Preston North End Championship Odds: Relegation a possibility for sinking PNE

Ryan Lowe’s Preston North End finished in a respectable 10th place in last season’s Championship, but there are fears that this upcoming campaign could be a long and arduous one. The Lancashire club have been overachieving on a small budget for the division, and a return to the mean could be on the cards in 2024/25. 

Below you can find the Preston North End Championship Odds, and a season preview, including a prediction on where they will finish this term. 

Last Season: 10th

Top Scorer: Will Keane (13)

Transfers In: Stefan Teitur Thordarson - Silkeborg (£600k), Sam Greenwood - Leeds (loan)

Transfers Out: Alan Browne - Sunderland (free), Ben Woodburn - Salford (free), Greg Cunningham - Galway (free)

First Game: Sheffield United (H)

Prediction: 21st

Championship Odds

*Please click on the link above to be taken to the main Championship Odds page on betfred.com (or app) for all the live betting prices.

I usually try to find the positives when doing these previews, but I’m afraid I’m overwhelmingly negative about Preston North End’s chances this season. To put it as bluntly as I can, I don’t think they have a strong squad at all, and I don’t think their manager is talented enough to drag them up the table. 

Now those things may seem contradictory to the 10th-place finish they achieved last term, but it was a very different Championship. The top four were exceptional, but below that, there were a whole lot of average teams. Coventry put everything into an FA Cup run, nearly made the final with a thin squad, picked up one point in their last six matches - and still finished above Preston. 

Preston themselves lost their last five matches of last season without scoring a goal. They were dreadful as the season came to a close, and would have been firmly in the bottom half had it not been for a freakish start to the season. They won six of their first seven matches by tiny margins, and from mid-September, picked up just 44 points from 39 matches. 

That’s relegation form in anybody’s book and the patterns I saw last term don’t lead me to believe things will improve over a quiet summer. Despite a 10th-place finish, they finished 10 points off the play-offs, while they were far closer to 18th position than that top six. Now, they have a small budget in this league, but I think that is seriously going to catch up with them in 2024/25. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the league, especially if we are looking at the bottom half, has drastically improved. The margins between top and bottom are going to be far tighter this time around, and so Preston are surely going to drop down the table as a result. 

They also statistically were poor last term. They created an xG of 43.77 last season, yet scored 56 goals. Only Rotherham created a lower xG, and if they had matched their xG total, they would have been the league’s second-lowest scorers. With Ched Evans, Will Keane, Emil Riis Jakobsen and Sam Greenwood as attacking options, I’m not convinced that goals will come easily this term. 

Football Odds

Losing Alan Browne is clearly a hammer blow, and also an indicator of where the club lies in the Championship’s food-chain. PNE offered their captain a record deal to stay, and he still turned them down to join Sunderland this summer. That sends alarm bells ringing in my head. 

The atmosphere around Deepdale is also fairly negative right now. Last season’s bright start feels like a distant memory, and the football being served up to them is fairly turgid. Lowe is a resolute manager and can harness a positive team spirit as we saw at Plymouth, but Preston are such a tough team to get going. I have a hunch that he will not be there at the end of the season, especially if they finish in the bottom five, as I expect. 

The top-10 finish of last year may give people a false sense of security with PNE, but make no mistake, in my eyes they are in a relegation dogfight. I think they will just keep their heads above water, but can’t see anything more than that for the Deepdale faithful.

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