League Two after four: Bristol Rovers top, Accrington 23rd

Four matches into League Two, the division has arranged itself in the way the fourth tier usually does: nothing separating anybody, and three clubs already looking uncomfortable.

Bristol Rovers lead it with nine points and a goal difference of plus five. Barnet, Walsall and Crewe Alexandra are all on eight. At the bottom, Shrewsbury Town have three, and Accrington Stanley and Port Vale have two apiece.

The top

Bristol Rovers being top is the least surprising thing on the list — a club of their size in this division is expected to be near the front, and being there in September buys nothing except a decent mood.

Barnet in second is more interesting. So is Walsall, and so is Crewe. The margin between first and fourth is a single point, which after four matches means the leader has won one more game than the club in fourth and nothing else.

And the bottom

Accrington Stanley are twenty-third with two points from four and a goal difference of minus three. They drew 2-2 at home with Colchester on the opening day, lost 2-0 at Exeter, lost 3-2 at Walsall on 29 August and have since added a point.

It is a slow start for a club that is, by some distance, the most famous small club in England — famous for a milk advert from the 1980s that used the name as a punchline, and still in the Football League four decades later while two previous clubs of the same name are not.

Port Vale are twenty-fourth on the same two points. Shrewsbury Town are twenty-second with three, having lost 3-0 at Rochdale on Tuesday.

The division nobody covers

League Two gets less attention than any professional division in England and produces more movement than most. Twenty-four clubs, forty-six matches, three automatic promotions and a play-off, with a relegation trapdoor into the National League that has taken some very large names through it.

It is also the division where the FA Cup and the Carabao Cup matter most in cash terms, which is why the cup rounds this month are not treated as an inconvenience the way they are higher up.

What the table is worth in September

Almost nothing, and everybody involved knows it. Four matches is under nine per cent of a League Two season. The gap between first and eighth is two points.

What it does show is which clubs have started badly enough to be worth watching. A side on two points from four in this division is not in trouble yet — but the clubs that finish in the relegation places are disproportionately the ones that were still looking for a first win in mid-September.

Two points and four matches

Being on two points from four in League Two is not the same as being on two points in the Premier League, and the difference is arithmetic. There are forty-six matches here rather than thirty-eight, and the relegation zone is two clubs rather than three.

That gives a slow starter more room than it has anywhere else in English football. It also means the clubs that end up going down have usually been at the bottom since autumn, because the division is compressed enough that nobody escapes by winning three in a row in March.

Accrington Stanley, Port Vale and Shrewsbury Town have taken seven points between them from twelve matches. One of those three will probably be mid-table by Christmas and one of them will probably still be here. Nothing in the first four weeks tells you which.

The month ahead

League Two plays through September with a midweek round and a cup tie, which for squads of this size is a genuine test of depth. Several of these clubs will look completely different by the start of October, in both directions.

Accrington host and travel through that run needing a win rather than a point, and their FA Cup and Carabao Cup schedules do not make it easier. That is the shape of a fourth-tier autumn: too many matches, too few players, and a table that moves four places on a single Tuesday.

You can play the rest of the season out on the League Two simulator here, with the real fixture list and the table sorted the way the EFL sorts it.

It is the division where that exercise is most revealing, because the margins are so small that changing three results moves a club eight places. Nowhere else in English football does the table respond that violently to so little, and nowhere else does a September position mean less. Which is precisely why the clubs at the bottom of it can afford to be worried and not yet alarmed, and why the ones at the top should not print anything. Bristol Rovers lead it by one point, which in this division is another way of saying they lead it by nothing at all.