The 2026-2027 football season is upon us. We’re counting down the clubs based on their scores on the Minnows Belief Index, starting with Tier 4, the bottom of the EFL Championship.
What connects Watford, Blackburn, Cardiff City, Charlton and Preston North End is not they they are “bad.” Two of them will probably finish mid-table, and one of them was promoted three months ago. In the Championship, anything can happen.
The common thread of these teams is that their off-pitch situations have become so dire, it’s making it difficult to see what is happening on it. The question for this group is a simple one: what does it mean when belief in a club detaches from the football on the pitch almost entirely, and begins to take up all the oxygen in the room?
Watford
Belief Score: −29.7 (Crisis) | Manager: Alessio Dionisi | Players to watch: Imran Louza, Nestory Irankunda
One burning question
Would relegation (leading to a complete ownership reset, a la Leicester, Sheffield Wednesday) actually be a mercy?
First, some context…
Watford are a second division club with first division ambitions, which describes most of their history and almost all of their present. The town itself is one of the more prosperous parts of England, sitting comfortably in the London commuter belt. This is not a story of a hard-hit town going through it. It is a story of a relationship that has gone toxic.
That relationship is with Gino Pozzo, who inherited the family’s football holdings from his father Giampaolo in 2012: Udinese, Watford, and for a time Granada in Spain. The multi-club structure is the point rather than an accident of it, and Watford supporters have spent a decade watching decisions made about their club that appear to be made for someone else’s benefit. Three managers went last season. There is no visible long-term strategy. There is almost total silence from the top. Fan surveys have put Pozzo’s disapproval rating in the region of ninety per cent, which is less an opinion poll than a verdict.
Vibe check: Falling, rapidly
The strangest part about Watford’s position at the bottom of the Belief Index is that they are not in administration. There’s no winding-up petition, no fire sale, no existential threat of the kind that has hollowed out so many other clubs at this level.
In fact, it’s almost the opposite, that the Pozzo’s intractability seems to be even more depressing for supporters, who have been worn down by continuation, like a smooth skipping stone in a stream. Supporters have begun to talk openly about whether an ending, any ending, would be preferable to another year of this. Much like the question people ask about a bad relationship or a failing business, Watford fans want to know: is it better for this to end badly, or keep going?
On the pitch
Last season was a parade of formations, a lot of shooting and not much defending, and no discernible identity from one month to the next. The club has appointed new manager Alessandro Dionisi to fix all of this, with the help of a handful of Udinese transfers (so far).
One BBC reader’s assessment of the appointment has stuck, because it is difficult to improve on: “Ticks every Watford box: no EFL experience, does not speak English, mediocre career, largely unknown, recently sacked for poor results in a poor league in a foreign country.” Yikes. Imran Louza remains a genuinely good footballer if he isn’t transferred by the end of August. Same for Nestory Irankunda, who is the kind of signing that suggests someone in the building still has an eye for talent.
Prediction
Bookmakers have them finishing in 15th. I’m picking them to finish in 22nd place, relegated, and perhaps, on their way to peace at last.
Blackburn Rovers
Belief Score: −24.3 | Manager: Tony Mowbray | Players to watch: Yuki Ohashi, Sean McLoughlin, Todd Cantwell
One burning question
Is Tony Mowbray here to fix Blackburn, or to be in the building when it finally goes?
First, some context…
Plenty of clubs in this division won something a long time ago. Only Blackburn won it all, not 75 or 100 years ago, but in 1995, in living memory. A generation grew up watching Alan Shearer and filing Rovers alongside Manchester United without a second thought, and that includes people who were watching from the other side of the world. The title is not a plaque on a wall. It is a memory with faces attached.
Which is why the decline reads as a fall rather than a settling. The distance between where Blackburn were and where Blackburn are is measured in three decades, not a century, and everyone involved can still picture the top of the mountain.
The last couple of decades have been a disaster. Venky’s ownership is loathed. The Rao family have not attended a match in over a decade. Managers have come through at a rate that suggests either no plan or a plan nobody has thought to share. The handling of the John Eustace situation two season ago, where Eustace left the club while it was sitting in fifth spot and pushing for promotion, to go to Derby that was battling to stay up, is worth sitting with for a minute, because it was a small window onto how the club conducts itself, and how it’s seen and experienced from the inside.
