The English Championship has a reputation for being a very competitive league where it is particularly difficult to predict the correct scores of games.
There is generally quite a lot of parity across the board and while you of course still get favourites and underdogs the gap is rarely as large as it is in the top divisions of England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
As an example, Middlesbrough were heavily backed for promotion in pre-season and have performed well, even going on an impressive nine-game run where they did not concede a solitary goal. This run was surprisingly broken by Bristol City, a team sitting third-bottom at the time. City actually managed to complete the double over Aitor Karanka’s high-flyers in the process.
The Championship has been like this for some years now and in 2012/13 the gap between relegated Peterborough and promoted Hull City was just 25 points. To compare, even this strangest of Premier League seasons already sees the gap between Newcastle United (third-bottom) and Leicester City (top) at 26 points.
To expand on this we can estimate some level of supremacy by looking at the Asian Handicap lines in the Championship.
In only 22 of 340 games played so far has the AH line been at least -1 or +1, which is just 6.5% of the time. The Premier League has already seen the same level of supremacy in 54 of 223 games, which is a relatively enormous 24% of the time in comparison.
Using the Brier Score method, I am now going to look at how many “shocks” have occurred in the Championship this season. The Brier Score uses a function that observes the accuracy of probabilistic predictions.
For the rest of this blog post please see the full version on the StrataBet Trading Expert page - along with plenty of other insightful pieces.
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