Preston North End are bottom with nothing from four matches

Four matches into the Championship season, nineteen of the twenty-four clubs have won a game. Twenty-three of them have taken at least one point. Preston North End have taken none.

Nothing from four, a goal difference of minus six, and bottom of a division in which the gap between last and the play-off places is already ten points. It is early enough that none of this is decisive and late enough that it is no longer a coincidence.

Where the division stands

The top of the Championship is congested in a way that makes the bottom look worse than it is. Swansea City, Queens Park Rangers and Charlton Athletic all have ten points from four. Wolverhampton Wanderers, Middlesbrough, Bristol City and West Bromwich Albion are on seven.

Below them the middle is packed: eight clubs sit between four and six points, separated by goal difference and very little else. Then there is a small group at the foot — Stoke City and Portsmouth on three, Burnley on two — and then Preston, alone on nothing.

The shape of the problem

Minus six across four matches is not a collapse. It is roughly a goal and a half conceded more than scored per game, which is the profile of a side losing narrowly rather than being taken apart.

That is both the encouraging reading and the worrying one. A team shipping five a week has an obvious thing to fix. A team losing by one or two every time has to find something less tangible, and it usually takes longer.

It also means the fixtures have not been kind in the way the table implies. Preston have not been embarrassed; they have been beaten, repeatedly, in matches that were close enough to have gone differently.

Why four matches matters more in this division

The Championship is forty-six games long, which is the standard argument for calm in September. The counter-argument is that it is also the most compressed division in England: forty-six matches, a play-off race that regularly goes to the final day on goal difference, and a relegation fight that is usually decided by two or three points.

In a league that tight, a start of zero from four is not fatal but it is expensive. Every point dropped now has to be recovered against sides that will be in form later, and the clubs that spend autumn at the bottom of this division tend to spend spring there too.

Who else is struggling

Burnley are twenty-third with two points and a goal difference of minus five, having been beaten 4-1 at Norwich last weekend. Stoke City are twenty-second on three with the same minus five. Portsmouth, Norwich and Cardiff are all on three.

The most curious case is Southampton, who are eighteenth with three points and a goal difference of plus five — they beat Millwall 5-1 and have lost the rest. That is a different kind of bad start from Preston, and probably an easier one to fix.

The one thing that would change it

There is a specific kind of relief available to a side in Preston position, and it is not a good performance. It is a win, of any description, by any margin, preferably ugly.

Nothing about a team on nought from four is fixed by playing well and losing again, because the problem has stopped being technical and become a matter of what a squad believes about itself in the seventy-fifth minute of a level match. The clubs that escape this start almost always do it with a scrappy one-nil rather than a performance anybody remembers.

It is worth remembering how quickly it can turn in this division. Nine points from four matches — which three clubs have already managed this season — would take Preston from bottom to mid-table inside a fortnight. The table is compressed enough that the distance from last to safe is smaller than it looks in September.

What comes next

The Championship does not pause. It plays through international windows more often than the Premier League does and it produces midweek fixtures from September onwards, which means a run of poor form can become six or eight matches inside a fortnight.

For Preston the arithmetic is straightforward and unforgiving: they need to win a match before the season is a month old, because the alternative is being cut adrift of a mid-table that is already ten points up the road.

There is a long way to go. There is also a version of this season in which the first four matches turn out to be the most important ones, and nobody will know which it was until March. That is the particular cruelty of a bad August: it costs the same as a bad February and nobody can tell you at the time whether it counted.