Jack Marriott has scored eight league goals in seven matches for Reading this season. Judged on attacking output per 90 minutes, he is not merely the best forward in League One. He is ahead of every player in the Championship as well — 5.95 against 4.33 for Cyle Larin of Southampton, who leads the division above.
There is an obvious reply to that, and everyone reaches for it: it is only League One. Quite so. Goals come easier a division down, everybody knows it, and nobody is startled that a League One striker out-scores a Championship one.
But notice what the reply does not contain: a number. If League One flatters a forward, by how much? Enough to wipe out a lead that size, or not? That question has an answer in principle — and this is a piece about trying to find it, discovering the answer is far softer than anyone admits, and watching what happens to Marriott when you apply it anyway.
First, what is being counted
Not goals alone. Goals are too rare over seven matches to separate anybody, so the measure here is broader: goals, assists, shots on target and key passes, weighted and expressed per 90 minutes. A goal counts three, an assist two, a shot on target a half, a key pass 0.3.
Jack Marriott’s 5.95 breaks down like this. In 516 minutes he has eight goals, which supply 4.19 of the total; 16 shots on target, worth 1.40; and 7 key passes, worth 0.37. Larin reaches 4.33 from seven goals, 12 shots on target and 6 key passes in 598 minutes. Scoring dominates the measure, but a striker who is constantly shooting on target is not invisible in it.
What an “exchange rate” would actually do
Suppose we knew that League One inflates attacking output by 45%. Then the honest way to compare the two men is to divide Marriott’s figure by 1.45. His 5.95 becomes 4.11. Larin’s 4.33 is untouched, because the Championship is the yardstick everything is being converted into. Larin therefore edges it, and the reflex was right.
Now suppose the true figure is 1.36 instead. Marriott becomes 4.38, Larin stays at 4.33, and Marriott leads. Two plausible rates, less than a tenth apart, and they disagree about who is having the better season.
That is the whole problem in one paragraph. The adjustment is not a technicality applied after the interesting part. It is the interesting part.
Where a rate like that comes from
The trick is to find players for whom the division changed and very little else did. When a club is promoted or relegated, the players who stay put are exactly that: same man, same club, same team-mates, different standard of opposition. Line up his numbers in the season before against the season after and the difference is an estimate of what the division is worth.
One such case tells you nothing; the player might simply have had a better year. 1,074 of them, between 2019 and 2025, start to tell you something. Averaged out, that comparison says League One output should be divided by 1.45 and League Two by 1.70 to put it on Championship terms.
Why there is more than one answer
There is a second way to do it: follow players who transfer between divisions rather than ride a promotion. 976 of those give a gentler verdict — 1.36 and 1.59.
Neither is clean, and — this is the awkward part — they are dirty in the same direction. Both overstate how much easier the lower division is.
The transfer figure is inflated because players who earn a move up are usually in the middle of an unusually good spell, so some of their decline afterwards is simply returning to normal. The promotion figure is inflated for a different reason: a promoted club is not just facing a harder league, it is also one of the worst teams in it. Some of the drop in its players’ numbers is their own side getting comparatively weaker, which has nothing to do with the division as such.
Two estimates that err the same way do not bracket the truth between them. They sit on the same side of it. So 1.45 and 1.36 are better read as a ceiling: the real figure is most likely smaller than both, and nothing we hold says how much smaller.
So we turned it into a dial
If the rate is unknown but bounded above, the useful thing is not to pick a number — it is to show what every possible number would do. So: take every EFL player with at least 360 minutes this season (249 in the Championship, 235 in League One, 242 in League Two), rank them, and count how many of the top twelve are Championship men. Then turn the adjustment up from nothing to the gentler of the two estimates, raising the League One and League Two multipliers together, each from 1.00 to its own figure.
With no adjustment at all, only three of the top twelve are Championship players — the lower divisions overrun the list. Turn the dial to the gentler estimate and it is nine. Turn it to the steeper one and it is eleven. The count never falls as the dial rises, which is the one thing here we can be sure of.
