The Championship this season has West Ham, Wrexham and Saints
Four matches into the 2026-27 Championship, the table reads like a list of clubs that all believe they should be somewhere else.
West Ham United are twelfth. Wrexham are eleventh. Southampton are eighteenth, Norwich twentieth, Stoke twenty-second and Preston bottom with nothing. Leading it are Swansea City, Queens Park Rangers and Charlton Athletic, all on ten points.
The relegated club
West Ham came down from the Premier League and have five points from four, sitting twelfth with a goal difference of plus one. On Tuesday they beat Wolverhampton Wanderers 4-2, which is the sort of result a club in their position needs early and often.
The Championship is unusually cruel to sides that come down. Parachute payments make them favourites and the fixture list makes nobody care: forty-six matches against opponents who treat the fixture as their cup final, in a division where the calendar is relentless and the squad is usually still full of players who would rather be elsewhere.
The club that keeps climbing
Wrexham are eleventh with five points and a goal difference of plus two, and on Wednesday they won 3-0 at Millwall.
It is worth stating plainly what that means. A club that was in the National League — outside the Football League entirely — is now four matches into a Championship season and has just won away at a side that finished in the top half of this division. The distance covered in a handful of years is the sort of thing that normally takes a generation.
They are also, at this stage, a perfectly ordinary Championship club: mid-table, positive goal difference, nothing dramatic either way. Given where the story started, ordinary is the achievement.
The three at the top
Swansea City lead on goal difference with ten points and plus six. Queens Park Rangers have the same points and plus four. Charlton Athletic are third on ten with plus three.
None of those three would have been most people first pick in August, which is the usual state of a Championship table in early September and the reason the division is watched the way it is. The clubs that lead it in September are frequently not the ones promoted in May, and everybody involved knows it.
And the ones already in trouble
Preston have no points. Burnley have two, Stoke, Portsmouth, Cardiff, Norwich and Southampton three apiece. That is seven clubs in four points at the wrong end, which by April will have separated into a relegation fight and a mid-table nobody remembers.
The most misleading of them is Southampton, eighteenth with a goal difference of plus five after beating Millwall 5-1. That is a club playing better than its position, or a club that had one good afternoon. Two months will tell.
The clubs in between
Between the three leaders and the seven in trouble sit fourteen clubs separated by three points. Wolverhampton Wanderers, Middlesbrough, Bristol City and West Bromwich Albion are on seven. Birmingham City, Sheffield United and Millwall are on six. Wrexham, West Ham, Blackburn Rovers and Watford are on five. Bolton Wanderers, Derby County and Lincoln City are on four.
Fourteen clubs, three points, and every one of them capable of a run in either direction. That is what a Championship table looks like in September and it is why nobody sensible draws conclusions from it — but it is also why the division is watched, because any of those fourteen could be in the play-off places by October.
Why this division is the interesting one
The Premier League after two matches has four clubs on six points and three on none. The Championship after four has three clubs on ten, eight between four and six, and seven between nothing and three.
That compression is the whole appeal. Twenty-four clubs, forty-six matches, three going up and three coming down, and a play-off that regularly produces a final worth more than any single match in English football. It is the division where the table in September means least and is followed most closely.
You can play the rest of it out on the Championship simulator here — the fixtures are the real ones and the table sorts exactly as the EFL sorts it, including the six-team play-off format that arrived this season.
That format change is worth a mention on its own, because it makes this table harder to read than any previous Championship. A six-team play-off means the target for a mid-table club is no longer sixth but eighth, and it means the fourteen clubs currently separated by three points are all, technically, in a promotion race in September.
Which is either the best thing the EFL has done in years or the end of the meaningful league season, depending entirely on who you support and where they finish.