What does a supercomputer say about QPR’s chances?

The football season gets under way again on Saturday – or at least it does if your team isn’t in the Premier League, which starts a week later. My beloved Queens Park Rangers are off to Vicarage Road to take on Watford and I’ll be there with my three sons to cheer them on. We ‘did the double’ over the Hornets last season – the only team we beat home and away – so there’s a smidgen of hope. But there are also plenty of reasons to be pessimistic, and not just about the opening game.

According to Opta, a British sports analytics company, QPR are going to finish dead last in the Championship. It got a supercomputer to run 10,000 simulations of how the season is likely to play out and 23 out of the 24 teams won the title at least once, with the only exception being the Super Hoops. Our chances of coming last according to the computer are 31.6 per cent, higher than any other team, and our chances of finishing in the bottom three, which means relegation to League One, are 62 per cent.

The bookies concur, with William Hill putting the odds of QPR being relegated at 7/2, and only two teams – Rotherham and Plymouth Argyle – being given a worse chance. The pundits, whether amateurs on YouTube or professionals on Sky Sports, are equally gloomy. I haven’t aggregated all their predictions, but my impression is that Rangers finish in the bottom three more often than any other team. I’m tempted to put a bet on them going down myself.

Why such low expectations? First of all, we almost got relegated last season. After a strong start in which we were briefly top of the league, we lost our manager to a more glamorous club (Glasgow Rangers), sacked his replacement after 12 games, and then brought in Gareth Ainsworth, the 49-year-old manager of Wycombe Wanderers, who looks like the lead singer of a 1970s rock band.