Data experts predict Championship table for Birmingham City, Leicester City, Middlesbrough, Millwall and rivals - gallery

Birmingham City will be eager to kickstart an exciting new era under their fresh ownership with a successful first season. Optimism is brewing at St Andrew’s following nine summer transfers to date and the promise for more before the end of the window.

It was a seven-year high of 52 points at the end of last campaign but John Eustace’s side will be targeting more than that for 2023/24. With some highly-talented teams relegated from the Premier League and promoted from League One, though, it could be tricky.

Leicester City, Leeds United and Southampton all have established Premier League players, whereas Ipswich Town are being tipped for a play-off spot. And that’s not to mention the clubs already in the English second tier that will be targeting strong finishes for the upcoming campaign.

So how, then, are things shaping up to look by the end of the 2023/24 season? Well, thanks to a new data expert model from BetVictor, a predicted table has emerged following simulations for each team’s 46 matches.

The data experts adopt the Monte Carlo method and at its heart is a Python-based match simulator that uses two Poisson distributions – one for the home team and one for the away team – to anticipate the number of goals each team could score in a match.

A Poisson distribution is a powerful mathematical concept that predicts the probability of a given number of events (in this case, goals) happening in a fixed interval of time. The key input to a Poisson distribution is the ‘lambda’ (λ) value, which represents the average rate of an event’s occurrence.

BetVictor’s system uses the match simulator to predict the outcomes of a full season’s fixtures. The simulation is run 10,000 times, following which the average standings and probabilities are calculated which leads to a final table and full range of ‘average’ points of each side.

With all of that explained, it’s time to flick through the pages to see what the data simulations expect the Championship standings to be at the close of play on May 4, 2024. Quite a few surprises in here, it has to be said.