Latest / Minnows Football / Previewing the 2026-2027 EFL Championship
Transcript
- Sam: Hello and welcome to the Minnows Football Podcast. I'm your host, Sam Martin. It's August 12th, 2026, just a couple of days until the season kicks off. And I've got some preview thoughts for you today. We've just published a bunch of content previewing the season on MinnowsFootball.com. Head on over and check that out, as well as our belief index and tables as we get into the season. And so I wanted to go through today and pull out some of the most interesting thoughts that that I thought we had and takeaways we had in writing all of that content and putting it all together. Before we jump into that, a few news items as we get into the week and start the season. Want to start with the news that Charlton Athletic is up for sale. And we got this news last week, came through that they're selling well, it's unsure at the moment. We're not sure if we're selling the entire club or if they're taking some investment into the club. but it's interesting because it's the last being pitched as the last. Buying opportunity in London, this club on the rise, and it's the the first real sort of takeover opportunity that we've seen in the championship this year after the Derby County deal fell apart on the weekend as well. And so we'll have a deeper dive into that and also the Derby news next week in our takeover series. But interesting to see what happens there at Charlton if anything happens in the the first couple of months of the season here. The other piece of news that did the rounds this week is these playoff changes. People started talking a lot more about these playoff changes. So expanding from six to eight teams in the the playoff for the championship at the end of the season. And you've got the basically what's going to happen, it's almost like a feeder competition where the top two teams will still be promoted automatically. Three and four will safely go through to the promotion, but very similar to what they did in the NBA a few years ago this kind of play in tournament of sorts. It's just a bit smaller than that, but a play in where five will play eight, six will play seven in basically a sudden death that then go in and play off for the for the the playoff spots. It's a it's more revenue in the club coffers, which is honestly I don't see a lot of downside here. This is a a good thing. It'll drive a lot more interest at the bottom of the top ten there, trying to get into that seventh and eighth spot. More games, more gate revenue, more interest from fans, bringing in more fans into that playoff grouping. So i but it'll be interesting to see kind of how it all plays out at the end of the season. So the other the other news is Opta came out with their supercomputer predictions for this season. And I thought it was interesting. They they threw up a few names, which bookmakers certainly don't agree with. And I'll talk a little bit more later on as we get into my preseason thoughts about my own predictions. But they threw up a few names that didn't come up from bookmakers for relegation in particular. and They were basing them off off obviously many, many different inputs. but the one they they called out that I wanted to to talk about a little bit here is they had the most likely relegated team out of this division being Stoke City this year. And bookmakers have Stoke towards the bottom. Do they? Where are they? I'm just having a look. kind of mid table and fourteenth. So bookmakers disagree with that. with that take. I have Stoke finishing around the same spot in 16th in my own preseason predictions for whatever those are worth. Optus big statement about why they had them finishing last was because of their back half of the season and just how they started so strongly Stoke. If you remember they're in second spot, sort of not quite midway through the season, but almost midway through the season last year. And then ended terribly, winning, I think, just a couple of games over their last 15, something like that. so that's why they had them in last spot. But it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. The other clubs they had getting relegated were Charlton and Watford, which you do see in a lot more season predictions, those two clubs going down. and so that was a a bit of an interesting one for me. They had going up, Opta had going up automatically West Ham and Southampton, and then the rest of the top eight Middlesbrough, Wolves, Burnley, Millwall, Norwich, and Sheffield United. So anyway, go check that out if that's kind of your jam and something you're interested in. And so that kind of brings us to my own preseason rankings that are now up on MinnowsFootball.com. And I'm not going to go through those rankings. I broke them out into four different tiers. And it's all based around the fan belief in each club. As you go on to Minnows, you'll see that we've got everything kind of revolving right now around this thing we're calling the belief index, which is how much fans are believing or not believing in their clubs. Zero is this critical threshold. The the score goes from negative 100 to positive 100. Zero is this threshold where over it you your fans do believe in what you're doing and have faith in you and therefore good things. compound that belief in a really positive way. Below zero is negative. And so fans don't believe in