The Friday night game sees the top two sides face off. Irrespective of what our foresting model says, if you have some football knowledge and have followed progress so far, you wouldn’t bet against Leeds and Middlesbrough pushing for promotion towards the end of the season. It is unsurprising then that the model forecasts a 1-1 draw in this match (13%).
In the Championship sack race, the front runner is perhaps Reading manager Paul Clement. Yet to record a League win this season and just 4 goals scored, Reading welcome Sheffield Wednesday to the Madejski on Saturday. The forecast is more gloom for the Royals, with an away win the most likely outcome (42%, 0-1; 10%).
Stoke are resurgent after two wins on the bounce in league and cup. But the midweek game saw only 7,000 turn up to watch the Potters, with 10% of those from Huddersfield. Have the fans already made up their mind on the manager? Or were the other 20,000 who turned up at the Bet365 Stadium last season actually Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal fans in disguise? The model gives them a coin’s toss chance of taking any points away from the Hawthorns on Saturday (1-0; 15%).
The rest of our Championship forecasts are in the the table below:
- The Forecast scoreline, with the % chance of that happening
- The % chance of a win by the Home team, P(H), or Away team, P(A) (with one hundred minus those two numbers giving the % chance of a draw
| Forecast | Win (%) | ||||
| Score | Pr (%) | P(H) | P(A) | ||
| Leeds | Middlesbrough | 1-1 | 13 | 38 | 34 |
| Birmingham | QPR | 1-0 | 12 | 40 | 32 |
| Brentford | Notts Forest | 2-1 | 10 | 63 | 17 |
| Hull | Derby | 1-2 | 9 | 35 | 40 |
| Preston | Bolton | 1-0 | 14 | 55 | 19 |
| Reading | Sheffield Wed | 0-1 | 10 | 32 | 42 |
| Sheff Utd | Aston Villa | 1-1 | 13 | 37 | 36 |
| West Brom | Stoke | 1-0 | 15 | 49 | 23 |
| Wigan | Rotherham | 1-0 | 13 | 66 | 13 |
| Millwall | Swansea | 0-1 | 12 | 31 | 41 |
| Ipswich | Norwich | 1-1 | 13 | 37 | 35 |
| Bristol City | Blackburn | 1-0 | 10 | 48 | 27 |
As discussed before (here, here & here), we continue to tinker with our forecasting method. Our aim has always been to provide a single scoreline forecast to hang our hats on. But it is challenging to balance both plausible result and score forecasts simultaneously, which will perform well against some metric. Therefore, we are now making “Fuzzy Conditional” forecasts, discussed here.