The 8 smallest clubs in the EFL Championship named and ranked by AI | OneFootball

ChatGPT has put forward some controversial picks for this list.

The Championship is a lovely melting pot of teams of all different shapes and sizes, styles and attributes. That's what makes it arguably the most entertaining and unpredictable league in the world.

England's second tier of football has, for a long period, been a place where all different kinds of clubs have come up against one another. Felled giants from the Premier League/First Division have dropped down a level and been met by teams who are on the rise up the country's pyramid, but ones that you maybe wouldn't expect to be based on certain factors.

It's not exact what determines a small club and a big club in football. Its definition can morph into different shapes and sizes depending on who is putting the argument forward.

Football League World decided to ask arguably the most neutral party possible, ChatGPT, to answer a question that gets debated by supporters of second-tier clubs every season: who are the smallest teams in the Championship?

Basing its answers on things like stadium size and average attendances, this is what the AI software had to say.

8 Watford

Vicarage Road was one of the homes of Premier League football for a while. From the start of the 2015/16 campaign to the end of 2021/22, there was only one season in which the Hornets weren't playing against the best that English football has to offer.

Despite their consistent status at the level, Watford never threatened to do much in the top flight, and it's been a pretty similar story since their last relegation in 2022.

They aren't a club with a particularly full trophy case, although they do have a number of runners-up medals to their name, and they don't attract a gaudy number of supporters to their Hertfordshire home.

7 Preston North End

An infamously middling Championship club in recent times, Preston have been in the division for a decade straight now, with their lowest finish coming last season when they just about avoided relegation to League One.

The team that heralded the original invincibles of English football have been put in seventh by AI because of the maximum capacity of its stadium - Deepdale - and, therefore, how many people attend their matches. In the 2024/25 season, the Lilywhites were watched by an average of just over 16,500 people per home game.

Despite being smack bang in the middle of the league's average attendances from last term, Pompey haven't been looked on too favourably by ChatGPT. It has said that they are the sixth-smallest team in the Championship.

Portsmouth only recently returned to the second tier after many years away from the upper echelons of English football. They sank right down to the foot of the EFl before enduring a slow climb back up to this point.

Hopes are high for the south coast club about what could be to come, but they aren't getting in over their heads about their chances of any imminent major success.

5 Swansea City

Another former Premier League side, Swansea aren't one that maximises the number of people its home can hold. They usually fill just shy of three-quarters of their ground - the Swansea.com Stadium - every other week, which isn't a bad amount on average across the EFL, but it's also not a fantastic figure compared to their league rivals.

This is one of the AI picks that may come to surprise people. Small is not an adjective that first comes to mind when you think of Millwall; hostility and roughness would probably be up there instead.

That said, some facts can't be denied. Despite The Den's sometimes overawing presence, there is a hard cap of just more than 20,000 on how many people can fit inside of it, which, to ChatGPT, is a detrimental factor to the size of the club.

3 Queens Park Rangers

Similarly to Millwall, QPR are limited on the number of supporters that can watch their home matches live because of their stadium's location. Loftus Road is located right in the heart of West London, not allowing much extra room for outward expansion to allow more people to come and watch games there.

They had the fifth-lowest average attendance of any Championship club last time out (15,826), but that is upwards of 85 per cent of its capacity, which isn't bad going.

2 Oxford United

Oxford's promotion to the Championship at the end of the 2023/24 campaign was their first venture into the English second division since the first full season of the new millennium, so it's no wonder that their attendances rank low among their competitors.

The Kassam Stadium is a more than functional stadium, but it doesn't have many of the bells and whistles that other grounds in the tier too. It played host to the second-smallest average attendance in the Championship in the previous campaign at just 11,352.

Their global fanbase has expanded in a way that no other EFL side has since the Covid-19 pandemic, which is a brilliant achievement given that Wrexham began the decade in the National League and in a pretty poor state.

Their meteoric, triple-promotion rise up the pyramid of English football hadn't been achieved before, but their presence in the Championship is also breaking new ground for the Red Dragons. They hadn't been in the second division since it was rebranded to the Championship in 2004.

Within the UK, Wrexham are still a small club. They have the smallest capacity ground of any of the teams that they're up against next season at 13,341. Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, the Hollywood pairing responsible for the club's rise, are taking steps to expand this, but, as things stand, they remain a small club, and that is reflected by ChatGPT's rankings.