what's happening. And so things that go poorly compound it in a negative fashion. There's lots of other metrics that go into that score, but you can go check all that out on Minnow's football. But we wrote these up in different tiers, four different tiers from worst to best, with least belief in the club through to most belief. I'm not going to go through all those scores here, but I did find a few interesting questions in there that I did just want to talk a little bit about today. And I want to start with West Ham. West Ham is potentially the most interesting story for me as we enter this season, from a belief perspective. So it's it's interesting, just first of all, that we have West Ham back in the championship. They've been relegated. they are really well positioned from a squad standpoint in terms of the amount of money that's been spent on the squad, the in inherited expectations of the the fans in terms of where they should sit, what tier they should be in. This is a top tier club. But there's this real asymmetry where they're they're first on the prediction table. So if you look at what bookmakers are saying, they're all predicting West Ham to go up, you you hear out there a few people have been talking about that it it might be a record breaking season for them in terms of the numbers of points scored. I believe that too. I'd have them going up automatically and and finishing in first place. But they in terms of our belief index, they're all the way down in fourteenth. And you can go and read our article about that where we really pull apart why they're they're scoring so lowly in the belief curve to start the season. It's everything from what you might expect about the trust of the the ownership and all the mess that's happened around not just David Sullivan, but Sullivan, but other owners who've been fighting in the boardroom there. but it's also just it reflects a little bit What will happen here potentially if things get off to a slow start for West Ham? And the interesting question that I they start to pose there is, you know, what happens if this club starts slowly and by Christmas they're not running away with the league, but they're down in seventh or eighth. You know, how does that belief negatively compound over time? And what sort of things would we see, not just from ownership, But also from the fan base that has already started to really turn against this club. You know, this is a club that really needs to have an incredibly strong, fast, good start to the season. So their on pitch performance gives fans a reason to really believe. So I'll be watching that as we as we go along here, in the first part of the season. But that West Ham is a club that's that's really interesting to me in the first couple of months. Another takeaway for me was was looking at and this is a couple of one other relegated club and then a club that's been in the championship for a while, but having a look at the two clubs of Watford and Burnley, which on the face of it have the a similar problem in that both fan bases don't really believe in their ownership. but they don't believe in the ownership for different reasons. So if you look at Watford, there's no belief in that club because of of the performance of Gino Pozzo and the Potso family over the past decade plus. And that stems from all sorts of different problems. first of all, people feeling like it's Watford's really just a feeder club to Udinese, all the way through to to Gino not really showing any interest in Watford, the place. Going through and cycling through so many different managers. I mean, we all know that it's an incredibly short time frame for managers in the in in any kind of football league right now, average time span of four or five months. But it's really bad and has been really bad in Watford. Went through three managers last year. And they've sort of settled on this guy that they've pulled out, D N E C that they've pulled out of Italy, without much of a track record and certainly no track reward. track record in English football. Fans aren't particularly happy. You can go and check out any kind of fan forum and see what people are saying about this. But that the problem is with their lack of belief in in the owner himself in that case and kind of the the they kind of got this feeling of of being a stepchild of the Pozzo family. On the flip side, you got Burnley, where there's a s there's an owner issue there, but it's not so much a problem with the owners, ALK Capital, I think they're called, but you know, American private equity syndicate. The challenge to their belief is more on the structuring of the way the club and the way the buy of the club, purchase of the club has been set up. And it's been set up in this leverage buyout structure. recently auditors have registered it as a a going concern. Going concern is a phrase that's used in in auditing to say that the concern is that the club can will not be able to service the the loan and and be able to keep the club solvent. And so the problem for Burnley is not so much And and then sorry, on the flip s on the flip side in terms of the owners, the owners have proven happy to spend money and happy to really invest and care about that club. And so two clubs there that I think are really interesting from an ownership perspective to see where they pan out and what happens there. you got Watford on one hand