Stat, Viz, Quiz: Who Will Win the Championship in 2025-26? ...Middle East

Stat, Viz, Quiz is the Opta Analyst football newsletter. This week’s edition looks at our Championship predictions, Gonçalo Ramos, and longest-serving players.

Many call it the most unpredictable league in the world, or the least predictable depending on how pedantic you’re feeling.

In just a few short days, the 2025-26 Championship season begins, with 24 teams looking to earn promotion to the promised land of the Premier League. In this week’s SVQ, we’ll be checking in with the Opta supercomputer to see how things could unfurl in England’s second tier.

Also, in our weekly look at a reported transfer target, we’ll analyse Paris Saint-Germain striker Gonçalo Ramos. Could he be on his way to the Premier League, and if so, how good is he?

With Crystal Palace and Liverpool preparing to face off in the Community Shield on Sunday, our quiz looks at the history of the annual curtain raiser, while our Ask Opta query this week is all about the longest-serving players.

If you haven’t done so already, you can subscribe below for free to receive SVQ every Tuesday.

STAT – Championship Predictions

It can almost be a cliché the extent to which people refer to the Championship as being unpredictable. We get it, there’s a lot of evenly matched teams and anyone can beat anyone.

Thankfully, supercomputers don’t deal in clichés. They just deal in calculating outcome probabilities for us without any bias or preconceptions, so we ran some Championship numbers through it and the conclusion was… *drum roll*… this season’s Championship is going to be really unpredictable.

You can head to the Opta Analyst website to read a full rundown of our 2025-26 Championship season predictions, but we wanted to give you some of the headlines in this week’s SVQ.

Sheffield United becoming the first team to miss out on promotion to the Premier League despite winning as many as 90 points last season has likely played a big part in them being made favourites to go up, while the recently relegated teams are all expected to put up a challenge to bounce straight back.

Arguably the more interesting numbers come at the other end of the table, though.

Before we get into relegation chances, we should mention that the difficulties going on at Sheffield Wednesday obviously can’t be fed into a supercomputer, so their predicted finish of 14th should perhaps be treated with caution.

The favourites to go down are Oxford United, closely followed by Watford. However, it should also be noted that both are given a less-than-22% chance of relegation, so in fact, no one team is particularly fancied to be relegated.

To show how low those numbers are for the relegation favourites, comparing them to our predictions last season, there were four teams who went into the campaign with more than a 22% chance of going down according to the supercomputer. That included favourites Cardiff City on 49.7%, while Plymouth Argyle were second favourites on 34.9%. Both ended up going down, though Oxford United stayed up despite being third favourites. In fact, Oxford had a higher chance of going down last season (27.9%) than they do this (21.7%), despite now being favourites.

It’s all just so unpredictable, so who knows?

VIZ – Goal-çalo Ramos?

The summer often brings talk of a transfer merry-go-round, which we quite like the idea of. A load of players having a whale of a time going round and round on wooden horses, waiting for clubs to come and pick them up.

It has been a carousel of strikers this summer, with the same names popping up in links with all the big teams, some of whom we’ve covered here in SVQ in recent weeks.

With last week’s subject, Benjamin Sesko, looking like he will be one of the last of those strikers to find a new club, seemingly off to one of Manchester United or Newcastle United, we’re starting to hear some names that haven’t been mentioned as much, presumably all on some back-up carousel somewhere. One of those is Gonçalo Ramos, linked with Newcastle in recent days.

It’s tempting to say that Ramos’ move to Paris Saint-Germain hasn’t really worked. The Portuguese forward moved to the French capital in 2023 after an excellent season with Benfica in which he scored 19 goals in 30 Primeira Liga games.

In his two seasons at PSG, Ramos has scored 21 goals in 51 Ligue 1 games, and 33 in 86 games in all competitions. However, it should be noted that only 39 of his 86 appearances have been starts.

Ramos’ goals-per-game average has been impressive in his two years in France, finding the net every 123 minutes (including added time) – that’s a better rate than any other PSG player in that time apart from Kylian Mbappé (96 mins). He’s also scored with 21.3% of his non-penalty shots, higher than teammates Ousmane Dembélé (18.5%), Bradley Barcola (18.7%) and Désiré Doué (19.5%).

No player at PSG has averaged a higher non-pen xG per 90 than Ramos over the last two seasons (0.78), while he is one of only nine players from the top five European leagues with an xG-per-shot average of 0.20 or higher (0.21) out of the 267 to have attempted 100+ non-pen shots in all competitions since the start of 2023-24.

He might not be a great dribbler who can carry the ball or play out wide or join up with the midfield like Dembélé did to great effect last season, but Ramos has shown he is an excellent penalty-box striker, and could be a useful option for another team who prefer to play a forward in that mould.

Whether the European champions will let him go remains to be seen, but at 24, Ramos is a good age and a potentially good shout for someone before the transfer window closes.

QUIZ – Community Shield Questions

With the Community Shield between Crystal Palace and Liverpool taking place on Sunday, we ask five questions about the annual curtain raiser. Answers at the bottom of the page.

1. Which team has won the most Community Shields (not including shared ones)?

2. Five of the last eight Community Shields have gone to a penalty shootout. Which team have won three of those?

3. Since 2004-05, four players have scored twice in a Community Shield match. Name any of them.

4. Manchester City beat Manchester United on penalties in last season’s Community Shield, with Jadon Sancho and Jonny Evans missing in the shootout for United. Who was the only City player to fail from the spot, doing so with their first kick?

5. Which former Manchester United player has played in more Community Shields than anyone else since (and including) the 2004-05 edition?

Ask Opta

This week’s question comes from John P, who asks: “With James Milner still going, who are the longest-serving players in the Premier League?”

Do you have a stat-based question you’d like Opta to answer in a future edition of SVQ? Email us at [email protected] or message us on X @OptaAnalyst with #AskOpta and we’ll pick the best one.

Answer:

Yes, James Milner is back for another Premier League season, almost 23 years after his debut in the competition for Leeds United in November 2002. That makes him the longest-serving player in the Premier League of those still active by some distance.

The next longest serving is Newcastle United goalkeeper John Ruddy, who remains on the books of a top-flight club having made his first appearance in February 2006.

Milner’s good friend and former teammate Jordan Henderson is next after signing for Brentford from Ajax this summer. The England international made his debut for Sunderland in the Premier League in November 2008, the same month Brighton’s Danny Welbeck made his first bow for Manchester United in the competition.

Nottingham Forest striker Chris Wood was handed his first Premier League appearance in April 2009, while Séamus Coleman made his first Premier League outing for Everton in November of that same year. The Irishman is also the longest-serving player to have stayed at the same club ever since.

What Are We Up to at Opta Analyst?

Here’s some of our latest data-driven offerings:

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Quiz Answers

1. Which team has won the most Community Shields (not including shared ones)?

Manchester United (17)

2. Five of the last eight Community Shields have gone to a penalty shootout. Which team have won three of those?

Arsenal

3. Since 2004-05, four players have scored twice in a Community Shield match. Name any of them.

Didier Drogba (2005-06), Nani (2011-12), Robin van Persie (2012-13), Sergio Agüero (2018-19)

4. Manchester City beat Manchester United on penalties in last season’s Community Shield, with Jadon Sancho and Jonny Evans missing in the shootout for United. Who was the only City player to fail from the spot, doing so with their first kick?

Bernardo Silva

5. Which former Manchester United player has played in more Community Shields than anyone else since (and including) the 2004-05 edition?

Michael Carrick (7)

Before You Go…

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Stat, Viz, Quiz: Who Will Win the Championship in 2025-26? Opta Analyst.

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