League One Opening Day Trends

We all love the opening day of fixtures don’t we? The optimism of a new season has us dreaming of glory, only for half of us to be crushed and fearing relegation by the end of an insipid 90-minute display. Let’s add some fun into opening day by getting ahead of the bookies by analysing the trends in League One.

I have taken the last five years of opening days in League One 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 very few heavy wins/defeats on opening day; only three matches from the whole sixty in the cohort were won by three goals or more

• Goals per game was 2.38, a pretty average return, if not a little low for a league average

• There have never been more than 3 matches per season that have gone over 3.5 goals

• Yellow cards per game came out as 3.78, but the weighted average creeps over 4 yellow cards per fixture

• The 2023/24 season was an outlier for cards, with every single team receiving at least one card and every match going over 2.5 cards

Teams relegated from The Championship 

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, eventual dominant League One champions Birmingham didn't manage to win, and nor did Rotherham, though that turned out to be a bit more predictive of their season.

However, the general pattern is that relegated sides tend to actually do quite well.

They have won nine of 15 matches in the sample, only six of the matches of the 15 were at home, but this balance is redressed this season with Luton, Cardiff, and Plymouth all playing at home on the opening weekend.

Four of the six home matches that relegated teams have played on the opening day have been won, it is only Reading who lost to Peterborough on opening day in 2023, but Reading were in something of a state at the beginning of that season.

A clean sweep of wins for the former Championship clubs on the opening weekend wouldn't be a huge surprise.

What may be slightly surprising is the lack of goals in these matches in general. Only three matches from the 15 saw more than two goals.

Only twice have the former Championship clubs conceded more than once on opening day: Peterborough won 3-2 at Cheltenham in 2022 (the highest scoring match in the sample) and Wigan lost 0-2 at Ipswich back in 2020.

Teams promoted from League Two

There is a general conception that teams promoted into League Two carry with them some winning momentum from their promotion season.

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 Championship clubs.

However, last season was a complete clean sweep of victories for Wrexham, Stockport, Mansfield, and Crawley Town. This hasn't happened before, and is obviously a fairly unlikely scenario.

Prior to last season the record was still perfectly good. From 2020 to 2023 promoted teams won 5, drew 7, and lost 4 of their opening day fixtures.

Again, the home record of newly promoted teams is better than average. Six of 13 home matches were won by the promoted teams.

There are generally a lot more goals when the promoted teams are involved. Half of the matches in the sample (20) went over 2.5 goals and the goal average is 2.78, which is 0.4 goals per game higher than the general opening day goal average in League One.

Plenty of research has been undertaken to find the trends for the opening day of EFL League One, so let’s dig into our EFL League Two Trends.

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 have a litany of the top UK bookmakers on offer for you to join and build up your free bet credits, as well including our Best Accumulator Bookmakers article.

Our Championship Play-Offs Outright Predictions and League Two Play-Offs Outright Betting Tips may also pique your interest ahead of the big kick-off, as well as our Golden Boot predictions.

You can see our experts' Championship Golden Boot Tips here, along with our League One Top Goalscorer Tips and League Two Golden Boot Predictions.

* All odds displayed correct at the time of publishing *

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