with his kind of ninety percent disapproval rating of fans, Burnley on the other side, a kind of f perennial yo-yo club over the last few decades at least. And and this this kind of cloud hovering over them in terms of how their owners are going to be able to move out of this this financial quandary. So stuff to c kind of keep an eye on there and and pull apart. Another takeaway from these previews is there's a number of clubs this year where the manager of the club, it's especially on the on the face of it, is Kind of bearing and shouldering the bulk of responsibility, not just the bulk of responsibility for the club's performance, but an an inordinate amount of responsibility for the club's performance. almost operating like a load bearing wall within these clubs. If you look at Sheffield United, it would be the easiest one to kind of think of with Chris Wilder there. If you look at last year with Chris Wilder being fired and then brought back straight away and Terrible start for Sheffield United, then Wilder got him back and out of relegation and into safety. all of Sheffield United's approach and tactic and strategy for this season kind of appears to be on his shoulders. And he is this this larger than life character who really embodies the hopes and and dreams of the of the fan base, but also hasn't been able to get Sheffield United up into the top flight for so long, for almost a decade now. So there's there's so much responsibility on him. And you can see that same way with managers taking on more of their share of the fan base's hopes across the division in clubs like Blackburn Rovers with the appointment of of Tony Mowbray, which has led fans to feel like There's not a strategy here. We're just gonna go back to a guy who seems like he can really, you know, put his shoulder to the wheel and and try and push us through and keep us up here. Nathan Jones at Charlton would be another one. Paul Hacking Bottom at Preston. Like there are there are characters across the league who are taking a ton of responsibility. Obviously, every manager takes responsibility, but but taking even more than most. And so what's going to be interesting there is to see. Again, if we don't have good starts from those clubs, what do those clubs do? because they have so much riding on these different appointments and the characters themselves are taking on so much responsibility. Speaking of managers, an another one I'm I was really interested in over the off season break was Michael Skubala and interested in it from two perspectives. Firstly, when he left Lincoln, and Lincoln City and he'd had such an amazing season there, obviously last year. And he's this guy, Scoobala, with this really interesting background. It's been talked about a bit, but like the footsal background and his his England youth coach experience. There's a lot of different elements to his background that make him a kind of unique character in terms of managers in the the championship and and across any football. But he had such a great year at Lincoln City Got him up, got him promoted, they're in the championship, and then he leaves to go to Bristol City, which was an interesting appointment in terms of what Bristol City was trying to do, and we'll talk about that in a second. But then Lincoln City, he left, and then about thirty minutes later they announced these co managers, two co managers to take over that that squad this year. And I've heard some analysts talk about well, that's it this is a crazy decision. To have two people in charge and these guys have no experience at this level, et cetera, et cetera. it is definitely interesting to have two people in charge. The the obvious thing to say is that when two people are in charge, it can come to a point where no one's in charge. And I know this from my own experience in business, but in in many cases it's it's documented there's a reason why you have a single point of responsibility at the top of these of any kind of group or team or or business. And so having two, is that going to, you know, mean that one makes the other one ineffective, that their differences and their flaws kind of you have multiple flawed characters, it brings out all those problems. The optimistic read on it is that two's got to be better than one, right? And you've got two characters there who who might bring out the best in each other and and that brings this whole, you know, this whole piece maybe potentially together. And The vibe of Lincoln City, if you go and look at its it's right up on our website and the belief in the club, they've got one of the highest, I think the highest trust in the institution of any club in the championship this year. That means fans believe that and trust the owners of the club more than any other club in championship football. And so why wouldn't they trust them to go and make this decision? It's a really level-headed set of owners. They Have run the club incredibly responsibly. Lincoln City is at a place they have net not been at in a very long time in terms of this this tier of English football. So that'll be interesting to see how that plays out and if the club gives those two guys the room to run and the room to to succeed in what's going to be obviously a pretty challenging season for this super underdog in the championship. Now back to Skubala, who'd left to go to Bristol City. That's interesting as well in