Data experts predict Championship matchday four results for Preston, Sheffield Wednesday, Sunderland, Swansea City & rivals

The 2023/24 Sky Bet Championship season enters its fourth match-day, as the games continue to come thick and fast ahead of the first international break of the season.

This is the penultimate weekend of fixtures, before teams put a pause on their season to go away on international duty. It’s also the last round of league fixtures before the end of the summer transfer window. Carabao Cup fixtures are to come next Tuesday and Wednesday but this could potentially be the last league fixture that some players feature in with a late flurry of transfer business expected.

Hull City vs Bristol City at the MKM Stadium is what kicks off the action this weekend in English football’s second tier as Liam Rosenior faces his former side, and will be hoping to get a result over his former boss Nigel Pearson. Watford vs Blackburn Rovers is the televised fixture, and that will take place on Sunday, 27 Aug with a 12.00 pm kick-off.

As for Preston, they face Welsh side Swansea City at Deepdale, and are hoping to continue their unbeaten run, having defeated Sheffield Wednesday and Sunderland, and earning a draw against Bristol City on the opening day.

We’ve been able to have a look at each of this weekend’s fixtures in detail – thanks to help from the data expert simulations at BetVictor.

The data expert model adopts the Monte Carlo method, at its heart is a Python-based match simulator that uses two Poisson distributions – one for the home team and one for the away team – to anticipate the number of goals each team could score in a match.

A Poisson distribution is a powerful mathematical concept that predicts the probability of a given number of events (in this case, goals) happening in a fixed interval of time. The key input to a Poisson distribution is the ‘lambda’ (λ) value, which represents the average rate of an event’s occurrence.