Championship Opening Day Trends

This spacing out of the opening days in the English Football League has meant that the Championship gets a big build-up all of its own. Are there any opening day trends from the last few years of the Championship that we can use to help get an edge on the bookies?

I have taken the last five years of opening days in the Championship and accumulated the data in some key markets to see where the edges might be on the market.

General Stats

Key points from the research:

• There are often a couple of matches in the programme that result in heavy wins, identifying which matches could produce a -2 handicap win could result in a decent priced winner.

• Goals per game return has been over three for the last couple of seasons.

• The goals market has been super hot or cold, depending on the season. Two of the five seasons had ridiculously low margins.

• Yellow cards per game came out as 3.6.

• The 2023/24 season was an outlier for cards in the Championship, as it also was in L1 and L2. We should note that new refereeing directives can have a big influence on the opening day. This season, there seems to be a clamp-down on holding players off the ball.

• There has never been a season in which fewer than eight matches out of 12 have seen both teams receive cards.

Teams Relegated from the Premier League 

I also thought it would be worth looking into teams that have been relegated and promoted into the division to see if there are any trends that are worth backing.

Last season, the writing was on the wall very early in retrospect. Burnley went to Luton, both newly relegated, and won 4-1, and Sheffield United also won their opening day fixture.

It is not always the case that the relegated clubs do well, but from the last five seasons, 60% of the teams relegated from the PL win their first match back in the second tier.

Home advantage doesn't seem to make a tangible difference, though it is a fairly small sample size. Two of the three relegated teams this season are at home on opening day and expected to win those matches, especially as Leicester play crisis club Sheffield Wednesday.

There does seem to be a change in trend developing in terms of the way these matches are going in terms of goals, though.

Six of the 13 matches in the sample saw only one goal scored, making that the modal average of the data. More recently, however, in 2023 and 2024, BTTS landed in four of the five matches, with two being the lowest number of goals scored in a match, and four of the five went over 2.5 goals.

This change could coincide with the increasing strength of the starting XI in these teams when compared to previous editions. It seems as though more clubs can afford to keep their best talent, or, at least, hold interest off until later, and as a result, many of the recent teams have been really strong, especially going forward.

Teams Promoted from League One

There is a general thought that the gap between the Championship and League One is growing in terms of difficulty.

Does this apply on opening day?

There is a difference that we should be aware of when looking at these results compared to the recently relegated clubs, in that the promoted teams are generally underdogs, or at least a bigger price, than the former Premier League clubs, who are, more often than not, chalked up as favourites.

A mixed bag is a good metaphor for what the research shows us. Indeed, last season's opening day results, where Derby lost, Portsmouth drew at Leeds (in retrospect a great result), and Oxford won, pretty much sums up the data set as a whole.

From the 14 fixtures in the sample, five were wins and five were losses. The last six promoted clubs have survived in the league, three of them won their first fixture of the season.

Home advantage doesn't seem to make much difference in this sample. Plymouth and Oxford won at home in the last couple of seasons, and this was a portent for each of them to actually have very strong home records as they survived in the league.

There are generally a lot more goals when the promoted teams are involved compared to the relegated teams. 

Over half of the matches in the sample (eight of 14) went over 2.5 goals, and the goal average is 3, which is 0.4 goals per game higher than the general opening day goal average in the Championship.

Similarly to the relegated clubs sample, this has been massively helped by recent years, with Blackburn v Derby and Leeds v Portsmouth both being six-goal thrillers last season.

We'll be all over the EFL this season, including our usual selection of EFL Accumulator Tips for every round of fixtures. It’s not just English football we cover on Andy’s Bet Club either, with a range of Football Betting Tips & Predictions on the site every day.

We've listed the Best Accumulator Bookmakers in one convenient place.

Our Championship Outright Predictions may also pique your interest ahead of the big kick-off.

Our EFL Predictions highlight the value in the market, as do our Football Accumulator Tips and Early Kick-Off Acca.

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