There remains no league quite like the EFL Championship this season, with such deep financial inequality yet still this feeling that anything could happen.
By Ian King
Four teams have pulled clear at the top of the table, but the gap isn’t huge and anybody down into the bottom half could still consider themselves to have half a chance yet of reaching the play-offs. Swansea City are 13th, but are only seven points off 6th-placed Blackburn.
This tightness starts at the top. Sheffield United lead the way with 39 points, with Leeds on 38, Burnley on 37, and Sunderland on 36. There’s then a five point gap down to Middlesbrough, and they’re level with Blackburn. To say that there’s all to play for would be something of an understatement. And with the Blades out of action this evening but the other three all playing, it could be even tighter by ten o’clock tonight.
Furthermore, Leeds have the trickiest fixture of them all. They’re at home to Middlesbrough after having bounced back from a 1-0 reversal at Blackburn with a 2-0 win against Derby County. They’ve also been in sticky form recently, with a defeat at Millwall which was followed by a slightly stodgy 2-0 win against struggling QPR and an extraordinary game at Swansea, in which they conceded an equaliser in the 90th minute only to score a minute later to take the match 4-3.
If Leeds do slip up against a Middlesbrough team who came away from Turf Moor on Saturday with a 1-1 draw against Burnley, the teams below them could be poised to strike. Burnley themselves are at home to Derby County, who were only promoted back from League One at the end of last season and who are hardly setting the division alight this time around. Burnley’s greatest strength this season so far has been an extremely miserly defence. They’ve conceded just seven goals in nineteen games, and the goal they conceded in their 1-1 draw with Boro at the weekend was the first they’d conceded since 3 November, ending a run of five consecutive clean sheets.
All three of these clubs have the substantial advantage of Premier League parachute payments, but this doesn’t apply to fourth-placed Sunderland, who have had the worst form of the top four over the last few weeks. Their 2-1 win against Stoke City on Saturday was their first in six games. Had they taken anything like maximum points they’d be comfortably clear at the top of the table – indeed, they were from 1 October to 9 November – but that recent stumble has left them in fourth place, three points off the top of the table. Sunderland’s recent form gives a hint as to why this year’s division is so tight. Sunderland may have gone six games without a win, but five of those were consecutive draws before a 1-0 defeat at Middlesbrough the week before the Stoke win.
And there have been a lot of draws in the Championship this season; 73 of them in 224 matches, or 32.6%! That compares with 24% over the course of the whole of the 2023/24 season, an increase of more than a third. Two teams – West Bromwich Albion and Preston North End – have drawn more than half of their matches, West Brom leading the way with 11 draws from just 18 matches. Fourteen of the 24 teams in the division last season didn’t manage more than that in 46.
What this says about the Championship this season is that there may be very little between the teams this season at both a macro and micro level. Draw the lens back and yes, there are just seven points between 6th and 13th in the table. But zoom back in and that tightness seems to also exist on a match-by-match basis. The number of West Brom’s draws isn’t even their only statistical anomaly. They’ve also lost just twice in the league all season, the sort of performance that you might expect to see from a team at the top of the table, except they’re 8th. It doesn’t end there, either. Norwich City are in 10th. They’re the division’s top scorers with 35, and they’ve also conceded the joint-most, with 30.
And the reason for this is fewer goals. There have been 2.46 goals per game in the division so far this season in comparison with 2.68 over the course of last season. Fewer goals mean a higher likelihood of more draws, and more draws means a tighter league table. Sheffield United, Leeds, Burnley and Sunderland may be leading the way at the moment, but as the 46-game slog continues and wear & tear start to show, the final destination point of those two precious automatic promotion places seems unlikely to become any clearer for a while yet.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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