Let me tell you three things about Newcastle United. First, they are only the eighth best team in the Coca-Cola Championship. Second, if they were in the Barclays Premier League, we would not expect them to go down. And third, we regard them as favourites to be promoted.

How can all these things be true? I’ll explain.

The Fink Tank Predictor is a computer model of English football, built by Dr Henry Stott, Dr Ian Graham and Dr Mark Latham. It analyses the past two seasons of goals and shots on goal and weights the results so that the more recent results count the most.

The model is designed to help us to provide the probability of different outcomes when teams meet. And armed with this we can simulate an entire league season over and over again. Say, just as a made-up example, that in 10,000 simulations, Ipswich Town came bottom of their division 5,000 times, their chance of finishing bottom would be 50 per cent.

One of the basic building blocks of the model is a team ranking, based on their strength in defence and attack as revealed by their weighted goals and shots. The ranking is topped by the strongest team, Chelsea at present, and they are given the index number of 100. The strength of the remaining 91 teams can then be expressed as a percentage of this number. Thus Manchester United are 94 per cent of Chelsea at the moment.

You will be wondering how all the league teams can be in one table, without division markers. This is done simply by looking at cup games and at promoted and relegated teams to weight matches played in each division. Thus the result of a Fulham v Hull City game can be compared with the outcome of a match between Leicester City and Nottingham Forest.

When you have the 92 teams’ rankings, you see that there is quite an overlap between divisions. Thus West Bromwich Albion are the best team in the Championship and, at 29 per cent of Chelsea, they rank above eight Premier League sides.

Newcastle are the eighth best team in the Championship, although they are rising. They are 24 per cent as good as Chelsea, the drop in standards in the Championship being very slow in a very competitive division.

But 24 per cent as good as Chelsea puts them above Birmingham City, Burnley, Stoke City and Hull.

How, though, can they be favourites to be promoted? Easily. Their early results have been spectacular, scoring 7.6 points more than the model expected. Blackpool are 5.9 points up on the model. By contrast, Reading are doing particularly poorly (11.6 points fewer than expected), as, it will come as no surprise to know, are Ipswich (13 points fewer than expected).

Doing the simulations now adds the points they have scored so far into the calculations. It boosts Newcastle strongly because the division is so close.

The grid published below shows the percentage chance of where Championship teams could finish in any position. With a team of a given class, there will be a range of possible finishing positions. There will be variations in a team performance that are down to luck and there will be variation in the performance of all the other sides.

Newcastle fans should not get too excited because there is a 40 per cent chance that they won’t gain automatic promotion. On the other hand, there is about a 90 per cent chance that they will finish at least in the play-off places.

And once they are back in the Premier League, there is every chance of staying there.