Supercomputer · J1 League

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

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J1 League: Japan's first season to run across two calendar years

Japan has just rebuilt its football calendar. After decades of February-to-December seasons, J1 now runs autumn to spring: 2026/27 kicked off in August and finishes in early June 2027, with a winter break of roughly two months in the middle. The gap left by the switch was filled with a one-off transitional tournament played without promotion or relegation.

The competition itself is unchanged and refreshingly plain. Twenty clubs, 38 matchdays, most points wins, bottom three relegated to J2, no play-offs anywhere. So the title figure on this page really is a title figure. What is new is that a projection made in August now stretches across ten months rather than four.

J1 League: the new calendar explained

Why is the J1 League season now labelled 2026/27?

Because Japan switched from a calendar-year season to an autumn-spring one. The campaign began in August 2026 and ends in early June 2027, bringing the J.League into line with Europe and with the AFC's own competition calendar. It is the first J1 season to span two calendar years.

How many teams are relegated from J1?

Three go down to J2 and three come up in return. Relegation is settled on the 38-round table with no play-off, so those figures are drawn from the same simulated standings as the title race. With 20 clubs and 38 games, the drop zone usually stays open deep into spring.

Does the winter break change how the season is projected?

Not in substance. The new calendar includes a pause of around two months from late December, avoiding Japan's coldest weeks, but it splits the 38 rounds into two blocks rather than altering how they are scored. The table being projected is the same one; only the dates move.

▸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.