7 clubs too big for the EFL Championship right now named and ranked by AI | OneFootball

We asked ChatGPT to list which second-tier sides are actually above their current level.

There are a lot of properly big clubs who are no longer playing at the top level of English football.

The rise of traditionally lower-level clubs up to the pinnacle of the sport in this country, your Brighton's, Brentford's and Bournemouth's etc, has a natural displacement effect on those who were in and around the Premier League.

If clubs like the aforementioned trio are going up, someone has to come back down to balance the numbers, and a lot of them have ended up in the Championship.

In the 2024/25 campaign, more than half of the clubs in the division averaged higher than a 20,000-person attendance for the season. So there are a lot of big teams in the division, some that would certainly argue that they, by size, deserve to be in the top flight.

Football League World has asked the AI supercomputer ChatGPT to rank the seven clubs that are "too big" to be in the Championship. It made its judgment based on "a mix of history, fanbase size, stadium capacity, financial power, and past success." This is what it came up with.

The former FA Cup and EFL Trophy winners spent a long time away from the second tier following their early 2010s slide down the English footballing pyramid. It took Portsmouth almost a dozen years to get back up to the Championship after they slipped all the way down to League Two.

Even in the fourth tier, they were regularly bringing in upwards of 15,000 fans to Fratton Park, showing just how large an entity they were even at the lowest level of the Football League.

6 Blackburn Rovers

Blackburn are the only team on this list who have won the Premier League. Other teams have been crowned as champions of the old First Division, as it was known before its rebrand in 1992, but Rovers hold the claim of being one of only seven clubs to have ever lifted that trophy.

Financial power, enough to bring in the likes of the Premier League's all-time top goalscorer, Alan Shearer, was what drove them to that 1994/95 victory, one season on from being the runners-up to Manchester United.

The muscles that they flexed in the mid 90s are looking a bit weaker in the modern day, but there is plenty of history to back up ChatGPT's selection of them in this list.

A bit like Brighton, although very different on the pitch to the Seagulls, Stoke spent an extended period of their recent history outside of the Championship and in the Premier League. Between 2008 and 2018, the Potters were a mainstay of the top-flight. They finished ninth in the division for three campaigns on the trot from 2013 to 2016.

In today's game, they aren't at the same competitive level, but their financial state is just as strong. Their owners, the Coates family, are the second-wealthiest in the Championship, with an estimated net worth of £7.5 billion.

One or two things here or there that could have gone Coventry's way in recent seasons would've seen them jump out of the second tier and back up to the pinnacle of English football, where they once lived for 34 years from 1967 to 2001.

An FA Cup-winning club, the Sky Blues have slowly retrieved some of their previously held stature in the game over recent seasons thanks to their performances. It doesn't feel like it'll be long before they finally get over the hump and get back to the Premier League.

Another first division regular of the 2010s, West Brom were one of the founding members of the football league. They have largely floated between the top two leagues in their history, all the while staying at their home of The Hawthons, where they have been since 1900.

From the beginning of the 1950s all the way until the mid-1980s, the Baggies were a consistent presence in the top-flight, picking up two league titles along the way and notching themselves a few UEFA Cup runs too.

In the early days of the Premier League, Boro were a staple of the division, even though they were relegated in the very first iteration of it. Up until the 2009/10 season, the Teessiders only spent three terms away from England's highest level of football, thus proving their size and historic standing in the country.

On top of that, Boro are UEFA Cup finalists. They came short against Sevilla in the 2006 final in Eindhoven, but that is the closest that any team on this list has come to winning a European trophy this century.

It has been said time and time again that, despite the recent controversies and uncertainties that have surrounded Hillsborough, Sheffield Wednesday are a massive club in this country. That iconic stadium is filled by equally supportive and vocal fans who have packed the place out for years on end.

Founded in 1867, the Owls, who got their name from previously only playing on the fourth day of the week, were one of the pillars of the early days of the sport's competitive era.

They have accolades like most others in the Championship simply don't. Four top-flight titles (but none since 1930), five second division titles, three FA Cups, a Football League Cup and a Charity Shield lie in the trophy cabinet of the blue half of the Steel City.

Sure, things of late have been far from brilliant for Wednesday, but make no mistake about it: they are a traditional heavyweight of football in England.