The Championship is well-known for being one of the most difficult to predict leagues in world football. Teams can go from play-off contenders to relegation fodder within only a few months (see Hull in 2020) and now, as we approach the conclusion of a season blighted by an absence of fans, it is as open at the top as ever.

Who would have expected Barnsley to emerge as one of the strongest contenders following their miraculous escape from relegation last season? Having seen Cardiff’s position halfway through the season, would anyone have predicted them to be the form side in the Championship?

So if human logic isn’t enough to help us understand the nuances of Championship results, can we use mathematics to help us make a more accurate prediction of the way things will go over the next few weeks.

The Factors

This won’t be as simple as looking at the quality of opponent that each of these teams will face over the last few games of the season – though that would save me a great many hours – rather we need to try and make this as accurate as possible. This means looking at a team’s form, their points-per-game (ppg) over the course of the whole season, and also their performances in the reverse fixtures and against teams occupying a similar position in the table to their opponents.

This, still, is not accurate enough. The Championship is the Championship and it wouldn’t be (arguably) the most entertaining league in the world if; a) we didn’t give the opponents, however, relegation-threatened they may be, a fighting chance and; b) if I wasn’t forced to account for a, frankly, devastatingly irritating amount of managerial changes over the course of the 2020/21 season.

The managerial changes present a tough issue, as one cannot fairly paint Mick McCarthy’s Cardiff City with the same brush as that of Neil Harris’ side from earlier in the campaign and yet we cannot accept Jonathan Woodgate’s recent appointment at Bournemouth as a fair interpretation of their whole season.

The way that I got around this problem was by setting a limit of 12 matches under a head coach as the cut-off point for ppg across the whole season and ppg under a new manager. This ensures that McCarthy’s Cardiff will get the respect that they deserve, without meaning that Lee Bowyer will win every other game with Birmingham because I don’t think that will happen.

In terms of acknowledging the other team in each of these equations, I will be looking particularly closely at the result of the reverse fixture between the two teams. It is probably the best indicator of how the clash of styles will play out and so I will be weighting the value. This means that I will essentially be counting that result twice in my equation, in order to improve the accuracy.

The Championship does have a habit of throwing up flukes though, so with this in mind, I will be splitting the Championship into six groups of four and factoring in results against those teams. This will hopefully iron out any outlying results and allow a better reflection of how Brentford, for example, will perform against teams at the bottom of the league, other than focusing purely on Wycombe.

The Teams

There are nine teams that are currently realistic choices for the automatic/playoff places at the top of the Championship. These are…

Of these teams, Norwich look to be nailed-on Championship Winners whilst Watford’s exceptional run of form coupled with Swansea’s recent lacklustre performances seem to have taken the Hornets over the line. Middlesborough are the outsiders for the top six, but never write Neil Warnock off.

The Equation

The only way to make this manageable is by looking at the maths through a ppg method. By averaging a team’s ppg across a variety of factors, we will be able to get a good idea of their chances of winning each game. So if we are looking at:

Form ppg

Season (or new manager) ppg

(Reverse fixture) x 2

Ppg vs group (closest opponents)

Then our equation would look like this:

 

If we use the example of Preston Vs Norwich, the math follows on pretty simply:

The only issue with this method is that it will essentially give the win to the team higher up in the table every time, and it doesn’t factor in the chances of the opponent, which shouldn’t be diminished in the Championship, so we do the same equation for the opponent, and that gives us their chance of winning:

Now, these numbers obviously don’t fit together, so we’re going to need to make the values equal, in order to get a fair idea of how many points Norwich can expect to take from this match:

 

 

This means that we can then add 2.14 points onto Norwich’s points tally and whilst some of you might point out that it is literally impossible for Norwich to take that many points from this game. That total factors in the possibility of a slip-up, and will do so in each of Norwich’s last eight games, which means that we should (hopefully) get a pretty good idea of how Norwich will look at the end of the season, so long as they stay somewhat similar to the form that they have displayed so far this season.

Our final equation looks like this, with O representing ‘opponent’:

 

My next job was to translate all of this across into Excel so that the maths was done for me and I’m aware that there’s a lot of information on these screenshots and they might be quite difficult to read, so you can see working out up close and personal on the spreadsheet here.

Norwich City

Current position: 1st

Projected points gained: 15 

Watford

Current position: 2nd

Projected points gained: 15 

Swansea City

Current position: 3rd

Projected points gained: 17

Brentford

 

 

Current position: 4th

Projected points gained: 16

Barnsley

 

Current position: 5th

Projected points gained: 14 

Reading

Current position: 6th

Projected points gained: 13 

Bournemouth

Current position: 7th

Projected points gained: 15 

Cardiff

 

Current position: 8th

Projected points gained: 15 

Middlesborough

Current position: 9th

Projected points gained: 13 

That leaves us with this table:

But wait…

At this point, you might be aware that all of the above mathematics has essentially predicted that each team will stay exactly where they are in the table, which is wholly unrealistic and, I’ll be honest, had me questioning the purpose of my existence on this planet.

The fault with this system is quite simple, it is very difficult to override the importance of consistency throughout a season and, with the form being somewhat steady for each of these teams, it was going to be difficult for any of them to be dislodged as none of them were really making ground on each other, particularly in the games between each of these teams, so that is how I would fix this problem. I would predict the outcome of the games that each of these teams play against each other, and this should shuffle the board.

 

To start with, we need to remove the points that each team gained from these fixtures on the spreadsheet, so we weren’t counting matches twice.

Norwich lost around seven points from their four matches against teams in this list

Watford lost nine points from their five

Swansea only lost three from two games

Brentford lost five from three games

Barnsley lost four from three games

Reading lost seven from five games

Bournemouth lost four from three games

Cardiff lost three points from two games

Middlesborough lost four points from three games.

So, there are a good amount of fixtures to get through and I’ll avoid a complex equation to predict these games and instead will focus purely on performances in the reverse fixture and results against the rest of these teams to work out which team will take away the points in each fixture.

That leaves us with this final table:

Norwich will win the league with an excellent total of 96 points, with Watford clear runners up. Bournemouth will cap off a disappointing return to the second tier of English football by missing out on the play-offs whilst Mick McCarthy’s Cardiff revolution will go down in history as one of the great Championship stories.

As for the play-off winners, I’ve earmarked Swansea to take the win. I think they’ll halt Cardiff’s runaway train in the semi-finals and an Ayew penalty will send the Swans soaring back into the Premier League.

 

By Theo Hewson Betts

 

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