Supercomputer · A-League

Plays the rest of the season 10,000 times and shows how often each club wins.

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A-League Men: two trophies, and the table only wins one

Australia hands out two prizes and this page projects the first of them. Twelve clubs play 26 matches — a full home-and-away round plus four extra fixtures — and whoever finishes top of the ladder takes the Premiership. The Championship is decided separately, through a six-team finals series ending in a Grand Final in June.

The two rarely land on the same club. The club that tops the ladder over the regular season and the club that lifts the Grand Final are frequently different, and only the second of the two is remembered as champion. There is no relegation either: the A-League is a closed competition, so the foot of this table carries no jeopardy at all.

A-League Men: Premiership versus Championship

What is the difference between the Premiership and the Championship?

The Premiership, marked by the Premiers Plate, goes to the club with the best record over the 26-round regular season. The Championship goes to the winner of the Grand Final at the end of a top-six finals series. Only the first is a league-table result, and that is what this page projects.

Is there relegation from the A-League?

No. A-League Men is a closed league with no promotion or relegation, so a club finishing bottom of the twelve simply starts again the following October. That is why no relegation column appears on this page, unlike almost every other league covered on the site.

Can Auckland FC and Wellington Phoenix qualify for Asian competition?

No. Both are based in New Zealand, which sits in the Oceania confederation rather than the AFC, so Australia's continental places pass down to the highest-finishing Australian clubs instead. A strong projected position does not translate into Asian qualification for either of them.

▸How does the supercomputer work?

Every remaining fixture is simulated with a Poisson model: each club gets an attack rating and a defence rating from the goals it has scored and conceded this season, and the expected goals of a match come from combining one side's attack with the other's defence, plus a moderate home advantage.

Before a ball is kicked the model does not start from zero: each club begins with a prior strength built from last season's finish and the market value of its squad, with the tails capped so no extreme is absurd. That starting point hands over weight to real results as they arrive, and by around matchday ten only the actual goals are talking.

The remaining season is played 10,000 times in a separate browser process, so the page never freezes. The title, top-four, top-six and relegation percentages are simply how often each outcome happened across those 10,000 seasons, and each club's points range covers the central 90% of its simulated finishes.

What the model does not know: injuries, transfers, sanctions, European fixtures or motivation. It uses goals and only goals — which is why it is in beta.