Data experts predict Championship finishes for West Brom, Ipswich Town, Stoke City, Norwich, QPR and rivals - gallery

West Bromwich Albion will be hoping they can build momentum from their extraordinary turnaround last campaign as a new season awaits. The Baggies have made just two signings in the summer window but head coach Carlos Corberan has now had a lot longer to work with his squad.

When the Spaniard took over, West Brom were in a dire situation. Now, just under 10 months on, Albion will challenge for the playoffs once again after narrowly missing out last term. It won’t be easy, though, as highly-talented teams were relegated from the Premier League and promoted from League One.

Leicester City, Leeds United and Southampton all have established top-tier players, whereas Ipswich Town are being tipped for a top-six spot. And that’s not to mention the clubs already in the Championship that will be trying to meet their high expectations for the upcoming campaign.

So how, then, are things shaping up to look by the end of the 2023/24 as it stands? 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. There are rather a few surprises in here, it must be said.