Get Your Stats Right: January 2026

How often are the teams that get promoted sitting in one of the top 3 spots after half a season?

It’s been a little while since we came to you with a Get Your Stats Right piece. Work, life, the sheer amount of football over the festive period all got in the way. But United haven’t list since then, so maybe staying away is a good omen…

Ahead of our recent Stats Mailbag podcast, we received a great question from David Attmore that was best suited to its own Get Your Stats Right article. (You can listen to that episode here, by the way):

David asked us if the stats from the first half of the season say anything about the likelihood of finishing in the top 3, or rather, how easy is it to predict if a team will be promoted based on their first 23 games.

Wonderful question. And very pertinent because the U’s are in the mix for top 3 now, after playing 28 games, but at points this season we’ve felt pretty far off the pace. It took a bit of time for everything to click, but now it’s clicked extremely well.

I decided to look at the last 14 full League Two season tables (2010/11 – 2024/25 excluding 2019/20’s shortened season) after 12, 23, 30, and 38 matchdays. I chose to look just at the position of teams instead of more advanced metrics like xG or xGA or anything else simply because teams can be promoted (or relegated) playing any style of football. Especially in League Two.