The true answer is somewhere along that line. Because both estimates are ceilings, it is nearer the left-hand end than the right.
And yet Marriott survives
Here is the part that makes him interesting. At every single rung of that dial, Marriott is still the highest-rated attacker in the EFL. Not once on the way up does the Championship produce someone above him. Only when you go past the dial altogether, to the steeper of the two estimates, does Larin finally edge ahead — by 0.23.
Below is that steepest reading: the top twelve on the most Championship-favourable terms available. It is the only version in which Larin comes top, and even here Marriott is the one lower-division player left standing.
Top twelve on adjusted attacking output per 90, using the larger of the two published estimates: Championship 1.00 (the baseline), League One 1.449, League Two 1.698. Adjusted = raw divided by the player’s division figure, so Championship rows are unchanged. Minimum 360 minutes.
| # | Player | Club | Division | Raw /90 | Adjusted /90 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cyle Larin | Southampton | Championship | 4.33 | 4.33 |
| 2 | Jack Marriott | Reading | League One | 5.95 | 4.11 |
| 3 | Jarrod Bowen | West Ham | Championship | 3.86 | 3.86 |
| 4 | Mohamed Touré | Norwich | Championship | 3.85 | 3.85 |
| 5 | Lyndon Dykes | Millwall | Championship | 3.59 | 3.59 |
| 6 | Fer López | Wolves | Championship | 3.43 | 3.43 |
| 7 | Finn Azaz | Southampton | Championship | 3.35 | 3.35 |
| 8 | Will Lankshear | Middlesbrough | Championship | 3.32 | 3.32 |
| 9 | Joël Piroe | West Ham | Championship | 3.05 | 3.05 |
| 10 | Adam Idah | Swansea | Championship | 3.01 | 3.01 |
| 11 | Andri Guðjohnsen | Blackburn | Championship | 2.97 | 2.97 |
| 12 | Jimmy Morgan | West Brom | Championship | 2.92 | 2.92 |
Before anyone gets carried away
Seven matches is not a season. Resample Marriott’s own games and his rate could reasonably have been anywhere between 2.74 and 9.70; Larin’s runs 2.27 to 6.45. Almost all of Larin’s range sits inside Marriott’s.
Ask how often Marriott comes out above Larin once the adjustment is applied, and the answer is 0.527 on the gentler estimate and 0.465 on the steeper one. A coin toss, twice. The ordering holds in the data we have. It would not yet survive the amount of data we would need to be sure of it.
What this is, and what it is not
This is a model applied, not a model proved. The rate comes from historical moves and the table is arithmetic downstream of it, so the table cannot be evidence that the rate is right.
We have a ceiling and no floor. Nothing in this design separates the division a player moved to from his club’s standing within it, because for a promoted squad those are the same event. So while the gap is very probably real, we cannot put a number underneath it, and cannot rule out that it is much smaller than either estimate suggests.
A club that goes up or down often rebuilds its squad, so part of a player’s change in output reflects different team-mates rather than tougher opponents — another reason the estimates run high. The weights in the composite are a choice, forwards and midfielders sit on one scale, and the figures are averages that say nothing about what any individual would do on promotion. Nothing here makes a League One attacker a poor signing; if anything the reverse.
What it does say is narrower and firmer than the charts people publish in October. There is very probably a real gap between the divisions, we are far more confident of its direction than of its size, and anyone quoting that size to three decimal places — as our own table and charts do — is saying more than the data supports. Marriott clears every bar we can honestly set. Whether he would clear the one we cannot measure is a different question, and the only truthful answer is that we do not know.
Men’s and women’s football are covered separately here, and this piece is the EFL only. The women’s pyramid has no equivalent bridge data — the provider publishes no player statistics for the second tier at all — so no such adjustment is possible from our data. That says nothing either way about how the women’s divisions compare.
