Supercomputer · League Two

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

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The League Two projection: three up, two out of the EFL

League Two is the only division in the English Football League that promotes three clubs automatically. Fourth to seventh then play off for the fourth and final promotion place, which makes the top-six marker slightly misleading here: seventh sits inside the promotion picture, and sixth carries no special reward of its own.

At the other end only two clubs go down, but they leave the EFL entirely for the National League rather than moving one rung inside the same competition. The exchange runs both ways, with the National League champion and its play-off winner coming up. The stakes are asymmetric, and the projection is built around that.

League Two: questions about the projection

How many teams are promoted from League Two?

Four in total. The top three go up automatically, the only division in the EFL to promote three, and fourth to seventh then contest the play-offs for the last place, with two-legged semi-finals followed by a final at Wembley.

Why are there only two relegation places?

The exchange with the National League is limited to two clubs each way: the bottom two drop out of the EFL, and the National League champion plus its play-off winner replace them. The narrower zone means survival probabilities on this page climb faster than in the divisions above.

Does a 46-game season make the projection more accurate?

More stable, not necessarily more decisive. Long seasons in tightly packed divisions produce clusters of clubs with near-identical projections, so a two-point swing can reorder five positions at once. That is why the range around each points total is as informative as the total itself.

▸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.