Crafting an FM26 team using real-life stats: Championship

Huw Davies digs into this season's numbers to find the players who can boost your Fantasy Football squad and give your Football Manager save a headstart

Huw Davies

It’s here: the third and final instalment in our stat-gazing trilogy, and as we all know from cinema, that means this is the best one. The Dark Knight Rises, The World’s End, The Godfather: Part III…

Hmm.

Well, I’ll try to buck that trend and end our triptych on a high. You can read the previous deep dives into League One and League Two for differently worded explanations, but the overall plan is to highlight the Championship player(s) best suited to each position on a football pitch and a Football Manager save, by looking at real-world statistics from the 2025/26 season so far. Poacher, playmaker, soldier, spy – I’ll pick out the stars in each role.

This is not a Championship Team of the Season. There’s no attempt at tactical cohesion, and the format won’t be kind to quality all-rounders. These are simply the statistical stand-outs.

Enjoy.

Sources used: Opta Analyst, Wyscout, FotMob, fbref

Let’s strip this down to pure shot-stopping, not distribution, which can be nebulous and hard to analyse statistically in keepers.

The 2024/25 campaign was remarkable in that three or four goalkeepers had genuinely brilliant seasons, producing some of the best shot-stopping form we’ve seen in the 20-odd years of the rebranded Championship. Although Oxford’s Jamie Cumming also deserved more credit, preventing 11.2 goals based on fbref post-shot xG statistics, the trio on everyone’s lips were James Trafford, Michael Cooper and Viktor Johansson. It’s fascinating to see what’s happened to them in just a few months since then.

Trafford earned a transfer from Burnley to Manchester City, and in the short term, at least, it’s been a disaster for his career. Then 22, he endured a difficult but hardly disgraceful start (three non-penalty goals conceded in three games from over five xG on target), only to receive inflated press attention due to a high-profile Icarus concession and City losing back-to-back, whereupon they signed a generational great in Gianluigi Donnarumma to take his place. Now, not only is Trafford reduced to being a cup keeper for Pep Guardiola, but he’s lost his place in the England squad altogether when a good Premier League season could’ve seen him pushing to be No.1 at the World Cup.

Meanwhile, Cooper stayed with Sheffield United having been named their Player of the Year in his first season at the club. But in 2025/26 he’s posting the worst shot-stopping stats in the entire division, of anyone to have played 5+ matches.

Johansson, on the other glove… there’s just no stopping the Viking. Look at that save percentage. Look at that rate of goal prevention. Look at that beard. At least three struggling Premier League clubs could do with him in their relegation battle.

Delving into defenders’ data from Leagues One and Two revealed that ball-carrying is just as impactful as ball-playing, so the relevant statistics for this role are progressive passing and progressive dribbling distance.

Now, is it cheating to name Luke Ayling the Championship’s best ball-playing defender? I don’t think so. It’s true that the 34-year-old was always a full-back before this season, and that sometimes playing on the right of a back three in 2025/26 has given him more dribbling opportunities and therefore an advantage over some CBs we’re considering. However, he is nonetheless reinventing himself as a central defender at Middlesbrough, including in a back four.

It’s hard to argue with the numbers, at any rate (specifically, per 90). His divisional, positional ranking for progressive pass attempts: 1st, averaging 13. Progressive pass accuracy: 1st, completing 81% of them. Progressive ball-carrying distance, per game: 2nd, behind Christoph Klarer at Birmingham. The answer’s Ayling, basically.

Also worthy of mention: the Leicester pair of Wout Faes and Jannik Vestergaard, the Swansea pair of Ben Cabango and Cameron Burgess, and Ipswich defender Dara O’Shea. You’ll have noticed a pattern: they, like Klarer, all play for clubs who have a lot of possession. One exception is Watford’s Manchester City loanee, Max Alleyne, though he hasn’t held down a starting berth.

Vestergaard unsurprisingly scores highly in the old ‘head it, kick it, get in the way’ attributes of defending. I’ve chosen to include clearances and aerial success rate – a candidate has to win two-thirds of his headers, minimum, because come on – as well as blocks, albeit to a lesser extent. Blocking a shot isn’t as common as contesting a headed battle nor making a clearance, so small differences in the stats could be a bit noisy.