Vibe check: Rock bottom
The shame of it is that this is a club and a place you would love to have a reason to root for. A small Lancashire town with real economic hardship around it, Ewood Park, Jack Walker’s money spent locally and spent on the thing the town cared about. All of the raw material for a good story is present.
None of it is currently in use. Fan responses to the Mowbray appointment ranged from relief to lukewarm to insipid. The general vibe is that it is a fairly underwhelming appointment that might serve to keep them up, but won’t do much else. But what else can you expect with a club where ownership has shown such a consistent lack of interest for so long?
On the pitch
Blackburn couldn’t convert anything last season, posting the lowest shots-on-target percentage in the Championship at 27.6 per cent. It puts a lot of weight on Yuki Ohashi, who has to be the focal point up front because, well, there’s no obvious second option if the goals do not come from him. Todd Cantwell is gifted and can show real talent on the right day. Behind them, Sean McLoughlin is the reason the back line held together at all last season, and it feels like Mowbray will lean on him to grind out results.
So unlike the club’s existential condition, the football question for Blackburn may be narrower than it looks. They don’t need a new on-pitch philosophy or identity; they need someone to convert chances, and the need it early.
Prediction
Bookmakers have Blackburn finishing in 22nd place and relegated. I’m even less of a believer, and have them finishing last, in 24th place.
Cardiff City
Belief Score: −17.9 | Manager: Brian Barry-Murphy | Players to watch: Perry Ng, Rubin Colwill, Chris Willock
One burning question
Why does a newly promoted side with a hot shot young manager still have such a low score?
First, some context…
On the face of it Cardiff have done the thing you are “supposed” to do. They went down, they reset, they came back up, and they arrive with momentum and a manager a lot of people rate. It is genuinely unusual for a promoted club to carry this little belief, and when a number refuses to move in the face of good news, the number is telling you the good news is not the operative fact.
Here it comes down to a single source: Vincent Tan. From the minute he arrived and tried to rebrand the club, through to the relentless managerial churn, a persistent reluctance to appoint a sporting director and hold to a direction—fans are still feeling the pain and not quite ready to forgive. Sixteen years is a long time. If an owner has not converted that much longevity into sustained success, perception hardens into reality, and belief prices it accordingly.
What do they have going for them? They are Welsh. They remain the only club to have taken the FA Cup out of England, in 1927, a fact that has aged into something close to folklore. There is also the emerging question of whether a genuine rivalry with Wrexham is possible, which would be good for both of them and very good for everyone watching.
Vibe check: Flat, but ready to rise
A strong opening month with Barry-Murphy’s ideas visible in results and this club goes up quickly, because the belief is not absent so much as withheld pending evidence. The flipside is exactly as steep, and withheld belief tends to sour rather than simply stay withheld. If Barry-Murphy is gone by Christmas, we could be in for a world of pain.
On the pitch
The encouraging part of last season, with the League One caveat applied throughout, is that they found multiple scorers and multiple ways to score. Yousef Salech, the twenty-three-year-old Danish centre-forward, took fourteen league goals off a division-leading expected goals figure of 18.27, which suggests the return was earned rather than borrowed. Behind him there was a good loan season from Omari Kellyman, whose return from Chelsea is not yet settled, and enough remaining quality to suggest the goals were a system rather than one man. The only question is what of it all survives the step up.
Prediction
Bookmakers have them staying up but near the bottom, in 18th. I have them in 15th, with the potential for more.
Charlton Athletic
Belief Score: −13.4 | Manager: Nathan Jones | Players to watch: Lloyd Jones, Conor Coventry
One burning question
With the current (good) owners putting the club up for sale, and the ground still belonging to our toxic ex…is anyone every going to love me?
First, some context…
Charlton spent the early part of this century looking like a club that belonged in the top flight. Everything since has been measured against that, that sense of belonging, of having made it, including the disastrous ownership of the 2010s and the story the club has been telling itself lately of recovery, and rebirth.
