First-season survival · 2026-27
When a club goes up, one question hangs over its whole season. Will it still be here a year from now? This page tries to answer it for the clubs promoted for 2026-27, working only from what was known before the season began. The headline is not a confident number for each club. It is a pattern. The model puts every newcomer near the same base rate, because the public data barely tell them apart.
The model leans towards the English newcomers staying up, but none of these is a confident call.
Across the whole league, the clubs least likely to stay up are listed below.
Say a club is given a 70% chance of survival. Read that as follows: across many seasons with a club in this position, about seven in ten stay up and three go down. It is a lean, not a promise. The margins here are wide and they overlap, so the small gaps between one club and the next do not really mean much. The model is mostly saying "this is a promoted club, so it probably survives", rather than putting one above another. As a reminder, of the three clubs promoted a year ago, two stayed up and one, Burnley, went down.
Each club has a card. Here is what every figure on it means.
Hull come up with the lowest rating of the three English newcomers, a full 294 points below where mid-table is likely to sit, which is almost twice the shortfall facing Coventry or Ipswich. And yet the model gives Hull much the same chance as Coventry. The reason runs deep. Among promoted clubs, the strength gap barely predicts who survives, so the estimate drifts back towards the base rate rather than following the deficit down. The wide margin is the model owning up to that. On public data, it can see that Hull are a promoted club, and not much more.
Staying up means staying out of the bottom three, so the fight at the foot involves the weakest established clubs as well, not just the three who came up. Below is the whole 2026-27 Premier League, sorted by the risk of going down. The three promoted clubs head the list, with Sunderland and Tottenham next in the firing line.
Each bar is the model's chance of that club going down (one minus its survival chance). Three of these clubs will fill the three relegation places. The order among the promoted clubs is little more than noise, since the model cannot tell them apart, but the established clubs are ranked with some confidence.
These are the sides that went up automatically in the other four leagues. The source data does not record who won the play-offs, so only the two automatic places are shown for each league.
These figures use only what was known before the summer 2026 transfer window. What a club spends over the summer is not in yet, and it matters a great deal for a newly promoted side, so treat these as a starting point rather than a settled call. The message sits with the rest of the study. Public pre-season data place the newcomers near a shared base rate rather than telling them apart.
This checks the method, not the forecast. Here the model is trained only on seasons before 2025/26, with that season held back, so last season's newcomers, whose fates we now know, give it a fresh test. The forecast above, by contrast, uses the full history including 2025/26.
| Club | Predicted P(survive) | Actual | Direction |
|---|
The model gets the two ends right. The best-rated clubs stayed up and the worst-rated went down. The middle is a muddle, which is just what an AUROC of 0.57 looks like in practice.