terms of Bristol City's being this. really well run club over the last almost a decade, but especially over the last few years. And, you know, their sense, they had a a bit of a tough season last season, and they've been almost stuck in this kind of middle tier of the championship. And they've clearly come up with this thesis that he's the guy to really kick them into gear. And can he be that guy that that comes in with a really clear sense of identity about how he plays the game? You know, similar to how when Helburgh came into Middlesbrough last year and really kind of reinvigorated that's reinvigorated that side with this sense of of how he wanted to play the game. And can Scubala do that same thing with Bristol City with the addition, which Helbur didn't have, of an an off season to put in place the players and the the strategies that he wanted to to play with. So Bristol City for me is a really interesting club to look at, especially as we start the season here and how Scubala's going to go to do there. Another really interesting club as we went through the tiers was obviously Wrexham. And Wrexham ranks right now in these preseason rankings at the top of the belief index. They have the most belief in their club. And one of the reasons is that they if you look at the calculations, it appears that Wrexham has almost nothing to lose in this league. And what's really giving us that that metric, that readout. Is that they've never been here before. And that means everything is kind of gravy because they've never been in this tier. They don't have any expectation within their fan base that they have been here. They belong here. If you went and asked the fan base a decade ago, do you think you're going to be in the championship playing vying for the Premier League in ten years? They would have said you're crazy. All that stuff that is very out there, obviously through the documentary and these different pieces. But at what stage does that start to turn? And at what stage does Wrexham fly so high that fans do believe that they start to have things to lose in this tier? Maybe that's already started to happen. I don't think it has. But at some stage it probably will, that those expectations will start to build. And we saw it just a touch at the end of last season when they missed out on making into the playoffs on the last last day of the season. And so if they were to have a tough start or a a bad season this year, you know, what would that do to to belief in the club and and how would fans, would fans just continue to feel, well, it's great, doesn't matter, you know, this is all above our, our kind of expectations anyway. or have those beliefs started to, to build in with the the obvious massive attention that the club has gotten through its celebrity owners and and through the documentary. And then speaking of of celebrity owners, there's also this really interesting juxtaposition that I called out a little bit through the the write ups between Wrexham and Swansea, who's a a really natural quote unquote rival of Wrexham's this year. a couple of different Welsh clubs obviously. They're not really traditional rivals, but but you know they're both Welsh so we could we could kind of group them together and pull them together. And the interesting thing with Swansea over the last few years has been that they've brought in, similar to Wrexham, they've brought in these celebrity owners in the with the likes of Martha Stewart. Snoop and Modrich. And so they've got celebrity owners in there, but they haven't really optimized that celebrity ownership in the same way that Wrexham has, in terms of really turning it into a part of their authentic selves. You don't see that in Swansea. You it really does at this stage on the Swansea side seem more like, you know, similar to JJ Watt at Burnley, Tom Brady at Birmingham, the the it's a it's a a marketing play rather than being something that's truly in the fabric of the club. And so seeing how those celebrities are going to play out in clubs like Swansea will be interesting to as we go about the season this year. Last thought, on these these preseason rankings, I I have a few the biggest disagreements that I had with bookmakers and then also with Optus rankings, two clubs in particular I wanted to call out And they're kind of linked in my mind. The first one is Southampton. Opta had Southampton finishing second, even with that negative four point start to start to the season, starting with minus four because of the Spygate scandal. Bookmakers have them in fifth. I have them down in thirteenth. and my my reasoning is that that I don't I think a club is going to struggle to come back kind of spiritually, mentally, emotionally. from not the Spygate scandal itself, because the scandal is is while bad, it's not it's not it's not something we haven't seen before. It's not, you know, completely egregious, which is reflected in the negative four points. So it's not so much the the crime itself which is gonna punish the club, in my perspective. It is the fact that they were so close to being promoted. And it was the fact that they were flying so high to finish last season. If you think back to the last few months of of the 25, 26 season, Southampton were unbeatable for that for that period of time. They just looked like they were going to win. They they would they looked like they were destined to win