Graphic: For competition, Coca-Cola Championship is the real thing

Want to know how much better Manchester United are compared with Stoke City? It’s easy. All you need to know is that Y equals 131.79 multiplied by X to the power of minus 0.5343. Couldn’t be simpler.

Don’t blame me if you are scratching your head. Blame Owen Coyle, the manager of Burnley. He started it. Coyle argued that the Coca-Cola Championship is the most competitive league in Europe. This sort of statement triggered the alarm bell at the Fink Tank lab, which goes off either when one of the statisticians escapes or when someone in the football world makes a contentious statement that can be quantified.

Dr Henry Stott, Dr Ian Graham and Dr Mark Latham cut the wire on the alarm and set to work.

For each club in the top two divisions in England, France, Spain, Italy and Germany, the Fink Tank established a figure for their strength based on a weighted model of the past two seasons of goals scored and conceded. They were then able to rank the clubs.

The next step is to measure how rapidly the strength of the clubs declines as one goes down the rankings. That is where all that Y and X and “to the power of” stuff comes into it. Sparing you the finer details of the maths, calculating this equation allows us to compare the competitiveness of the various leagues. If all the clubs are of roughly equal strength, the league is very competitive and the quality declines slowly as you go through the rankings. If some big clubs are much better then the league will be less competitive and strength will fall off pretty quickly. I had better cut to the chase. Coyle will be reading this and will be anxious to know if he is right. Yes, Owen (if I may), you are right. The Championship is the most competitive. Only the Spanish second division comes close.

Now look at the graphic. It gives the chances of different clubs finishing in different positions in the Championship. From it you can see why Coyle made his comment. Burnley’s chances are spread evenly across the league places. What that means is that, for a club of their ability, there is so little difference in quality between teams that luck and tiny fluctuations in performance could land them almost anywhere.

Some people crave this unpredictability, claiming that it makes the game exciting. But in the United States, where they regulate wages and so forth to achieve such evenness, there are critics who think that it is boring, calling it predictably unpredictable because anyone can finish anywhere.

Not everyone is in the same boat as Burnley, however. Some are more equal than others. Reading have more chance of finishing top [45 per cent] than any Barclays Premier League team have of title success. This is not because Reading’s ranking is a hangover from last season. They are doing five points better than we expected. Their chance of promotion is a remarkable 71 per cent.

The team having the best start to the season are Wolverhampton Wanderers, who have exceeded expectations by more than 15 points. And Birmingham City have performed eight points better than expected. Wolves have a 44 per cent chance of going up automatically and Birmingham a 55 per cent chance.

These three clubs – Birmingham, Wolves and Reading – dominate the promotion race. The only other club with a more than 5 per cent chance of going up automatically is Charlton Athletic. Their chance? Six per cent.

The most competitive league in Europe? It may not feel like it to some.