Championship Analysis • 2019/20–2024/25
The Championship Lottery
What does it actually take to win promotion — and how thin is the margin between glory and free-fall?
The Championship has a number. Or rather, it has many numbers — and that’s exactly the problem. Over the past six completed seasons, the points required to finish in the top two and earn automatic promotion has ranged from 83 to 101. That is an 18-point swing. In a 46-game season, 18 points is roughly the difference between a good run of form and a catastrophic one.
Ask anyone in a Championship boardroom what the target is and they will say 90 points. They are not wrong, exactly — the six-season average is 93.9. But averages are dangerous currency in this division. West Brom went up as runners-up in 2019/20 with 83 points, a total that would have left them seventh the following season. Burnley won the title in 2022/23 with 101 — a points haul that would have secured automatic promotion in every single season in this dataset. The Championship does not do consistency.
What follows is a breakdown of those six completed seasons, from 2019/20 to 2024/25: the promotion bands, the playoff entry points, the relegation thresholds, and what they collectively tell us about the current 2025/26 campaign. The headline conclusion — spoiler, because the data demands it — is that 90 points is a reasonable target but not a guarantee, and that the gap between automatic promotion and the playoff lottery is growing wider every season.
Lowest Ever (Auto)
83
points to finish top 2
Average (Auto)
93.9
points for auto-promotion
Highest Ever (Auto)
101
points to finish top 2
The Numbers, Season by Season
Auto-promotion, playoff winners and the relegation cut-off across 2019/20–2024/25.
The 2022/23 season stands out immediately. Burnley’s 101 points is the record in this dataset — and behind them, Sheffield United and Luton both finished on 91. Three teams above 90 points, and only two going up automatically. Luton’s play-off final victory that year is a reminder that the third-best team in the division can still face a Wembley lottery to get promoted. The table does not always reward the meritorious.
The trend across the six seasons is broadly upward, with one notable exception. 2019/20 remains the statistical outlier — West Brom going up in second with just 83 points, a figure that looks almost quaint against recent seasons. That campaign was completed behind closed doors following the Covid shutdown; whether the change in environment dampened points accumulation is impossible to say, but the numbers suggest something did. Every season since has set the automatic bar at 88 points or higher, with three of the last four seasons featuring a top-two side on triple figures.
Where Do the Lines Get Drawn?
The spread of final points totals across all three zones — promotion, playoff, and relegation.
The auto-promotion band sits well clear of the rest — but the gap between the playoff and relegation zones is far smaller than most fans would like to believe.
The Automatic Promotion Ceiling and Floor
How the points required for a top-two finish has shifted across 2019/20–2024/25.
The Ceiling
101 points. That was Burnley’s final tally in 2022/23 — a number that belongs in the top flight, not the second tier. It is the highest in this six-season dataset and it was not achieved by a team coasting; Vincent Kompany’s side won 35 of their 46 games, finishing 10 points clear of Sheffield United in second. They were emphatically, unmistakably the best team in the division.
But the ceiling tells you as much about the division as it does about the champions. In 2022/23 the entire top end inflated — Sheffield United and Luton both hit 91 and still did not go up automatically. When multiple teams pile on wins simultaneously, the bar rises for everyone. Burnley did not merely need to be good; they needed to be relentless because the teams behind them were nearly as good. The ceiling is not a measure of individual excellence — it is a measure of how competitive the whole division decides to be.
The Floor
West Brom’s 83 points in 2019/20 is the floor in this dataset — and it is a very specific kind of floor. Slaven Bilić’s side finished second behind Marcelo Bielsa’s Leeds, and 83 points was enough because the 2019/20 season was, by recent standards, a low-intensity campaign at the top. Brentford finished third with 81. The points were simply lower across the board.
Here is the context that makes 83 a genuinely alarming number: in four of the other five seasons in this dataset, 83 points would not have been enough to finish in the top two. In 2023/24 alone, Ipswich’s extraordinary 96-point second place lapped West Brom’s total by 13 points. The floor is 83, but planning for 83 is a fool’s errand. It happened once in six seasons, in abnormal circumstances. Budget accordingly.
The Playoff Gamble
Playoff entry points and actual promotion rates — the gap between making it and winning it.