that that playoff. And they got to the semifinals of the FA Cup. Eckert had them playing in this just in incredibly confident almost brash and brazen way. Like they really felt and looked like they belonged, up in the the top tier. And to have that pulled out from underneath you through no fault of your own as the players, I think that is the thing that's going to be really difficult for that team to recover from. So it's not so much the club struggling to recover from it, it's the team. And especially with Eckett who orchestrated the the spying, allegedly orchestrated the spying, Still at the top of the club. So I think that's a really interesting thing to keep an eye on and why I have them lower than Bookmakers and others. The other club that I have lower is Birmingham City. Opta has them in 10th, I have them in 12th, Bookmakers have them in sixth. And i I'm also in in the case of Birmingham City, kind of pricing in the belief there a little bit and saying that this is a club that really feels impatient. It's a club that truly believes that it should be in the top flight of English football and is desperate to get back there. And that desperation last season really played out in a way that they didn't build a resilient team. And the way that that lack of resilience was seen was that when they were away they were not they were a completely different squad, completely different team to when they were playing at home. And can they fix something like that quickly? and get back to being a team that's competing to go up. And so I think it's just a case of being a little over its skis in terms of the overall build of the project there. So obviously see what happens. but they're two clubs under an incredible amount of pressure as we enter the season. and it'll be great to see what happens there. So anyway, take a look. They're my thoughts on the preseason rankings and and previews that I did. On Minnows Football, go check that out on MinnowsFootball dot com. Brings us to this weekend. So what are we excited about coming into this weekend? Well, first of all, football's back. Amazing. It almost felt like it didn't go away, especially with the World Cup over the summer. a lot of great games this weekend. The promoted and relegated teams are always interesting to see in this new setting. It's kind of like a new shiny, new toy. So you've got Wolves take on Blackburn Rovers on Friday. That's kind of the marquee opening game. Bolton home to Preston, Lincoln City away to Middlesbrough, Burnley home to West Ham, which is the marquee game on Sunday, and then Cardiff City home to Wrexham. My favorite games that I should want to call out Portsmouth QPR, which is not going to be a game that I think many people call out. I find it interesting because I think both those clubs are at a really competitive. Compelling point this season in a way that they might not have been in other seasons. Like you look at QPR, they just to survive for them over the last few seasons has kind of been enough. But the main the change they made with bringing in Stefan last year as manager and the expectations of this kind of young, hotshot-ish manager, and the kind of the kind of funkiness at which Cifuentes left the year before that. They've just had so much like up and down turmoil, you know. Can they can they actually do something this year? Portsmouth's in the same way with John Massinho. And so that's that's gonna be an interesting to me, like it's very, very early obviously, but like an interesting statement game. Two clubs that are really looking to make the push this year. and similar to that, Bristol City is another club that's really looking to make the push this year, obviously. They're going up against Millwall. Two fascinating clubs in my perspective. Millwall is is this really interesting question about can they bounce back from not bounce back from losing in the playoffs necessarily, but like can they go again? they just had such an amazing year last year. And can they do it again and get up again, especially through this kind of identity and attitude, such a hard charging like a highly emotive identity of this hard scrabble club. So that's gonna be a great game for me. And then the last one I called out was Middlesbrough versus Lincoln City. And that's interesting for from opposite ends of the table. Middlesbrough might pick to be automatically prom promoted behind West Ham in second spot. Clear identity Very promising manager. They've had a very strategic offseason in terms of transfers. They've done some really sort of shrewd pieces of business, it seems. Really well positioned, well poised, but also heartbroken from the playoffs last year. So can they get back up? Can they start fast? and against competition that is expected to bring up the bottom of the table in Lincoln City and That's this really interesting experiment like we were talking about before, talked about earlier, with co managers, a real true underdog story. And it's gonna be one of the ones we're following really closely this season, on Minnows of can these underdogs stay up? It would be such an amazing story if the imps were able to to avoid relegation this year and stay in the championship. So anyway, lots of great games this weekend. Go and watch a bunch. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with a roundup of those games and more here on the Minos Football Podcast.