Southampton are 18th in the Championship and scoring freely

There is a line in the Championship table that does not make sense at a glance. Southampton are eighteenth of twenty-four with three points, and their goal difference is plus five.

Every club above them except one has a worse or equal goal difference. Every club below them is on three points or fewer with a negative one. Southampton have somehow arranged to score more than they concede and still sit six places off the relegation zone.

How it happened

The bulk of it came in one afternoon. On 29 August they beat Millwall 5-1 at St Marys, which is the sort of result that reshapes a goal difference on its own and tells you very little about anything else.

Around it are three matches that produced two points and not much scoring. That is the whole explanation: one enormous win and three quiet afternoons, in a division where the table rewards consistency and the goal difference column does not care how the goals arrived.

What it usually means

A positive goal difference from a low points total is one of the more reliable early-season signals in football, and it generally points the same way: the team is better than its position.

The logic is simple enough. Points come in threes and are decided by margins; goal difference accumulates across every minute played. A side that is winning big and losing small is usually playing well and losing matches it was in, which is a pattern that corrects itself more often than it continues.

The counter-argument is the one Southampton have to worry about: a single 5-1 can carry a goal difference for two months and disguise three genuinely poor performances underneath it. One result is not a trend.

The comparison

It is worth setting them against the two clubs directly below in the table. Stoke City are twenty-second with three points and minus five. Burnley are twenty-third with two and minus five. Preston are bottom with nothing and minus six.

All four are in the same part of the table. Only one of them has scored more than it has conceded. If the season plays out the way early goal difference usually suggests, three of those clubs are in a relegation fight in April and one of them is not.

The division they are in

This is a strange Championship. It contains West Ham United, relegated from the Premier League and currently twelfth. It contains Wrexham, eleventh, three divisions above where they were a few seasons ago. Sheffield United, Middlesbrough, Norwich, Stoke, Derby, Portsmouth and Southampton are all in it, and so is Charlton Athletic, who are third.

In a division with that many clubs who consider themselves too big for it, being eighteenth in September is uncomfortable in a way the table alone does not capture. St Marys will not be patient for long.

The 5-1, in context

Millwall were beaten 5-1 at St Marys on 29 August and then lost 3-0 at home to Wrexham four days later. So the club Southampton put five past has since conceded three more, which either takes some shine off the win or suggests Millwall are having a worse fortnight than anyone expected.

Millwall are nonetheless tenth in the table with six points, three above Southampton. That is the Championship in one line: a club can concede eight in a week and still be in the top half, because everybody else is dropping points at the same rate.

What to watch

The number that matters over the next month is not the goal difference, which is already banked. It is whether Southampton start converting the close matches — the ones they have been losing narrowly while the 5-1 sits there flattering the column.

If they do, the table will look entirely different by October and the plus five will look like the early warning it usually is. If they do not, the goal difference will erode and the position will start to look earned rather than unlucky.

Either way it is the most interesting line in the division right now, and it is the kind of thing a league table only produces in the first month of a season.

By November the sample will be large enough that goal difference and points will have converged, as they almost always do, and the anomaly will have resolved itself in one direction or the other. Which is why it is worth noting now: in six weeks there will be nothing unusual left to look at.

You can test it yourself on the Championship simulator here — play the remaining forty-two matches out, see where a side with this profile tends to land, and find out whether the goal difference was telling you something or covering for three bad afternoons. The simulator starts from the real table, so whatever you are testing begins from exactly where the season stands this morning.