Championship 8 May 2021,

With the top half of the table secured, the English Championship season ends on Saturday this weekend, until the promotion playoffs start.

So this weekend is all about relegation, or surviving it.

There is a  massive fixture of Derby v Sheffield Wednesday at 12.30 which will probably settle things.

There are a few different scenarios but if either team wins then they are safe, unless Rotherham also win, in which case they are safe, unless Derby win.

Our model predicts a 1-1 draw in the Derby v Sheffield Weds game.

Derby have a slightly higher expected goals (1.39) than Sheffield (1.11). A home win is also reasonably likely.

A 1-0 win is the second most likely score at 11.4% compared to the 1-1 (12.7%) – these are shown in the table below in the ‘Home wins’ and ‘Draws’ sections. Bookmakers have Derby on slightly lower odds to win (40.4%) than our model (43.3%) whilst our model and bookmakers have less than 1% difference between them on whether Sheffield Wednesday can win (30%-30.9%)

Rotherham are away to Cardiff and our model gives them little hope of survival.

Cardiff are really the most likely team to win in this whole weekend set of Championship matches (62.7%), according to our model. Bookmakers actually seem to disagree with this extent of favouring Cardiff. Their mean odds, have them at only 40.2% to win, giving Rotherham more than double the chance of winning than we do (33.6% to our 15.3%).

Wycombe, mathematically are not relegated. Realistically they’d need to win by a ridiculous amount and have Sheffield Wednesday only win 1-0 against Derby. That said, our model relegates them by not only predicting a 1-0 Millwall win but it is also less than 1% different to bookmakers mean odds when predicting the likelihood of a Millwall home win (51.8% to 52.7%).

So really the most likely result is quite banal for the neutral.

A 1-1 draw keeps Derby up and relegates everyone else. If that then happens, Rotherham would need to win by 6 goals against Cardiff (they would then presumabl stay up having scored more goals, despite being on the same goal difference). Stranger things have happened but not often.