Another glorious season of English Football may already have started, with thousands of games from the Championship, League One and League Two ahead, but that hasn’t stopped us doing our annual dive into the numbers with our EFL 2025-26 Season Predictions.
Our yearly We Told You So attempt features as many stats as we could arrange from last season and beyond, with various calculations to allow for promotion and relegation, using on and off field stats.
There’s last season’s stats for the whole season, and more recent time periods to allow for teams that were improving or not towards the end of the season, overall season performance for the last three seasons, team stats (All from Who Scored) , transfer market values and changes from TransferMarkt, xG, and not much more.
All of the stats are rolled up into order, with that shared below for each division. With a brief explanation accompanying each tier.
EFL 2025-26 Season Predictions – Championship
UP
After scoring 111 points the previous season in League One it probably no surprise that our stats show Birmingham will do a double promotion in as many seasons, as one of the famously owned clubs goes up.
Coventry going up automatically is probably a big surprise, but they did finish 5th last season in the Championship, had the third best form behind the two promoted sides from Christmas and fourth best from February. It’s a good season for the midlands then.
The playoff places feature two big rivals, that we could only hope meet in the playoff final, and as an Ipswich fan will have to declare that they take the final promotion place, with hopes they aren’t as hopeless in the Premier League as last time around.
Fans of football via streaming might be disappointed that Wrexham aren’t going up with Birmingham. So are we, Wrexham are great. Leicester are solid midfield after receiving a points penalty for EFL bookkeeping reasons.
DOWN
Sheffield Wednesday will be lucky to finish (or start) the season, so relegation looks nailed on at this point. Ownership might and should change. Hopefully in time for the Owls to only get relegated and not liquidated. Our stats might shock a few with sending Southampton down for second successive relegation, which seems harsh, but we can only blame the numbers. Finally, Watford, who have threatened to let everything unravel in previous seasons with constant manager changes finally fall off the cliff and go down to League One.
EFL 2025-26 Season Predictions – League One
UP
Stockport Country and Leyton Orient, will make up for just missing out last season with promotion in 2025-26 to the Championship. Not only because their form was great throughout the season – they finished top six for all four time periods – Whole Season, from Christmas, from February and from April. For Leyton Orient if will be over 40 years since being in the second tier, and for Stockport a little less, but they have also been down to the second tier of Non League football since.
The top six is a mix of relegated Championship clubs, good old divisional yo-yo clubs, and Blackpooil. Out of those teams, we like Plymouth the most, and they did sore 100 points last time they were in this division, and they beat Ipswich that season too.
DOWN
A trio of midfield teams from League One feel our stats computer’s wrath this season, with only AFC Wimbledon joining the party after being promoted just last season.
EFL 2025-26 Season Predictions – League Two
UP
Crawly Town are the team our stats computer likes best to go up from the fourth tier, and they will do so a season after dropping down. They are the only relegated team to do so according to us, with the other three ending up mid table at best. Chesterfield go one better than playoffs this season with a promotion and the other automatic qualifier being Swindon, who made a late charge in 2024-25 but finishing mid table-ish. Notts County are the biggest name team of the 4th to 7th group, and we pick them to be the promoted side and are the only team of that lot to make the playoffs.
DOWN
Newport only just survived League Two last season, but that won’t help them this season as they head to the National League. Which is where Oldham came from, with Oldham finishing 5th in the National League table.
