Promotion through the play-offs

[Sir Tokyo Sexwale]

quite interesting

 

James Dart and Jessica Gross

Wednesday April 19, 2006

 

"We've all heard it said that the teams who finish one place below the automatic promotion places always lose out to teams who finished 20 points back in the play-offs, but what are the actual records of teams in each spot?" wonders Nathan Walker.

 

Time for some good old-fashioned statistical analysis, Nathan, meaning a delve into the record books, or www.rsssf.com (great website)as we like to call them. To get a fair answer to this question we need, of course, to analyse the data from when the play-offs - in their current format - began: 1988-89. Since then, there have been a total of 51 promotions via the play-offs in the Championship, League One, and League Two (and their equivalents). If we rank the teams from one to four in a seeding system based on play-off positions in which they finished the regular season, we arrive at the following figures:

 

Championship (and equivalents): No1 seed: four promotions (23.5%); No2 seed: four promotions (23.5%); No3 seed: five promotions (29.4%); No4 seed: four promotions (23.5%).

League One (and equivalents): No1 seed: five promotions (29.4%); No2 seed: three promotions (17.6%); No3 seed: four promotions (23.5%); No4 seed: five promotions (29.4%).

 

League Two (and equivalents): No1 seed: 12 promotions (70.5%); No2 seed: one promotion (5.8%); No3 seed: two promotions (11.7%); No4 seed: two promotions (11.7%).

 

Overall: No1 seed: 21 promotions (41.1%); No2 seed: eight promotions (15.6%); No3 seed: 11 promotions (21.5%); No4 seed: 11 promotions (21.5%).

 

So there you have it. History suggests that the team finishing fifth in the Championship is the most likely to reach the top-flight, the winner of the third-versus-sixth League One semi-final will be licking their lips, while the scrum in League Two will clearly be for fourth place. They may only be stats, but we'll check again after the forthcoming play-offs to see how reliable an indicator they are.