Sixth place in the Championship is a peculiar destination. Over six seasons it has cost between 68 and 77 points — a nine-point range. Bristol City reached the playoffs in 2024/25 with 68; Bournemouth needed 77 in 2020/21 to claim the same spot. Both faced a three-game knockout tournament that has historically promoted one team from the top six and sent the other four home. The points total, it turns out, is largely irrelevant once you get there.
What is relevant — and what the numbers suggest is getting worse — is the gap between sixth and second. In 2019/20 that gap was 13 points. In 2024/25 it had grown to 32, as Leeds and Burnley both hit triple figures while Bristol City scraped in on 68. A team finishing sixth is increasingly not the sixth-best team in the division; they are a mid-table side that put together a good run at the right moment, and then they face teams who have spent six months grinding out results against the best opposition around. The play-off semi-final is a coin flip. The play-off final is barely better.
Falling Through the Trapdoor
The 18th-place safety line versus 21st-place over 2019/20–2024/25 — and how thin the margin sometimes is.
The margins at the bottom of the Championship are, on occasion, truly brutal. Over six seasons the gap between 18th place (safety) and 21st place (relegated) has ranged from two to eight points — and a gap of two, which arrived in 2024/25, is essentially a rounding error across 46 games. Stoke City survived on 51 points; Hull City went down on 49. Two points. Three wins and a draw’s worth of football separating survival and League One.
The 2021/22 season provides the starkest illustration of what can happen at the wrong end. Peterborough United were relegated with 37 points — the lowest in this dataset by some distance, and a figure that would have been worrying in the Football League, let alone the Championship. Reading finished 22nd with 47 points. The trapdoor, when it opens, can swallow a club whole. The uncomfortable message from the data: 50 points almost certainly keeps you up, but 49 almost certainly does not — and in a division where most sides occupy a tight band between 45 and 60 points, the margin for error is essentially non-existent.
2025/26 — Where Does It Stand?
The current table, mapped against the historical promotion and relegation bands.
Championship Table
At Gameweek 38 of 2025/26, Coventry lead the Championship with 77 points — projecting to roughly 93 on current form, right on the six-season average. Middlesbrough sit second on 70, projecting to around 85, which would represent one of the lower second-place totals in recent memory and puts them uncomfortably close to the historic floor of 83. With eight games remaining, this is shaping up to be a below-average points season for the top two — which, incidentally, is good news for the teams immediately below who might not need as many points as usual to gatecrash the automatic places.
The bottom of the table is a different kind of story. Sheffield Wednesday’s 12 points at GW38 is a number so low it barely registers as a Championship total — they are mathematically buried and heading for a grim statistical footnote. For the rest of the bottom cluster, West Brom, Portsmouth and Oxford United are all scrapping around 40 points, directly in the danger zone the historic data defines. The promoted-and-immediately-returned Leicester are 19th on 44, not safe. Meanwhile Hull City — relegated last season on 49 points in one of the tightest drops in recent memory — sit fifth on 63, playing with the kind of aggression that tends to follow a year in League One purgatory.
So What Does It Actually Take?
So what does it actually take? The honest answer is: more than you think, in most seasons, and occasionally less than you would have believed possible. The data from six Championship campaigns points to a target of 90 points as the starting point for any serious automatic promotion ambition — but 90 is not the answer. It is the floor of a reasonable expectation. In four of the six seasons in this dataset, you needed 91 or more to finish in the top two. In only one season would 90 have been enough on its own, and even then you would have been sweating.
The play-off route is its own calculation. Get yourself to 70 points and you have a decent chance of finishing in the top six — but then you are at the mercy of a three-game knockout that could end on a last-minute penalty in the 93rd minute at Wembley, and it often does. The Championship play-off final is the richest game in football not because it is the best game, but because the team that wins it is frequently not the team that deserved it most. That is the lottery in its purest form.
If you forced a number out of this analysis, it would be 92. That is the figure that has historically always been sufficient for automatic promotion, and it is close enough to attainable for any squad genuinely built for the division. Fall below 88 and you are relying on fortune. Reach 95 and only a genuinely exceptional season from multiple rivals can stop you. The Championship is a league where three wins from your last five games can swing you from tenth to sixth or from survival to relegation — and six seasons of data show no signs of that changing.
In the last 6 seasons, a team has never been relegated with more than
50 points — and never been promoted with fewer than
83 points.Championship • 2019/20–2024/25
