Supercomputer · Champions League

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

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Reading the Champions League league-phase projection

There is no champion to project on this page, only a 36-team league table. Each club plays eight different opponents, four at home and four away, and everything turns on where it lands: first to eighth go straight to the round of 16, while ninth to 24th are sent into a two-legged knockout play-off in February.

Twenty-fifth to 36th is simply out, with no drop into the Europa League to soften it. The margins are unforgiving. With 36 clubs separated by only eight matches, the table packs tight: a single result moves a club several places, and ties on points are broken by goal difference rather than by a head-to-head that most of these clubs never played.

Champions League projection: common questions

Why is there no title percentage on this page?

Because the league phase does not crown anyone. The supercomputer projects the 36-team table that opens the competition, so what it reports is the probability of finishing in the top eight, in the play-off band from ninth to 24th, or below the line in 25th to 36th.

How much is a top-eight finish really worth?

Two things. It removes an extra two-legged tie in February, when domestic fixture lists are at their most crowded, and it places a club in the seeded half of the round-of-16 draw against a play-off winner. Sides ranked ninth to 24th must win a knockout tie just to reach that same stage.

Do eliminated clubs drop into the Europa League?

No. Under the 36-club format, teams finishing 25th to 36th are out of European competition altogether, with none of the transfers to the Europa League that existed under the old group stage. That is why the model treats the gap between 24th and 25th as a hard cliff rather than a gradient.

▸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.