The longest anyone has led an EFL Championship race without winning it: Southampton ended 74 of the 2011-12 EFL Championship race's 102 playing days in first place, 73% of them, and finished behind Reading. The longest unbroken spell of that lead covered 45 playing days, from September 18, 2011 to January 14, 2012. At the other end of the same race, Reading won it having led on seven of those 102, never more than six in a row. Both lists below rank by the share of a race's playing days a team spent in first place. How that is counted is spelled out under the lists.
Companion pages: Closest EFL Championship races and Biggest EFL Championship comebacks and collapses.
Everything on this page comes from the same season files the charts draw, with standings read as each day ended. All 34 charted EFL Championship races from 34 finished seasons enter: every title race from 1992-93 to 2025-26. The 2026-27 season joins these lists when it ends. A team's time in first place is counted once per season, at its longest, whichever of its charted races it came in.
Longest leads lost is the club that ended the most of a race's playing days in first place and did not finish first. Any club in the race qualifies, not the runner-up alone, because a club can lead for four months and finish fifth.
Winners who led least is the same count for the club that did win, ranked from the fewest days up. Each row closes on the day that winner took first place for good, which the comebacks page ranks on.
Only days this race's teams played are counted, the same rule the closest races page counts closeness over. A strike or a pause freezes the standings, and a leader sitting out an idle stretch would collect time on top for nothing.
The ranking is by share rather than by the raw count, because a league's seasons are not all the same length and a short one would otherwise win by being short. Seasons cut short by a strike or a stoppage are ranked on what was played, which is the same rule and the reason for it. The count and the total are printed beside the share, so the order can be checked; where two rows print the same whole percent, the unrounded share put them in that order.
A day two clubs end level at the top is a day in first place for both of them, which is what holding first place means in English. In this league level means level on the table itself: a club level on points but ahead on goal difference or goals scored ends the day in first place alone, as the league's own table has it. So the two counts of one race can add up to more than the race's playing days. A day on which a club still to play its first game is on top, alone or level with others, counts for nobody, because that club was up there without a game. Races whose top two the standings cannot separate appear on neither list: with no winner, the data can name neither the club that lost a lead nor the club that kept one.
A lead measured in days and a lead measured in points are different questions, and the two lists often disagree about which season was the bigger collapse; the comebacks page ranks the same blown leads by size. Only finished seasons are ranked; every irregularity in the record is listed in the data notes.