Leeds United's automatic promotion fate v Leicester City, Southampton & Ipswich Town based on reverse results

Leeds United are now in control of their own destiny as far as their automatic promotion bid goes, but what do previous results suggest in terms of their final finish? The Whites have been in superb form since the turn of the year, remaining unbeaten in the league in 2024.

Daniel Farke's men have surged back into second place thanks to Ipswich Town's slip-up over the weekend, and they now have nine games to prove they are one of the best two teams in the division, with leaders Leicester City only three points ahead. As things stand, Ipswich are one points behind the Whites, while Southampton are six points off the pace but with a game in hand.

Plenty of twists and turns likely lie ahead in the automatic promotion race, but to get a sense of what could happen, we have taken the results from the reverse fixtures of each of the games the top four have remaining and put together a table based on if those results were to play out again.

In that scenario, Leicester would win the league with a record points tally of 109, while Ipswich would finish second on 101 points, as many as five points ahead of Leeds on 96. Southampton would fall significantly behind with 87 points. Leeds would have the second best goal difference of the four with 47, behind Leicester on 60.

Crucially, though, Leicester and Ipswich did put together near-faultless starts to the season, while Leeds and Southampton were slow starters. That does skew the experiment, but the fixtures may also suggest strong finishes to the season for those two teams, while Leeds are likely to perform better than earlier in the season, given the turnaround they have managed since those opening months.