wrong at the start of the season, and there’s no case in point stronger than Sheffield United.
Ahead of MD1, the supercomputer’s predictions suggested the Blades were likeliest to win the Championship title, doing so in 26.5% of seasonal projections. They were deemed more than twice as likely to earn automatic promotion (41.1%) than each of their three closest challengers, Leicester (16.0%), Ipswich (15.2%) and Coventry (14.4%).
While that projection looks slightly foolish now, Sheffield United had just come off the back of a 90-point season, only losing late on in the play-off final against Sunderland in May. Just two other teams have won 90+ points in a second-tier season (based on three points for a win) and not won promotion: Leeds United in 2023-24 and Sunderland in 1997-98. Both of those teams won the title the following season while earning 100+ points.
Their average points total across the 10,000 pre-season simulations was 80.7, but now, after nine games and just three points collected, that projected points total has been revised to just 55.5. That drop of 25.2 is the biggest swing – either way – between the supercomputer’s projections in pre-season and now among all 24 Championship clubs.
Coventry are the team to have seen the biggest positive swing, with their projected points total now 13.7 higher than it was in August (82.4 vs 68.7), followed by Middlesbrough (+9.6), Preston North End (+8.9) and Stoke City (+7.5).
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