Championship Promotion Race Predictions: Leicester, Leeds on Track

After a vital weekend of Championship action at the top of the table, we give an update on the Opta supercomputer’s projections for automatic promotion.

Leicester City have hit a bad run of form at the worst time. Their 2-1 defeat to QPR on Saturday was their third Championship loss in a row following back-to-back defeats against Leeds United and Middlesbrough. Their only consolation this weekend was that Leeds failed to win in the early Saturday game at Huddersfield.

Leicester’s latest defeat has seen their chances of automatic promotion fall from 98.1% on 23 February to 87.4% today with the Opta supercomputer. Of course, they are more than likely to still achieve a top-two finish, but should they suffer a midweek loss at Sunderland, the almighty collapse could be on.

Enzo Maresca’s side (78 points) still hold a five-point lead over third place Leeds (73), but their gap at the top of the table has been reduced to just three points following Ipswich’s win at Plymouth this weekend. The Foxes won the title in 64.5% of the current Opta supercomputer simulations, with Leeds (20.2%) and Ipswich (13.9%) the next most likely Championship winners.

The team to enjoy the best weekend at the top of the Championship were Kieran McKenna’s Ipswich, with their victory in Devon boosting their chances of automatic promotion moving from 28.5% before the weekend’s action to 47.7% today.  

Southampton fans will probably admit that automatic promotion feels unlikely now after recent results, but they did boost their outside chance this weekend with a 4-3 victory at Birmingham City thanks to Joe Aribo’s injury-time winner. Saints will almost certainly be in the playoffs, with a finish between third and sixth occurring in 91.7% of current Opta supercomputer simulations.

As well as Southampton and one of Leeds or Ipswich, the most likely two teams to compete in the playoffs as they stand are West Brom (89.0%) and Norwich City (42.8%). There’s every chance that we could see an East Anglia derby in the playoffs this season.

At the bottom, Rotherham finished inside the bottom three in every single one of the 10,000 Opta supercomputer simulations today – hardly a surprise when there is now a 19-point gap between themselves and safety. The other two current favourites for the drop to League One are Sheffield Wednesday (59.4%) and Stoke City (31.6%), although both those sides picked up victories this weekend.

The fact that Sheffield Wednesday are in with a chance of survival shows how good a job Danny Röhl has done in Yorkshire, however. Since his first Championship game on 21 October, the Owls have been the 11th best team in the league with 32 points in 24 games. When we checked in with the Opta supercomputer on 29 December, they were being given a 91.9% chance of being relegated, so their improvement since then has given them a fighting chance of staying up.

The 2023-24 Championship promotion race took another turn on Friday night, as second-place Leeds United came from a goal down to beat leaders Leicester City 3-1. It was the sixth time this season that Daniel Farke’s side have conceded first and still gone on to win – the most by Leeds in a league season since 1999-00 in the Premier League.

In fact, Leeds’ victory was their ninth league win in a row, matching Leicester’s longest winning run from the Championship season back in September and October. This is the first campaign to have two second-tier teams achieve nine-match winning streaks since 1904-05 (three teams).

When Leicester led 1-0 going into the final 10 minutes at Elland Road, it looked like they would extend their lead at the top of the Championship table to 12 points before the weekend. However, a late turnaround saw Leeds reduce that gap to just six – something Ipswich Town also did on Saturday following their win at home to Birmingham City.

Southampton continued their poor two-week spell, as they lost for a third time in four league matches with a surprise 2-1 home defeat to Millwall after previously losing by the same scoreline to Hull in midweek in front of their own fans.

What do those results mean for the four sides’ chances of automatic promotion according to the Opta supercomputer, however?

The good news for Leicester City is that they’ve had such a brilliant season that defeat to their title rivals hasn’t made much of an impact at all.

Before kick-off on Friday, Enzo Maresca’s side were being given a 98.1% chance of automatic promotion to the Premier League, while the defeat to Leeds has reduced that by just 2.7 percentage points (now 95.4%). Barring an absolutely dire finish to the campaign, Leicester will be a Premier League club next season.

The win over the Foxes, combined with Southampton’s failure to pick up any points against Millwall, meant that Leeds’ chance of automatic promotion rose to 71.6% from 58.8%. Despite being level on points with Ipswich in the table (72 with 12 games remaining), Leeds’ current form is giving them the advantage.  

Since the turn of the year, Leeds have won the most points in the Championship, collecting all 27 possible across the nine matches. Ipswich have done well, too; they’ve won the second most in this period alongside rivals Norwich City, but the problem is their points tally is still nine fewer than Leeds in that timeframe.

As for the Championship title, it’s still Leicester’s to lose according to the supercomputer (75.4% chance), although Leeds almost doubled their chances of winning the league this weekend, moving from 8.7% on Friday morning to 19.0% on Monday.

The Opta supercomputer has simulated the remainder of the Championship season 10,000 times. Across those, the two teams with the highest average points totals at the end of the campaign are obviously Leicester (103.0) and Leeds (93.7) based on what we’ve already told you.

But what about the four teams who will make up the play-offs? Ipswich (90.9) and Southampton (89.6) are going to be there barring a dramatic losing run, but interestingly the supercomputer thinks Coventry City (73.2) will sneak in ahead of Hull City (71.4) alongside West Brom (75.8). This will give Coventry the opportunity to go one better and win promotion via the play-offs after last season’s penalty shootout heartache against Luton at Wembley.

• Opta’s League Prediction model estimates the likelihood of teams finishing in each position in the competition. We can therefore see how successful a team’s season is likely to be, whether it’s their relegation or title chances.

• The model estimates the probability of each match outcome (win, draw or loss) by using betting market odds and Opta Power Rankings. The odds and rankings are based on historical and recent team performances.

• The model considers the strength of opponents by using these match outcome probabilities and simulates the remaining fixtures in the competition thousands of times. By analysing the outcome of each of these simulations, the model can see how often teams finished in each league position to create our final predictions.

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