Favourites

As ever the clubs that have most recently benefited from Premier League experience and its extravagant largesse are strongly favoured for an immediate return. Many consider Cardiff City, for all last season’s tragicomic travails, the most likely to go up – although several big names have departed, the Bluebirds squad still seems bloated with performers proven at this level, with the likes of Kenwyne Jones, Nicky Maynard and Adam le Fondre all capable of having a considerable impact in attack, and a place in the top six seems the very minimum of their ambitions.

Fulham have added the free-scoring Leeds striker Ross McCormack to their squad for an eyebrow-elevating headline fee of £11m; if Bryan Ruiz can bring his international form to Craven Cottage – he hasn’t done so in three seasons so far, but we live in hope – and Kostas Mitroglou occasionally turns up they would surely have the division’s outstanding attack.

Norwich City represent relative stability both on the pitch and in the boardroom, and despite the sale of Robert Snodgrass to Hull, the loan departure of Ricky van Wolfswinkel and the presumed exit of Leroy Fer the club seem to have the wherewithal to make good on Neil Adams’s promise “to put smiles on faces”.

Derby County’s transformation under Steve McClaren last season – marooned in mid-table when he arrived on 30 September, only Leicester won more points thereafter – was so convincing that they need only maintain the same form this year to grab automatic promotion. May’s Wembley defeat marked precisely 20 years since the Rams last lost a play-off final, and as they will recall from 1994 – when they came ninth the following season – it can be difficult for the beaten side to avoid losing their spark. In those two decades a beaten play-off finalist has claimed automatic promotion the following season only three times, while five – including the last two, Watford and Blackpool – have not even finished in the top half of the table. The nature of Derby’s defeat, having dominated the entire match only for Queens Park Rangers to score in the last minute with their only shot on target, was perhaps uniquely galling, and though they have managed to ward off the vultures keen to scavenge from their squad, with the likes of Chris Martin, Will Hughes and Craig Bryson still at Pride Park for the start of this campaign, they have not strengthened significantly.

Wigan Athletic, who like Derby were transformed following the appointment of a new manager and ultimately disappointed in the play-offs, have seen their player of the year, Jordi Gómez, sold to Sunderland but have made a few canny signings – Andrew Taylor and Don Cowie both arrived from Cardiff on free transfers – and should challenge for automatic promotion if Oriol Riera packed his goalscoring boots when he flew in from Osasuna.

Dark horses

Blackburn Rovers started last season in very ordinary style, but they ended it encouragingly, with six wins and no defeats in their last 12 games. Gary Bowyer’s side are perhaps a little reliant on Jordan Rhodes’s impeccable goalscoring abilities, but should he stay fit they will expect to improve upon eighth spot. They and Reading both maintained their push for the play-off places until the last day of the season, and though the Royals have since lost several players and signed very few, there is potential there for Nigel Adkins to inspire another promotion push.

Watford limped to a massively disappointing 13th place last season, all but unrecognisable from the entertaining attacking force of the previous year, but have since re-signed the 2013 Championship player of the year, Matej Vydra, added some players with greater experience of the division and should the month end without Troy Deeney, their top scorer and talisman, securing a much-touted transfer into the Premier League their sights will be set on significant improvement.

The former Watford stalwart Kenny Jackett led Wolverhampton Wanderers out of League One as champions, and his side could prosper if they can carry that momentum into this season – they will get an early chance to judge their promotion credentials by playing all three of the clubs that came down from the Premier League in their first four league games.

Brighton & Hove Albion have finished the last two seasons in the top six, but logic suggests something of a stumble this time following the departure of several key players and a manager, with an unknown quantity in Sami Hyypia now occupying the dugout at the Amex.

Strugglers

Between the end of November and the end of last season Blackpool played 29 games and won three, losing 20, and since then their squad has been considerably weakened. There really is no rational cause for optimism except for the fact that sport isn’t always an entirely rational business, as they themselves proved when Ian Holloway led a side supposedly destined for relegation to promotion in 2010. That particular kind of lightning seems most unlikely to strike twice here.

