Supercomputer · Europa League

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

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How the Europa League league-phase projection works

The shape mirrors the Champions League: 36 clubs, eight matches each, one combined table. The stakes attached to each band are what differ. Winning the competition outright delivers a Champions League place for the following season, awarded on top of whatever a club earns domestically, so the shortcut into the round of 16 carries real weight.

The field is also unusually mixed. Alongside the clubs that came through Europa League qualifying sit sides that lost in Champions League qualifying and dropped down, which widens the gap between the strongest and weakest projections. Ninth to 24th face a February play-off; 25th to 36th are eliminated with nothing to fall into.

Questions about the Europa League projection

What does the Europa League winner qualify for?

A place in the following season's Champions League, granted in addition to the berths its domestic league produces. It is the most valuable prize on offer here and the reason clubs with realistic knockout hopes tend to take the competition far more seriously than the second-tier label suggests.

Why does the table run to only eight matches?

Each side meets eight different opponents drawn from four seeding pots, four at home and four away. Nobody plays the same club twice, so a projection has to weigh the difficulty of an individual schedule much more heavily than it would in a conventional home-and-away league.

Is ninth place much worse than eighth?

Materially, yes. Eighth goes directly to the round of 16 with no extra fixtures. Ninth must survive a two-legged play-off in February to reach the identical stage. The model reports the two bands separately because a single position changes the route, the workload and the elimination risk.

▸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.