Now, all that good progress is potentially up in smoke, and Charlton is for sale.
The immediate problem is that, for fans, this looks like the people on the inside don’t truly believe. If this is fundamentally a club that belongs in the Premier League, that has a loyal fanbase in London, then why jump out now? What do they know that we don’t?
Of course, the genuine question is less emotionally charged than that, and it’s this: is this a sale that’s chaotic and damaging, or actually additive to the overall mission. Current owners GFP paid somewhere in the range of fifteen million pounds for the club in 2023, to buy it from disastrous former owner Thomas Sandgaard. They god the club promoted, got the women’s side into the WSL, and are now selling into a rising market with a prospectus pitching the club as the last upside footballing opportunity in London.
That is not a distress sale. It is a successful exit. Now, Whether that distinction survives contact with a fanbase that has been through Roland Duchâtelet and Thomas Sandgaard is another matter, because this would be the fifth ownership group in six years. There is a limit to how many times you can ask people to start believing again from scratch.
There is also the small matter of the ground. The Valley is owned by Duchâtelet, on a lease running to 2040, which is a serious footnote to any story about this club belonging to its supporters.
What the fanbase expects
To be on the path to recovery, and no more than that. The road has been long and winding and there have been enough scares along it that nobody is asking for the Premier League. They are asking for the direction of travel to hold.
Vibe check: Stable, for now
Charlton fans expect to be on the road to recovery, and they can kind of believe in that, so long as things are not derailed by the club sale. The road has been long and winding, and there have been enough scares along the way that nobody is demanding the Premier League next year. They’re just asking for things to continue moving in an upward trajectory.
One big part of the stable vibe is manager Nathan Jones, who is on a long-term deal, which means there is an identity here and an intention to stick with it. The open question is whether it is the right one. Jones was outstanding at Luton and a nightmare at Southampton and Stoke, and the pragmatism that made him work at one level has not always travelled. He is a grinder, and grinders can hold a season together. Whether he is operating at his ceiling in this division is the thing to watch.
On the pitch
Are they going to attack? At all? They did not score enough last season, and the question is how far staying compact and clinging on can take a squad before the margin runs out.
The honest answer is that it can take you further than people think, and that is exactly the trap. Low-block football banks points early and hides a thin squad for months, right up until the day it stops working, at which point there is no second plan and very little time to build one. Nathan Jones knows this better than most, because he has been on both sides of it.
Lloyd Jones and Conor Coventry are the right players for the version of Charlton that grinds out a 1-0 and goes home happy, and there is real value in a team that is difficult to beat when the alternative at this level is being pleasant and going down. But defensive competence is a floor, not a direction. Somebody has to score, and the recruitment this summer will tell you whether the club believes that too, or whether the plan is genuinely to survive on clean sheets and hope.
Prediction
Bookmakers have them just staying up, in 20th. I have them in 23rd, and relegated.
Preston North End
Belief Score: −11.3 | Manager: Paul Heckingbottom | Player to watch: Ben Whiteman, Alfie Devine, Milutin Osmajic
One burning question
Can a club be crushed by both expectation and improbability at the same time?
First, some context…
Preston are the original Invincibles, winners of the inaugural Football League in 1888–89 without losing a match, a founding story no other club in world football can match. Deepdale is, by the club’s own account, the oldest continuously used football ground anywhere. The fun ended in 1961, their last season in the top flight, and the sixty-five years since have produced eleven consecutive Championship seasons, twelve including this one, a highest finish of seventh back in 2017–18, and nothing better.
That gap, between the founding myth and the six-decade stall, is the whole story. Most clubs in this tier lean one way: either weighed down by what they are supposed to be, or living off the improbability of where they are today. Preston carry both at full weight, and the two do not cancel out. They compound. A record like theirs sits heavily against an inherited expectation that, for Preston specifically, reaches back further and burns brighter than almost anywhere else in England, and it is doing so in a town that carries the fourth-highest regional hardship score in the division, hemmed in by Blackpool, Liverpool and Manchester and competing for attention against three much larger gravitational pulls. The negativity in the score, then, is not a mood. It is a performance reading.