Most bookies consider them precisely twice as unlikely to win the division as the next most unlikely team – Millwall, whose stonking four-win, four-draw unbeaten close to last season brought them only as far as 19th and has been followed by an uninspiring summer.

Rotherham United’s fans have enjoyed back-to-back promotions, and should cherish the memories of those celebrations as they endure what is likely to be a significantly less champagne-soaked campaign. Huddersfield will need Nahki Wells to shine if they are not to get sucked into the survival fight.

Charlton Athletic have a newish owner, a(nother) new manager and a squad massively restructured over the summer, largely with foreign signings (not all of them unknown to British audiences, with André Bikey returning to England after a year with Panetolikos in Greece, and Tal Ben Haim arriving from sister club Standard Liège). While it is conceivable that they will be successful, there does seem to be strong wheels-falling-off potential.

Birmingham City limped across the finish line last season, staying up only on goal difference, but having since lost the last of the Premier League era big contracts and made a few astute signings, a season of relative stability appears in store. They should compete for the mid-table places with Bolton Wanderers, who need Jermaine Beckford to play as he did in a brief but glorious run in the middle of last season, when he scored in five out of six league games, and not as he did in the remainder of the year, when he scored two goals in 27.

New managers

Since the end of last season four Championship clubs have appointed new managers, with an Englishman, a Finn and pair of Belgians coming into the league, all of them in intriguing circumstances. The former Millwall midfielder Bob Peeters arrives at Charlton as the third appointment the club’s Belgian owner, Roland Duchâtelet, has made since buying them in January. Peeters left Waasland-Beveren after only six months to take up the Addicks’ reins, and given the way Duchâtelet, a multimillionaire who made his fortune in electronics, has so far run the club he should probably brace himself for things to shortcircuit in short order. In a division that is notoriously hard to predict, Charlton’s fate looks particularly uncertain.

The new Blackpool manager José Riga, another Belgian, is receiving a unique primer in the unpredictability of the Championship, having arrived at Charlton in March, left in May, moved to Bloomfield Road in June and threatened to resign in July, at which point the club had only eight senior players. As it stands a long-term stay in the Championship seems unlikely for either manager or club.

Leeds United meanwhile took the unusual decision, when recruiting a new manager, to headhunt David Hockaday, formerly and not particularly successfully of Forest Green Rovers. “I wasn’t surprised I got the job because I didn’t apply for it, I was approached,” he recently said. This reveals an unusually stoic nature – I also didn’t apply for the job, and would have been absolutely astonished had I got it – that will surely come in handy in Yorkshire.

English football fans are more likely to be familiar with Sami Hyypia, for whom Brighton are a second coaching position following a spell in sole charge at Bayer Leverkusen which ran from last May until this April, when a run of one win in 12 matches proved his undoing. The Seagulls have lost in the play-off semi-finals in the last two seasons and a third appearance would represent an admirable success for the former Liverpool centre-back.

Players to watch

David Marshall (Cardiff)

They may boast a wealth of attacking talent but if Cardiff’s squad has a weakness it is in defence. Just as well, then, that they have the division’s outstanding goalkeeper behind them, the most solid of bases upon which to build. He has inevitably been linked with a transfer, but the finger he dislocated in pre-season might put off suitors, to Cardiff’s benefit.

Adam Forshaw (Brentford)

The 22-year-old midfielder was outstanding during the Bees’ promotion campaign, being named League One’s player of the year, and has since been the subject of two bids from Wigan – whose manager, Uwe Rösler, was previously at Griffin Park. His presence – or absence – could go a long way to deciding whether this is a season of consolidation for Brentford, or one of struggle.

Almen Abdi (Watford)

The Swiss midfielder excelled during Watford’s swashbuckling charge to the 2013 play-off final but was restricted to nine starts in the Hornets’ stuttering follow-up season because of injury. With the quicksilver striker Matej Vydra also back in Hertfordshire, the Hornets should be able to muster performances more akin to those that brought them third place in 2013 than those that took them to 13th last season.