Supercomputer · Championship

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

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The Championship supercomputer and the six-team play-off

Twenty-four clubs, 46 matches, and from this season a wider promotion race. The top two still go up automatically, but the play-offs now take third to eighth rather than third to sixth. Fifth hosts eighth and sixth hosts seventh in single-leg eliminators, with the winners meeting third and fourth over two legs before a final at Wembley.

That final is routinely described as the richest match in football, because the winner steps into Premier League television money that the losers keep chasing. Three clubs go the other way into League One. With no European qualification attached to anything here, every column on this page resolves to promotion, the play-offs or the drop.

Championship projection: what people ask

Why doesn't the Championship page show any European places?

There aren't any. The division's rewards are entirely domestic: two automatic promotion spots, six play-off places and three relegation places. Where a Premier League finish converts into Champions League or Europa League football, everything on this table is measured against the promotion and relegation lines instead.

How does the expanded play-off change the odds?

It brings two more clubs into contention, so sides projected around seventh and eighth now carry a genuine promotion probability where previously they had none. It also lengthens the road: fifth to eighth must win a one-off eliminator before reaching the two-legged semi-finals that third and fourth enter directly.

Is the projected points total enough to judge a promotion push?

Only loosely. In a table this congested, two clubs three projected points apart can hold very different promotion probabilities depending on the fixtures each has left. The percentage columns and the width of the points range together tell you more than the midpoint on its own.

▸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.