The 2026-27 Championship season begins on Friday, with Wolves hosting Blackburn Rovers at Molineux in front of expectant fans.

Wolves take their place as a Championship club for the first time since 2017-18 following a disastrous Premier League campaign last season, when they finished bottom with just 20 points.

They were joined by Burnley and West Ham, with the Hammers back in the Championship after a 14-season stint as a Premier League club.

Promoted trio Cardiff City, Bolton Wanderers and Lincoln City are also back in the second tier, with Lincoln playing at this level for the first time since 1961.

Given the notorious unpredictability of the Championship, it is never easy to forecast how it will turn out, but Opta's supercomputer has had a go.

To illustrate just how volatile the Championship can be, every one of the 24 clubs finished bottom of the table at least 19 times across the 10,000 pre-season simulations. Likewise, every team won the title in at least 30 scenarios.

Hammers to bounce back up

Unsurprisingly, three of the five favourites for promotion this season are the teams that dropped down from the Premier League last May.

West Ham are the Opta supercomputer favourites for both the title (17.2%) and automatic promotion (29.4%), with Southampton (23.7%), Middlesbrough (21.0%), Wolves (19.2%) and Burnley (13.5%) following closely behind in the race for a top-two finish.

The last time West Ham played in the Championship, in 2011-12, they secured an immediate return to the Premier League. They did, however, need the play-offs to do it, after finishing third in the table before defeating Blackpool 2-1 in the final at Wembley.

Having kept hold of Jarrod Bowen, who registered the joint-fifth most goal involvements in the top tier last term (20 – nine goals, 11 assists), West Ham should have the most firepower in the division.

In each of the last two seasons, the Opta supercomputer has seen two of its four most likely teams for automatic promotion in that campaign go on and secure a top-two finish – Leeds United and Burnley in 2024-25 and Coventry City and Ipswich Town last season.

However, it did also project that Sheffield United were the strong Championship favourites last season (41.1% chance of promotion), and they eventually finished 13th, 24 points off the automatic promotion places.

Middlesbrough have been contenders for a few years now. Boro have reached the play-offs in two of the last four seasons and have only finished outside the top eight once since 2021-22. Their last promotion came in 2015-16, when a second-place finish secured a return to the Premier League, although their subsequent top-flight stay lasted only one season.

Wolves and Burnley finished in the bottom two of the Premier League last season, cut adrift from the rest, with Wolves finishing 21 points from safety and Burnley 19 points off 17th-place Tottenham.

On the last two occasions that Burnley have been relegated from the Premier League, they secured automatic promotion straightaway with at least 100 points. The pressure will be on new Clarets boss Nicky Hayen after he joined this summer from Belgian side Genk.

Wolves also have a new man in the dugout, with Rob Edwards sacked and replaced by Portuguese Cesar Peixoto, who led Gil Vicente to a shock sixth-place finish in the Primeira Liga in 2025-26.

They have also re-signed Raul Jimenez after the Mexican spent three seasons at Fulham and scored 28 Premier League goals in that time. Armed with arguably one of the best strikers in the Championship, can Wolves bounce back at the first time of asking?

Southampton start the season with a four-point deduction, but the supercomputer still thinks they have a strong chance of automatic promotion. We all know why they were deducted points, and Tonda Eckert has somewhat surprisingly kept his job as head coach.

But he did do a fantastic job last season (ignoring one of his less admirable methods), winning a league-high 68 points between his first game on 5 November 2025 and the end of the season. Saints are given a 15.6% chance of automatic promotion by the Opta supercomputer.

Millwall came close to a sensational automatic promotion last season but eventually lost out in the play-off semi-final against Hull City. They are expected to be there or thereabouts once again, finishing inside the top two places in 13.8% of the 10,000 season simulations.

Eight teams to fight it out in play-offs

After 37 years of a four-team system involving clubs finishing between third and sixth, this season’s format extends qualification down to eighth place.

For the first time ever, fifth will play eighth in a Championship play-off eliminator, while sixth will play seventh. The higher-ranked winner of those ties will then face the fourth-placed team in the semi-finals, while the lower-ranked winner takes on the third-placed side.

So, to state the obvious, each team now has a bigger chance of having something to play for at the end of the season.

Take a team like Derby County, for example, whose chances of finishing in a play-off qualification spot increase by 10.1 percentage points in the new format (35.9%) compared to the old format (25.8%). Wrexham are a similar story (35.8% top eight, 26.2% top six).

Sixteen of the 24 teams finished inside the play-off spots in at least 22% of our season sims, underlining once again how competitive and difficult to forecast the Championship remains.

Norwich City (11.8%), Sheff Utd (8.7%) and Birmingham City (7.2%) are outside bets for promotion, but they should all be pushing for a place in the top eight at least.

Oxford, Watford and Stoke set for relegation scrap

No team were relegated more often than Oxford United (21.7%) in our pre-season simulations last season, and that projection proved to be accurate as the U's dropped down to League One after a 22nd-place finish.

Watford are in for another season of worry according to the supercomputer’s projections. The Hornets were deemed to be the joint most likely side to go down last season (21.7% alongside Oxford), but a good first half of the campaign meant that projection eventually proved incorrect.

However, another tumultuous summer, and yet another managerial change, means that the dice might not roll in their favour this time around.

Watford were relegated in 25.3% of the 10,000 season sims ahead of 2026-27, which is mainly down to their dreadful form in the second half of 2025-26.

They ended New Year's Day in fourth, just three points off the automatic promotion places. However, their 21 games from that point onwards saw them bring in only 16 points (W3 D7 L11) – the third-worst total behind only Sheffield Wednesday (7) and Leicester (12).

Stoke City also had a terrible second half to last season. The Potters won their first two league games of 2026 but then picked up only 15 points from their final 20 games (W3 D6 L11), which was relegation form.

As a result, the Opta supercomputer saw them relegated the most often in its pre-season simulations (31.1%) this time around, just ahead of Charlton Athletic (26.2%). The south London club survived last season – their first campaign back in the second tier for six years – with a 19th-place finish, seven points clear of the relegation zone.

Preston North End (25% chance of relegation) are another team tipped to struggle. Despite finishing 14th in the Championship last season, they ended in the relegation zone of Opta's expected points table – which was perhaps a more accurate representation of their on-pitch performance than reality. They tallied 53 expected points, seven fewer than their true points total of 60.

Of the newly promoted sides, Bolton are deemed the most likely to be relegated back to League One (23.1%), ahead of Cardiff City (22.8%) and Lincoln City (14.0%).