Vibe check: Flat, but in a kind of good way
Heckingbottom has been in post since 2024. The Hemmings family have owned the club since 2010. By the standards of this tier that is a foundation, and it is worth saying that stability of this kind is not nothing. The complication is that the Hemmings family have said they want to sell, which turns steadiness into a holding pattern with an unknown ending. The sale doesn’t feel as imminent as Charlton, but it’s in the back of the mind regardless.
On the pitch
The immediate question is whether they can avoid a repeat of last season’s collapse. Alfie Devine is back and this time permanently, which is a good move for a side that needs creativity. Ben Whiteman is gone to Wrexham, an acrimonious spat with Heckingbottom on his way out the door. The shape is a back three, and Thierry Small is central to how it works, having posted one of the highest successful cross rates in the entire division last season, which is precisely the supply line Heckingbottom wants. The unsolved position is centre-forward, where Milutin Osmajić was strong in limited minutes without ever nailing it down.
Where they finish
Bookmakers have them in 23rd and going down; I am a little more optimistic of Heckingbottom and the strategy, and have them in 18th.
QPR
Belief Score: −11.1 | Manager: Julien Stéphan | Players to watch: Ilias Chair, Jimmy Dunne, Richard Kone
One burning question
Is this stability, or is this stasis?
First, some context…
QPR occupy a genuinely unique position: a club with underdog instincts located in the middle of West London, with Chelsea, Fulham and Brentford all nearby and all currently doing better. Hammersmith and Fulham is wealthy on aggregate, but QPR’s traditional support comes from the working-class pockets inside it, and the club has always felt smaller than its address.
Loftus Road is the third-smallest ground in the division, with houses backing onto the stands and sightlines that will occasionally put a structural post between you and the football. It is a small club in a big city, and it feels like one.
Of course, QPR’s distinctive place in English football belongs to the 1970s and 1980s: the flair club, Rodney Marsh and Stan Bowles and Gerry Francis, the blue and white hoops, the compact intensity of Loftus Road. The club has been in the top flight within the last twenty years and it did not go well.
We are now embarking on an eleventh consecutive Championship season, and across that span QPR have not finished higher than ninth. There is no recent hope to draw on, and that is what makes the score lag behind what the table would suggest. But maybe the hope is in the fact that they’ve been steady these part eleven season; maybe this is their home, their peak habitat, and so long as they put a product on the pitch that supporters can get behind, this is in fact a fine place to be.
Vibe check: “Mid”
Institutional trust here is mildly negative despite ownership being stable, and the reason is that the stability is quiet. Disciplined rather than splashy, which in this division is closer to a blessing than a complaint, but quiet ownership does not generate belief on its own. There was some strangeness around the end of Martí Cifuentes, placed on gardening leave. And Stéphan remains something of an unknown quantity: will he stay, will the French leagues call him back. And is this actually the squad he wants?
The falling risk lives in the trust score, and it has a name. Stéphan is the reason the fan verdict outran the table, and re-signing him in the face of Ligue 1 interest is a point in the club’s favour. But his record elsewhere follows a familiar pattern of a strong first season followed by decline, and QPR have just banked the strong first season. If the pattern holds, the same volatility that produced both a 6-1 and a 0-5 last year starts tipping towards the wrong end, and −11.1 drifts with it.
The rising case is younger and quieter. Kolli at twenty, Kieran Morgan and Daniel Bennie at nineteen, Koné at twenty-two, Mbengue at twenty-three: a core to build around, a clear identity, honest football, and a manager the supporters still trust.
On the pitch
Can they stay healthy, and can Stéphan move the needle? Last season came in three acts, bad then very good then merely fine, which was a near-exact echo of the season before it. Stéphan’s approach is to defend deep and counter fast. Jimmy Dunne is a genuine pleasure to watch defend. Ilias Chair is a genuine pleasure to watch play, on the occasions last season when he did. Richard Koné will need to score more up front, and may do just that.
Where they finish
Bookmakers are leaning towards more of the same, and have them in 17th. I have them slightly higher, in 14th.
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