West Ham United have started the 2026/27 Championship season as clear favourites to go straight back up. The models that agree on that are nowhere near agreeing on who joins them, or who drops out of the division entirely.
Relegation from the Premier League does two things to a club. It takes money away and it hands you a squad that is, on paper, far too good for the league you have landed in. West Ham are living the second half of that sentence right now.
The bookmakers have them at around 7/4 for the title with bet365, which is short in a 24-team division where anything can happen between August and May. One widely quoted supercomputer run puts their implied chance of winning the Championship at 36.4 per cent. Wolves are second favourites. Burnley are the popular pick for the other automatic promotion place.
Why the models like West Ham
Squad value, mostly. Parachute payments do a lot of quiet work in these projections, because they let a relegated club keep senior Premier League players who would otherwise be sold. The models see that wage bill and assume it converts into points.
It usually does. Not always. Every season somebody with parachute money finishes tenth and spends the summer explaining themselves.
The relegation picture is a mess
This is where the projections fall apart. One simulation has newly promoted Lincoln City going straight back down, with Blackburn Rovers and Queens Park Rangers alongside them. Opta looks at the same league and sees something different entirely.
- Stoke City, 31.1 per cent chance of relegation to League One
- Charlton Athletic, 26.2 per cent
- Watford, 25.3 per cent
Three of those names do not appear on the other model's list at all. That is not a rounding error. It is two systems reading the same division and disagreeing about which clubs are actually in trouble.
What that tells you about the Championship
The gap between eighth and twentieth in this league is small enough that a run of six games decides a club's season. Injuries to one centre-half, a manager sacked in November, a striker who suddenly cannot finish, and a mid-table side is in a relegation fight by February.
Wrexham and Birmingham City are both being talked about as promotion contenders, which would have sounded strange a few seasons ago and now barely raises an eyebrow. Leicester City, down in League One, are among the favourites to come straight back up.
The bit the models cannot price
Whether a relegated squad wants to be there. West Ham have players who were in the Premier League four months ago and will be asked to go to Blackburn on a Tuesday night in January. Some of them will handle it. Some will not, and the ones who do not tend to be the expensive ones.
Favourites is a status, not a result. West Ham have 46 games to turn one into the other.
More from SoloScore: full Championship coverage, results and promotion race updates all season.
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