Yahoo News Coventry City Championship prediction made as yet another play-off scramble beckons
It wouldn’t be fixture release day without the latest ‘supercomputer’ prediction on how Coventry City’s Championship campaign is likely to pan out.
The Sky Blues have clear intentions to push for the play-offs and big ambitions to return to the Premier League, having gone agonisingly close at Wembley in the 2022/23 campaign when they lost out to Luton Town in a sudden death penalty shootout. Just over 12 months on and the Hatters are back in the second tier after failing to get a foothold in the top flight but will, once again, be among the favourites to bounce straight back up.
Burnley and Sheffield United followed them down, having also failed to keep their place at English football’s top table. Meanwhile the likes of Norwich City, West Brom and Leeds United missed out in last season’s play-offs in a season when Mark Robins’ men fell away, eventually finishing ninth after their FA Cup run to the semi-finals took its toll, resulting in the team running out of steam.
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So what about this time around? Well, with the likes of Haji Wright and Ellis Simms having bagged 19 goals apiece last term and solid foundations in place, a positive summer transfer window should see City become a much more resilient side in terms of strength in depth, and therefore more able to cope with the rigours of the division.
According to Grosvenor Sport's supercomputer, however, Leeds and Burnley are set to seal automatic promotion, with Hull, Middlesbrough, Watford and Norwich making up the top six. That means Coventry will miss out on a play-off spot, in this calculation, by just one point!
We should, of course, take such predictions with a pinch of salt – the supercomputer surely not taking into account the likely goal assists of new signing Jack Rudoni or the wing wizardry of fellow new recruits Ephron Mason-Clark and Raphael Borges Rodrigues!
As for the other end of the table, and who the supercomputer reckons will drop down to League One, Blackburn, Cardiff and Oxford United are predicted to go down, with Wayne Rooney’s Plymouth narrowly avoiding relegation by just six points.
How does the SuperComputer work?
The SuperComputer is a probability model, not determined by human predictions or bias. What happens is the SuperComputer estimates the outcome of each remaining fixture based on a team’s current strength (based on factors such as league position and form) and betting market odds.
The machine then simulates the remaining games in a season 1,000 times and constructs an average league table from the 1,000 simulations, to rule out anomalous results.
