Championship fixtures: Sheffield Wednesday & West Brom given ‘hardest’ starts and how it compares to Leeds United, Sunderland & more - gallery

Hillsborough has been chosen as the destination to kick off the 2023-24 Championship campaign as Sheffield Wednesday welcome Southampton to South Yorkshire on Friday, August 4.

The Owls were promoted to the second tier after beating Barnsley in the League One play-off final with a dramatic winner in extra time from Josh Windass. Meanwhile, the Saints dropped into the Championship after a dismal Premier League campaign which saw them finish bottom of the table.

The full EFL fixture list was revealed on Thursday morning and statistically, the Owls have one of the hardest starts in the Championship, with the Opta Power Ranking used as a basis for calculating the difficulty of each club’s start. The rankings calculate the strength of 19,008 clubs from 391 domestic leagues across the globe and those rankings are then used to decide how hard a team’s run of fixtures are.

The rankings for the second tier start with Leicester City, ranked 126th in the world and ‘hardest’ to play against, all the way down to QPR, ranked 2,189th.

And below is the start of every team ranked, with the team at number one indicating the ‘easiest’ opening run of games and number 24 the most difficult, according to the statistical experts. See where the Owls rank...