GoalSoon · 31 July 2026
Eight clubs won automatic promotion for 2026/27. We track players who make exactly that move, and the step into the Premier League is more than twice as expensive as any other step in the pyramid.
The 2025/26 season settled the automatic places. Coventry took the Championship with 95 points and Ipswich went with them on 84. Lincoln won League One on 103 and Cardiff followed on 91. Bromley, Milton Keynes Dons and Cambridge came out of League Two on 87, 86 and 82. York won the National League with 108 points and 114 goals.
Every one of those squads is about to meet better opponents. We can put a number on how much better, because we track players who make exactly that move.
For every player who changed division and played at least 900 minutes on both sides of the move, we compare his rating percentile against others in his own position, before and after. That controls for the thing that ruins most such comparisons: a goalkeeper and a striker are never scored on the same axis, and a player is only ever measured against his peers.
| Move | Players | Percentile change | t |
|---|---|---|---|
| Championship → Premier League | 28 | −29.8 pp | −6.50 |
| League One → Championship | 93 | −13.6 pp | −4.80 |
| League Two → League One | 107 | −10.9 pp | −4.40 |
| Championship → League One (down) | 63 | +27.0 pp | +8.13 |
Read the first row slowly. A player sitting at the 70th percentile of Championship centre-backs arrives in the Premier League at about the 40th — the same player, the same season, a different division. That is not a slump or a bad summer. It is the price of the room he walked into.
The other rows say the pyramid is not evenly spaced. League One to the Championship costs 13.6 points, League Two to League One 10.9. The last step is more than twice as expensive as any other, which matches what we see when we rate the divisions themselves from the same transfer data: Premier League +23.8, Championship 0, League One −12.8, League Two −19.3. The gap between the top two divisions is wider than the gap between the next three combined.
The fourth row is the one people forget. Dropping from the Championship to League One is worth +27.0 percentile points, nearly the mirror of the climb the other way, and on 63 players with a t-statistic of +8.13 it is the most solid number in the table.
Which is worth remembering when a relegated squad is described as demoralised. Most of those players are about to look considerably better, and the ones who do not are the story.
Coventry scored 97 goals winning the Championship, more than anyone. Haji Wright got 17 of them, third-highest in the division. Ipswich go up behind them with Jack Clarke on 15 goals and six assists. Both are being asked to make the single most punishing move in English football, and the honest expectation is not that they keep scoring at that rate — it is that they arrive around thirty percentile points lower and are judged on what remains.
The gentler steps look different. Cardiff's Yousef Salech scored 13 in League One and Lincoln's load was shared — Reeco Hackett-Fairchild and Jack Moylan on 11 each, Robert Street on 10 — which is a squad shape that survives a 13.6-point drop better than one man's season does. Bromley carry Michael Cheek's 15 goals into League One and Cambridge conceded 33, the meanest defence in League Two, which is the asset that usually travels furthest.
Then there is York. O. Pearce scored 34 goals in 3,942 minutes in the National League, part of a 114-goal, 108-point season. That is the largest individual return in this data by some distance. It is also the move we cannot price: our transfer measure does not yet reach below League Two, so anyone telling you what a National League striker becomes in League Two — including us — is guessing.
The full 2025/26 season for all four divisions — every table, every match rated by our model, every player who appeared, and the transfer records these figures come from — is in the free season packs.